f1onagher
Well-known member
Alright, I just finished the game. It's definitely a glorified mod of Xcom 2. Again, it was worth the money, it lasted me exactly 24 hours and the gameplay didn't start to wear thin until the last two hours. The heavily distilled gameplay was fine for a barebones spinoff, but by the last six hours or so I had reached a plateau where there was nothing new to do other than keep grinding forward. I am going to reiterate how much I absolutely hate the alternating turn method used in this game, I got the hang of it by the end, but I can safely say I want my team coordination back. Also, the game runs out of difficulty levels after like, your fifteenth mission, and everything just becomes Very Hard making the difficulty measure pointless. It doesn't help that the game's answer to difficulty is just to keep giving the same enemies more health and armor, which is disappointing after they went through the effort to make each faction uniquely difficult.
The unique operators turned out to be a disappointment as I eventually refined an A-team and only swapped others in when someone got wounded. The fact that you're practically obligated to take Terminal(medic and support) and Verge(offensive psionics) doesn't give you a lot of leeway for creativity, not that the game gives you much wiggle room. Team size plus the small, arena-sized levels removes the variability Xcom 2 enjoyed, especially after WotC. All in all, I like the experimentation put on display, but outside of the unit kit, I don't want to see any of these mechanics in Xcom 3. They simply will not work for a proper, full-sized game.
As for the story, I am deeply disappointed. There is never any material worldbuilding beyond 'cooperation and integration good, dissent bad'.
This segues into the characters who are... not awful. Whisper, your base command guy, is responsible for carrying 60% of the story and dialogue and he lacks the tone or presence to appear authoritative at all. Of the operators, only Torque (the Viper) is memorable by dint of being the only character with a personality beyond what their character card has. She's also sassy and the token bigot so her lines are more enjoyable as well. The characters just fail to add anything meaningful to the game and I realize that this was obviously a cheap rush job for a cheap game, but there's just nothing there. I was more attached to the Argentinan Heavy in nuXCOM 1 because he built his own story without a shallow two-dimensional cardboard cutout personality occasionally making modular comments to something Command was saying.
If this is the official worldbuilding direction of the future Xcom games, I'm going be a bit disgruntled. If this is just a fun spin-off about one the scores of diverse successor states dotting Earth though, I'll actually dig it quite a bit. And if they get rid of that asinine turn method I'll forgive just about any story transgression.
Final score: C+
It's not trying to be a full-sized game and I definitely got what I paid for. No regrets but a few red flags.
The unique operators turned out to be a disappointment as I eventually refined an A-team and only swapped others in when someone got wounded. The fact that you're practically obligated to take Terminal(medic and support) and Verge(offensive psionics) doesn't give you a lot of leeway for creativity, not that the game gives you much wiggle room. Team size plus the small, arena-sized levels removes the variability Xcom 2 enjoyed, especially after WotC. All in all, I like the experimentation put on display, but outside of the unit kit, I don't want to see any of these mechanics in Xcom 3. They simply will not work for a proper, full-sized game.
As for the story, I am deeply disappointed. There is never any material worldbuilding beyond 'cooperation and integration good, dissent bad'.
The ultimate bad guy is, of course, a human supremacist. The only sympathetic faction is the one full of aliens who just want to steal some ships and leave Earth. There is minimal recognition of the scars of war in any format and only the ADVENT remnant faction seems to address the new reality in any format with their 'Do not conform to the renewal of the Old World' propaganda. I'm going to admit that if I fought a 20 year long war for freedom and survival and City 31 was the result I'd be shooting someone.
This segues into the characters who are... not awful. Whisper, your base command guy, is responsible for carrying 60% of the story and dialogue and he lacks the tone or presence to appear authoritative at all. Of the operators, only Torque (the Viper) is memorable by dint of being the only character with a personality beyond what their character card has. She's also sassy and the token bigot so her lines are more enjoyable as well. The characters just fail to add anything meaningful to the game and I realize that this was obviously a cheap rush job for a cheap game, but there's just nothing there. I was more attached to the Argentinan Heavy in nuXCOM 1 because he built his own story without a shallow two-dimensional cardboard cutout personality occasionally making modular comments to something Command was saying.
If this is the official worldbuilding direction of the future Xcom games, I'm going be a bit disgruntled. If this is just a fun spin-off about one the scores of diverse successor states dotting Earth though, I'll actually dig it quite a bit. And if they get rid of that asinine turn method I'll forgive just about any story transgression.
Final score: C+
It's not trying to be a full-sized game and I definitely got what I paid for. No regrets but a few red flags.
