izigame.me

Fundamentally Xenonaughts 2 is aimed at the hardcore XCom crowd. In terms of what this game does new compared to the previous game I won't touch too much on. Instead I want to talk more about the merits of the game design compared to how the genre has advanced since the earlier era.
As an old school game aimed at the hardcore folks, this game is fundamentally not balanced nor friendly towards newcomers. It is also, after spending about 12 hours of trial and error, not that fun due to a lack of viable different strategies. I am not saying that hard games should not exist. I play many other strategy games on their hardest mode, having beaten Total War, Expeditions: Rome, Wasteland 3, Low Turn Count Fire Emblems, Wesnoth etc. Rather, the core gameloop does not feel fun, and the process of learning the game is far too painful. In short, the game mechanics I feel is not respectful of my time as a player, and overly frustrates me.
Due to the high difficulty, there's basically one strategy towards combat that somewhat works, which makes every battle feel the same, no matter how much the map changes. The developer attempts to add mission variety to alleviate this problem, but the problem with the new mission types is that the fundamentals of the game do not support player enjoyment of those new mission types. Enemies will one shot player units in timed missions where the player instead of advancing slowly are forced to rush forward. Depending on the game map snipers may or may not be useless. RNG is a heavy factor that basically solely penalizes the player. Mission time counts seem designed to not only assume the player knows the perfect strategy and is deploying it (not possible for a new player), but also that the player gets perfect or near perfect RNG, has perfect prior knowledge of the map, and brought specific things to combat. All on the second mission of the game. Extremely long reload times and unfriendly learning curves aside, once a player does learn all of this, each battle is basically a repeat of the exact same strategy (slow SWAT simulator), as the difficulty does not allow any other strategies to work.
FWIW One of my friends who *does* play XCom significantly also did not recommend this game to me. As another reference, playing Expeditions:Rome on the hardest difficulty blind for the first time took me about 1 hour to figure out how to beat the first map thanks to lucky RNG, and another 1 hour to actually figure out how to do it without relying on RNG. Playing Xenonaughts 2 on the "normal" mode took me 6 hours and that was relying on perfect RNG.