Decided to update my post with my latest impressions/experience with the game. Hopefully it will be useful for the developers!
Update 1:
Good:
- I really dig the music. It sounds like a mix between UFO and TFTD;
- After really diving into a new campaign, I finally got the feeling of how this game can be really addictive, that old UFO feeling, “I just can’t stop”. This makes it even more sad that there are so many really necessary improvements and bugfixes to be made. I mean, you have a gem in your hands but, like many others have said here, it feels like BB6 instead of a final release;
- Colonies look so much better than BB5. I’m going to repeat this one: the graphics are really over the top. Congratulations again for all the art team;
Bad:
- Sometimes colonies just won’t have a spawnery. One more thing forcing the player to save-scum
- I accepted a faction mission by mistake. The player should be able to cancel those, otherwise they stay in your “objectives” forever;
- Mind control is absolutely overpower, I had very experienced soldiers and never seen one resist it! Is there a way to avoid it? I know priests can do it to, but they are just not my play style. I mean, there is a unit that is basically a tank and it is capable of controlling my soldiers?
- Grenade launchers need serious rework. Just why is it not possible to launch a grenade horizontally?
- How the heck am I supposed to get more Phoenix soldiers? Yeah, I’m repeating this one, because its just… crazy?
- Why doesn’t phoenix tech evolve? I mean, a few campaigns I tried, all I could give the standard assault soldier was the basic rifle.
- Research should produce more tactile results. I started 8 campaigns already. On each one, I would just pile up all available research and wait for them to finish. It just doesn’t make any difference.
I don’t want to sound rude here guys, I’m trying to be constructive. The problem is, I just got tired of trying to play so many times and losing to bugs and things that seem to be just missing. After the last one, I decided to wait for patches to play again.
Hi everyone, I’d like to leave my feedback on the release version.
To be honest, I was expecting much worse when I played backer build 5 and I read your release date of dec 3. However, I hope the dev team take our patience in consideration and continue to work on bugfixing and improvements.
After playing through the campaign 3 times on veteran, there is one problem I couldn’t get out of my mind: what happens if you lose all your soldiers? It happened during my first play and I wasted like 35 minutes speeding up time just to see something happen. Nothing ever happens. You just complete research projects and watch events you can’t do anything about and that’s it.
I love difficult games, but starting with 5 soldiers and having no means of recruiting more during the first several hours means only one thing: save scumming. So my soldiers never die and the whole point of worrying with their lives is missed.
The second main thing is the voice acting during tactical. I mean, I took it as a placeholder. It can’t be considered final.
Other considerations:
- Why do you have to click to buy skills for soldiers when there’s only one choice?
- In my first campaign (it lasted about 4 hours) I never built anything in my base. As micromanagement of science and engineering was removed (from the original Xcom) and you can’t recruit anyone, there is almost no point in spending time building things.
- Benefits from lots of research projects are just resources. So you just stack them on the list and wait. The act of chosing them is meaningless.
- This one was mentioned a thousand times after BB5: just why doors open if you get adjacent to them? I bet you guys never use public bathrooms, just imagine if someone passes by your toilet door!
- There is definitely something wrong with the performance. I cranked settings up to ultra (disabling only field of depht). Very slow. They I tried reducing settings gradually. It turns out its bad even in low settings.
I loved the graphics and the classic Xcom music and I really want the game to succeed, so I’m using this forum to communicate my initial impressions. As I said, as much as I wanted to play, I always thought the release date to be too unrealistic.
