Recent reviews by oh Danny boi

There are many problems with this game preventing me from recommending it. for starters, and being the one most easily fixed, is that it's extremely buggy, sometimes to game-breaking degrees. Important details such as highlights to district unrest and health bars don't appear until having interacted or tabbed through options, the "this will end turn" message doesn't always show on actions that will end a turn until you've looked at a different action, missions with reinforcements can sometimes not give the reinforcements thus preventing progress (Something I've read but not experienced), it can freeze as these recent xcom games have known to do with reloading freezing or taking minutes to be able to interact with things, you can sometimes see what enemies will be in an encounter even though you're not supposed to be able to, and some people have experienced being unable to equip weapons to their agents which also breaks the game. I've also experienced a bug by using a mind controlled enemy to interact with something on a story mission which prevented progression and required me to restart the encounter. There's surely many bugs I've missed.

Next complaint is that the UI on missions, besides being super glitchy, is less informative than the previous xcom title and even has some deceptive descriptions to abilities. During a breach, the only stat you can see for each member is their health and if they have any abilities you can set up before breaching, even though being reminded of your character's other stats and abilities when you're setting up who goes where and when would be super useful. Once in-combat, you can't check your weapon's damage without aiming at someone. During breach, Cherub's phalanx ability's description is deceptive and doesn't guarantee every aggressive enemy in his line of sight aims at him, even though that's what it implies. Outside of missions, you get a series of alerts everyday of what has changed, but if you want to click each individually to make sure you don't miss anything, there's no easy dismissal without constantly changing off the page where all the alerts are, and many of the alerts are redundant. Also, the back button in the lower left of the UI sometimes ends up a pause button until you click it, which is probably another bug. Even the victory stats screen was buggy with it not scaling the UI properly to my monitor, causing the stats to be unreadable (I saw the numbers and part of two words, all shifted off of where they were supposed to be, and couldn't see the text of what the numbers meant).

In-mission, there are several mechanics that seem illogical and unfair for real life but seem to be the way they are solely to make the game artificially more challenging. Despite setting up breaches with clear line of site to the internals of places and characters talking about people and features inside places, you personally have no idea of any enemy locations (even though they'll magically appear in view through windows the moment you hit "breach") nor of any layouts, even if the characters should logically have foreknowledge of the layouts. When evacing, you have to use a specific exit that if always at the least convenient location, no matter what entry points you had nor where enemy reinforcements can enter from. Somehow, on hostage retrieval and evac missions on roads, you always start on the opposite side from the vehicle that transported you there, which would be ridiculously conspicuous that your armored vehicle dropped you off to a hostage scene, you walked around in full view to the other side of the hostiles, and still manage to surprise them. Also, if you have Torque and have a character restrained when all other enemies are dealt with, she instantly kills them instead of letting you choose to knock them out. And everyone has time to reload (and heal if you have that enabled) and also get any time-limited items rounded up, along with having all the time in the world for you to prepare for the next breach, but any abilities that require x-turns to refill don't auto-refill before the breach for some nonsensical reason?

Finally, some features and characteristics that are considered major parts of earlier xcom games are gone, making this feel so unlike them. Instead of slowly discovering a few hostiles along as you progress through a level, you see an entire room at once, with everyone currently in it, upon breaching, even if you don't have line of sight (but only once you breach, like this knowledge is only magically added to your head after stepping one foot into the place). Breaches also scatter-moves your agents in ways that strategically you probably wouldn't ever choose yourself if you controlled it. And while the other games may have unrealistically had sides taking turns, this one eliminated that but instead replaced it with enemies and allies unrealistically all queueing up based on breach positions (which has its own problems with arbitrary limitations) for you and who knows what for hostiles, which limits your tactical options greatly compared to the older games. It's not a worthwhile trade-off.

It's hard to convince my friends to play local multiplayer games, but once I did, they sure seemed to enjoy this game.