Recent reviews by Halad

This game has a lot to love but unfortunately has some very obvious rushed out problems.

Lets start with the good :
- Sound, Music, Voiceovers
- Overall theme and level of detail in the environment
- Fun tactical element
- Card system allows for interesting character builds

And then the bad :

- A complete lack of choice in viable squadmates on Survivor difficulty, turn economy rules the game and there are distinct winners and losers. For example, later in the game I ran into a 4v21 encounter with a boss in the mix. This could not be stealthed past at all. Stealth kills have a 3 hit cap and because so many enemies were in a small area it was actually much better to simply grenade 7 targets at once.
- Never played/don't have the day 1 DLC character so unsure if that applies to above.
- FPS drops, especially in Recon mode
- Crashes
- Resource systems that don't actually have meaningful impact
- Threat system on Survivor moves so quickly it doesn't even allow you to recruit the entire cast (not that you ever should, as needing more than 6 agents means you screwed up)
- Related to the threat system, its not even possible to complete the latter half of the "tech tree"
- Very clunky/buggy controls/inventory management. There is a delay when switching characters wherein the old icons/skills show up and this can result in skill/item misuse or even weird reference errors which cause skills to replace inventory slots.
- Frustratingly unclear targeting in large groups. A border around the target would help here and theres plenty of prior work to pull from.
- Random numbers popping out of characters when armor is shredded, and then character armor numbers reverting to some default font when being buffed.

Long story short, buy it on sale. I played hundreds of hours of XCOM/2 but I won't be replaying this game. I don't necessarily regret playing it but I don't think it warranted the price and then theres the whole 10 dollar character shenanigans. Heres to hoping some patches improve the negatives at least.

Really enjoyed this game before 2.2, but 2.2 "Le Guin" made it borderline unplayable.

Its not the new mechanics but the complete disregard for malfunctioning AI opponents with this patch that pretty much ruins the game. Maybe its because I didn't buy the latest DLC, but pretty much every opposing empire *including* awakend fallen empires managed to have rebel factions break off due to a lack of stability. The fallen empire bit is a massive balance issue as they are willing to form research agreements with other empires. Additionally, no empire made it past destroyer tech and the game was trivially easy.

To top it all off, the lategame is now multiple times slower than it used to be. It is an incredible drag on the experience to have to slog through all of that only to find that your AI opponents defeat themselves and never had a chance once mid-game hit. The AI seems content to let planets decay into untenable situations with overcrowding and unemployment. This eventually results in a massive resource deficit whick quickly spirals into a complete economy/tech freeze. Even spoon feeding a vassalized empire an incredible amount of resources does not solve it. The same thing happened in the last major patch(name escapes me) where the AI could not even manage to keep a steady state empire afloat.

Some say this is the price of progress but the fact is that every so often you will have a broken game for a few months unless you want to roll back. It's mind boggling this release was so rushed.

All that said it -was- a great game and I definitely got my money's worth up to this point, but its not worth playing in its current state with all the bugs(and there are a LOT). If you're thinking about picking this up, rolling back may be the best option for you.

While the new mechanics in this expansion are great and add a lot to the base game, there are a ridiculous number of bugs that are yet to be fixed. This leads to ironman being more of an "avoid the bugs" mode than an actual play option. Heres some of the more notable ones, to illustrate how much crap you'd have to deal with in an ironman playthrough:

Fairly frequent crashes when using Kill Zone.
Twitchy tile targetting that frequently has issues picking a tile even when your mouse is not moving.
Untouchable often fails to activate.
Extracting the VIP last can sometimes result in them being registered as KIA for the council capture or kill missions.
Implacable on snipers in conjunction with death from above results in very strange interactions.
Multihits abilities often take forever to execute.
Bugs with the 2nd to last mission still not fixed with regard to intel bonuses being applied.
Skirmisher ripjack grapple toward a target sometimes fails to deliver an attack, probably because you cannot choose which tile to grapple to and it puts you between full cover and the target.
Failed flanking bug around ladders is still present.
Psi Operatives appear to be able to go on covert missions while still training in the Psi Lab.
PCS Advanced Dodge isnt much different than Superior Dodge, though I suppose its possible thats intentional.
Viper Suit freeze can wear off immediately on the enemy turn, proving nearly zero value aside from blocking overwatches. Its possible this is not a bug, but I'm skeptical.
Overwatch shot order has poor interactions with bladestorm, resulting in wasted attacks in some cases. This is more of an issue now due to a new item.
Intermittent targetting bugs with destruction of cover that an enemy is not behind. Its weird but intentional that destroying enemy cover can prevent you from targetting them(as they are considered to exist in tiles adjacent to the cover). This is not related to that.
Multiple units failing to fall when the floor is destroyed and as a result being difficult or impossible to use line attacks on correctly(null lance, plasma blaster).

Probably more that I haven't run into. This was just one playthrough of Commander difficulty which made things quite annoying.

I'm hoping Firaxis actually fixes this. I like the game but part of the draw of XCOM is Ironman to add a level of excitement to the game, but losing to bugs isn't fun at all and really detracts from the overall gameplay experience. Alt-F4ing every hour to bypass Ironman autosave is just silly.

Loved the game, has similarities to Banished like others have mentioned. Way less buggy than Banished, however, and has some more interesting mechanics. Does lack depth, and lategame bases simply don't function without bots which is a hard lesson to learn. This is more a function of how the population swarms between resource points when things get even slightly low, and end up starving.

The first 30 or so structures are really exciting as you struggle to get your colony off the ground, but after that it tapers quickly. Would be a much better game if it had more depth, or at least something to do once you've stabilized your colony.

Gotta say I did like this game, but came back after a bit only to find I was banned. Pretty ridiculous as I've never been involved in exploits and I'd paid for the game as well. Can't really recommend it in good conscience given that they have "high load" on their support system but what appears to be an automated ban system. I didn't even receive an email letting me know I was banned.

Very meh game. Feels like rock paper scissors in space. Tech trees are bland and just tiers of the same old crap over and over. Save your money and buy Master of Orion 2 for true 4x enjoyment.