I adore the setting and the cinematic aesthetic quality that this game has. Unfortunately, it falls short in many areas that are very important for Turn-Based Tactics games. Too many in fact that it's impossible to ignore. I've never played XCOM so I can't make that kind of apples-to-apples comparison, but I can at least make some observations based on the few tactics games that I've played.

First off, panning to the edges of your screen to scout out the map feels clunky. Even on recon mode, you hit these walls that are meant to tell you that an area is non-traversable, but it feels like the game wants you to blindly feel your way around the invisible walls of the map when all you really want is to get a lay of the land. Imagine trying to get a bird's eye view of a labyrinth but only being able to observe 1 hallway at a time and hitting a wall when you try to scan surrounding areas. It makes me wonder why panning/free cam is even a thing if it doesn't feel free at all. I would have thought the fog of war was enough to bring balance to that feature but they really added a layer of annoyance on top of what was already appropriate.

Speaking of Recon Mode, it's a pain in the ass to observe certain objects. As far as I can tell, investigation points aren't easy to spot unless you hover very close to them. Lore books and enemies are okay, but I don't want to scan every inch of a map just for a small bit of context that may or may not contribute anything to the overall lore. A better indicator similar to the way lore books shine would have been a good way to point those in recon mode to fun flavor text. As far as I'm concerned, if something is inconsequential (lore-wise) and too annoying to find, then it's not worth looking for it.

The Motion Blur is horrible. I typically play through my games with Motion Blur and DOF, but those games also have more precise setting controls for camera movement. I could not find a way to just have a birds-eye view of the enemy units performing their attacks without the camera shaking violently and blurring like there's no tomorrow moving from 1 unit that's on one end of the screen to the other. This is even worse with Action Cam turned on (even only some of the time) so I had to disable that feature completely. As previously mentioned, a static bird's-eye view to observe all pieces as they move would have fixed this. Some games have fixed this issue by allowing moves to auto-complete.

To a lesser extent, there are some small bugs/issues here and there that I encountered. Sometimes the enemy's action would not complete. Incapacitated enemies also seem to get thrown around like a ragdoll when hitting a completely unrelated unit. The achievement for defeating Lady Nicastro in the tutorial mission is also not working completely as intended (there's a Reddit thread on it).

Lastly, I don't know how they picked out which character to turn into DLC. I totally think that Nocturne belongs to the Base Agent cast just as much as anyone not named Eddie, Ingrid, and Lateef. It seems like such a roll-the-dice decision that it wouldn't have mattered which one of them became DLC. As far as I'm concerned, she contributes just as much to the lore as every other expedition recruit. I don't believe any of these characters should be locked behind DLC and that was an unsavory move that seems to only subtract from the base game.

I really wanted to love this game. I completed everything it had to offer after putting roughly 55 hours in. Unfortunately, it did not live up to the hype and the price tag. I hope another game with this aesthetic comes along because the proof of concept is definitely there. It's just that the game did not have enough polish that you'd expect from a game backed by this publisher.

PROS:
Art Design
Music
Great Voice Acting
General aesthetic polish
Unique blend of XCOM + stealth that works surprisingly well and doesn't fall apart as quickly as it should on paper

CONS:
Lategame difficulty scaling is terrible and breaks the flow of the game
Performance is atrocious
An obvious dominant strategy emerges and is essentially forced onto you by mission design
The difference in power levels between characters is enormous
An entire character is behind a paywall

OVERALL: 6/10

This is very much a "mixed" review for a lot of reasons, I wish there was more nuance on the recommended scale. The major issues with the game are with the performance and how difficulty is scaled into the lategame, and both of these things hold back the game enormously and are very difficult to solve for different reasons.

First, performance is simply not good. This game is remarkably hard to run at playable framerates on anything but the finest graphics cards; with my 1070ti my frames peak at 50 and generally hover in the mid-30s on basically minimum settings. I don't know how much can be done on this front at this point. It's annoying, and if you have the "standard" setup with a 1060 and a decent processor this game will be basically unplayable on minimum settings, which is always a shame.

The difficulty scaling is an issue that kinda cuts down to the core of the game, on the other hand. In the lategame, missions are made harder by simultaneously clumping more enemies together and making a higher proportion of enemies immune to stealth takedowns. There was a mission I played recently where a group of 8 and another group of 4 enemies, all immune to stealth kills, were clumped up in one area. Fighting them in combat without taking at least one stress break (an instant reset condition due to an absurdly harsh post-mission punishment) would be near-impossible, yet none of the enemies can be taken down out of combat either.

This leads to the style of gameplay that will define the late stage of every campaign, and the biggest single problem with the game: luring enemies across the map until they're separated from their group, then ganging up on them. This is simultaneously extremely tedious due to a total lack of useful tools for luring enemies (meaning you run into their detection circle and stay around the edge of their vision to repeatedly cause them to chase you), extremely punishing since getting fully detected by this enemy will trigger combat with the entire area, and totally unrewarding once you do kill them. But if you've played the game you'll know this is the only viable way to clear many later missions, and this is a really serious problem. It shouldn't be possible to do, yet it's the also only way to approach a lot of late encounters. Until this issue is addressed entirely this game can never break the 6/10 mark for me.

