izigame.me

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.