izigame.me

I'm surprised by all the positive reviews.
The game is basically the original XCOM 1/2 reskin. That's not a bad thing in itself, but it doubles down on the worst parts of XCOM meta. Somehow it manages to be more shallow, frustrating and save-scammy than the original series, while also being a direct clone.

Boring details:
+ The only thing I like about this game is that the art style is less cartoonish / more gritty than the recent XCOM remakes.
- The hit chance mechanic is an absolute, unmitigated cancer-AIDS-ebola that is precision handcrafted to maximize player's RRPM (rectal rumbles per minute). Somehow it feels even worse than the XCOM series, which has always been pretty cancerous in terms up straight up lying to you about calculated hit percentages.
If you want to see hit mechanic done right in an XCOM-style game, check out Phantom Doctrine.
- The tech tree lacks any kind of breadth. Every new tech is a straight upgrade from the previous one. There are no "branches" and no choices to make.
- Lack of enemy variety. Most alien types are entirely the same with different stats. I can only tell them apart by the amount of hp/armor.
- Total lack of tactical mechanics we've come to expect from more recent games. No psyonics, no stealth, no melee, no grappling hooks, no weapon mods... All you get is a gun, a more damage gun and an even more damage gun.
- Soldier class building is just applying a gear template. Your tactical team gets no perks/skills or meaningful specialization. Soldier training/promotion = +1 to all stats.
- Base management is tedious, and you have to know upfront what all the upgrades do, and how many of each module you'll need. Building it is so long and expensive, that correcting a build mistake may cost you the whole game. You have to plan it out on day 1, then just go through the motions.
- Story is incomplete at the time of this review, but it seems to lack any nuance or twist. Very barebones writing. Not that the story matter for XCOM genre, but still...

Special note on difficulty of the game
I get that developer is trying to position it for the humiliation fetish hardcore crowd, but it's a very shallow appeal to those who enjoy cheesing poor AI.
There are two ways to make any game harder:
1) The right way is to make AI smarter, more reactive to the player. More enemy class variety and more synergy between them.
2) The easy way is to give AI insane amount of attributes (damage, health, action points, etc.) but keep them terminally stupid and abusable.
Guess which approach Xenonauts 2 took...
In this game AI will routinely reaction-shoot the last remaining hair off your soldier's nuts from outside of your visibility range, over multiple half-covers, and while he's wearing refractive armor. I estimate some of these shots requiring over 300% accuracy to land, which isn't possible.
The game will also routinely dump your landing craft out in the open, with multiple foes just outside already waiting in overwatch for you to step out. Just to rub it in how "hardcore" this is.
At the same time, the base defense/assault missions are laughably easy, because tight corridors with many doors make AI look like a gaggle of special needs children.
The tactical engagement needs to be played SUUUUUUUPERRRR slow, because AI always hangs in around one spot and has plenty of action points for reaction shots. Technically the game allows you to bypass AI reaction by having high reflexes attribute, but since AI has insane stats, it almost never worth risking it.
I'm sure the developer understands this issue, but instead of fixing it they added time limited missions. Because F U, that's why!

>b-but you don't understand the hardcore mechanics of my oldf oldschool games
Listen here, son. Granted, I don't remember UFO Defense that well, but I have easily couple of thousand hours in Terror From The Deep, and likely another 500 in the Apocalypse.
So why do I "hate" them? What was cool 30 years ago isn't up to snuff in 2020s. But hey! If it was, you can still get and play the original titles for couple of bucks on Steam. Spoiler: you will not enjoy them
Yes, I am well aware how "RNG" works. It's not actually random in any meaningful way, it's just opaque to the player.
Tech gibberish for the turbo nerds: The "random" function in most old school programming frameworks is just a giant pre-calculated table of seed values and return values. Given the same seed, you'll always get the same value back from the "random" function. It is literally the exact opposite of random. Perhaps quantum computers will change that at some point, but so far the true randomness does not exist in digital world. Any computing outcome that is labeled as "random" is not actually random, but rather opaque. Think of this next time you decide to gamble.
There are workarounds like adding current timestamp value to the original seed, but XCOM genre is way too cool for that.
Every die roll that happens to determine a hit is seeded based on the outcome from the previous player action. In practical terms it means that if you repeat the same 90% shot a 100 times by reloading a save, you will not get 90 hits and 10 misses, as one would expect, but rather the same outcome (hit or miss) that you got the first time will be repeated 100 times. You can spoil this pattern by taking another shot with another pawn at a different target before taking the same 90% shot, because now your seed will be different.
In a way the hit chance is entirely predetermined, independent on the player skill or even luck. Once you understand that, the illusion of the tactical gameplay evaporates. The game becomes a save-scam fueled search for the right seed sequence, often to the detriment of the tactical positioning and common sense.
But wait! Isn't the above also true for all XCOM games (original and remakes)?
Yes, but... The XCOM remakes, while still flawed in number of ways, are set apart from the originals and the Xenonauts series by the tactical team development. Your pawns get meaningful growth with unique roles and abilities, making them into distinct chess pieces instead of a group of pawns. That specialization is what quickly offsets the predetermined "randomness" of the XCOM hit mechanics. By mid game the tactical engagements begin to feel more like chess games and less like D&D.
Why would anyone want to undo that development and "go back to the roots" so to speak is beyond me. Unlike HoMM3, the XCOM games aren't getting better with age.