This is a stealth game with combat as a failure condition, but it forces you to do more and more combat the further you get if you don't want to cheese everything using luring tactics. This loop just doesn't work for me, and I don't think it'll work for you either. Just to clarify, I love turn-based tactical combat; I'm a fire emblem and XCOM nerd and love Shadowrun as well, but this game doesn't have any of the things that make those games' combat systems so great, and long battles are an absolute slog due to the lack of depth.

To get deeper into the combat, there are two characters who can essentially infinitely gain action points if certain conditions are met, and these characters are extremely strong in comparison to the rest of the cast. One of them can also exploit this to near-infinitely chain their signature/ultimate ability, and successfully doing this is by far the best way to deal with combat against large groups, to the point where this character, Celestine, is essentially indispensable for every lategame mission.

Character progression is designed in such a way that greatly rewards simply sticking to 3 main agents and 1 supplementary (since some mission types allow 4 characters and most allow 3). The experience cost of powerful abilities ramps up pretty drastically and those lategame abilities are still a much better use than taking a bunch of low-level stuff on a peripheral character. There's critically no way to assess a mission and its goals beforehand to tell which agents you should ideally bring, since this more depends on the spread of enemy types and the nominal objective means very little on this front. So the strategy that makes the most sense is to pump up 3-4 characters to max as soon as possible and never deploying any characters outside your main team. The fact that the game basically screams that this is the intended way to play, however, doesn't prevent them from having one of the most bizarrely punishing mechanics with no workaround.

When an agent or enemy is missed by an attack and hit by certain abilities, they will gain Stress points. When this bar is filled, for the next 2 turns the character will be reduced to 1 Action Point instead of 2, and will be vulnerable to an execution, and instant kill. As far as I know the enemies are not capable of using execution moves, but even if they were and that was the only punishment for being stress broken, it would be many times less punishing than the current setup. A character being downed in combat can be stabilized, returning them to half health, and this can be done up to 3 times in a mission. The post-mission cost is that if the agent enters another mission the next week they can only be revived twice when downed, but this can be totally circumvented by spending an abundant medicine currency that has no other uses. Early on it can matter, but lategame there's never a reason to worry about agents going down. After being stress broken a single time, however, there is a 3-week crippling debuff applied to the character and these are so harsh that the character must sit out for that entire time. There is no mechanic for healing this or making the debuffs less severe, meaning a stress break is esentially infinitely worse than allowing that agent to be downed, and you should instantly reset to your last save if it happens.

A unique character is locked behind a paywall at launch, which is just silly and totally predatory in my opinion, but I'm a person who thinks that about any paid DLC so take that with a grain of salt. My playthrough did not include this character so they may significantly affect the balance of the cast as discussed previously.

There are some baffling design decisions that hold this game extremely far back from its potential, and I hope that these will be addressed because the core game here really is great. But until some massive balance changes come out, don't pick this game up unless there's a large sale, because the lategame is a total disaster currently. Some of the problems mentioned suddenly appear out of nowhere as the game progresses and some mechanics randomly disappear due to bizarre balancing, when these things would be on more of a sliding scale if they were implemented better.

This game is mediocre. The developers took a large number of elements from XCOM 2 and put their own spin on them, with the result being an unfortunate product that is much worse than XCOM 2 in every way. It never crashed, but the game itself felt like a beta. Everything lacks polish and nothing holds together well:

- The controls are quite bad. You'll be running around the world then encounter a small step and all of a sudden have to click in just the right spot to keep moving. But the rest of your team might not follow. Occasional other pathing issues. You move around with your team grouped with a "leader", but often if you move the leader up against cover the others will just stand right next to the cover and not duck.
- The camera is questionable. Found myself wishing I could zoom out more or pan away from my characters. Sometimes your view gets blocked by obstacles.
- The lack of tooltips is awful and really shows how little effort went into ensuring quality. When you see an item in the world (and most items just look like generic nondescript boxes or bottles), you have to move right next to it to see what it is. Very tedious. Even then you don't get told what the function is, you have to pick it up then mouse to some other tooltip (I forget where they appear and where they don't, very inconsistent) to see the function.
- There are a couple "special" resources that feel very tacked on and are not explained at all. "KA" in particular is very hard to find but is required for the lower half of all "Ally" research trees. Just weird, I completed the game having gotten I think exactly 1 KA but a surplus of the other special resource.
- Most items are not very useful.

This is more subjective, but I found the art style, story, and characters bland and kind of irritating. It's comic book-like and really lacks any sense of darkness or dread. Also, it's just lame that they make the main "bruiser" character a slender blonde chick. She has the ability to punch through brick walls. It's PC silliness that doesn't even fit with the rest of the game's aesthetic.

The turn-based combat is the heart of the game. Like everything else, it is mediocre. I'm a fan of the genre, so I played it through (max difficulty) and there were a few decent large battles towards the end. But mostly it's poorly balanced and just not that fun, totally lacks the intensity of XCOM. In general it's way too easy if you're an XCOM vet, it was only in the last third of the game that I had any difficulty at all and even then, not much.

The real-time stealth element also kinda sucks, I found it just not very fun. Also it is very hard to predict how many enemies will be "activated" when you engage, sometimes you engage an enemy and only that enemy is activated, at other times (with other enemies a similar distance away) like 12 enemies will be activated. Annoying and needs better UX.

All in all this just seems unfinished, unpolished, rushed to market. In theory it could be a good game, but the craft and execution just isn't there. I played it to completion but wouldn't recommend it.