Barely getting started and enemies are bullet sponges which smacks of lack of designer creativity. It’s so bad I wish I could get a refund. You have to suspend disbelief to have 4 squad mates run a train on one common enemy alien only to have him still at 40% health after that. Meanwhile they are hip firing from across the map half killing my squad mates.
It’s ridiculous and ruins strategy. XCOM is ten times better. I wasted 60 dollars on this game but I won’t be fooled again. It’s sad to see a developer consider themselves a “serious” strategy game creator when they resort to bullet sponge enemies to try and fix spotty AI for a higher difficulty level.
I will recommend this game to NO ONE. The enmies take 50% more damage than they should, and that is being generous. Every enemy is taking so many shots they seem like endbosses or special characters. They run out fully exposed and just tank bullets.
Higher level of complexity through merging all soldiers turn and high flexibility of moves.
Higher level of complexity through merging of all skills of whole squad.
Many rules and mechanism quite uncommon, this makes wrong play it in same way than with other games that seem similar, but nope it’s different.
The special “cover” and ballistic system which is quite uncommon at least for not too old similar games.
Auto scaling that can most often detail during first month of the game.
Many glitches and bugs and polishing to do.
No true Easy difficulty, because of auto scaling, most often Easy will have no link with “easy”, moreover even without total derail the auto scaling will lead the difficulty regularly to Veteran at least with spikes worthing an XCOM extreme difficulty level.
For a newbie, it’s rude, for those that can go over this phase, despite all the problems, and beside some self torture moment, there a lot of tactical fun to get from the game even in current state.
I don’t know Imo xcom 1 - 2 feel too overrated, I feel it has less replayablity compared to PP. I couldn’t imagine how fun PP is if the base game have something like an online join ops. - online multiplayer campaign each week or month perhaps .
Are we even playing the same game? I’ve completed this game twice on legend difficulty and found it rather lacking in challenge. I’m not usually one of those people but, ‘git gud scrub’. Maybe this just isn’t the genre for you.
Um I just did a mission where each enemy took coordinated strikes from at least 6 squad mates to take down. Whilst 4 or 5 enemies with the exact same tankiness are moving behind my troops. But because taking down one enemy requires focus fire of 6 or more squadmates to even have a chance at killing it, the other enemies are all over you and equally hard to kill quite quickly.
Like I have said I have played great games like XCOM2 and others. None of these games were that far out of balance. And yes laying overwatch down and setting firing lanes works…if every enemy is not running around with 10 times the hitpoints of your soliders and with a krap ton of armor.
I suspect the balance scaling, or encounter levels is way off. I don’t know and I don’t care. Frankly its bad gameplay and lacks strategy as the enemies are just running around as giant bullet sponges.
Just as a freaking clue to a developer who obviously doesn’t have one: the run of the mill enemy should be comparable to the players squadmates. Elite enemies sure, but make them rare. And boss enemies should be a step above that. When a freaking slug runs over and explodes in a giant fireball that engulfs a 12 foot area setting everyone on fire…you’ve gone too far.
Every enemy is over tuned. Like I said I wish I could get a refund. I sat on this purchase a long time not sure if I could trust the quality of this game. And now I know that it was definitely true that I could not.
Honestly this is bunch of rubbish. It suspends disbelief when an enemy face tanks 5 of my squadmates opening fire on them from damn near point blank. Not only that the enemies return fire damaging each of my soliders almost as bad as all of them did combined to the enemy to begin with.
When I shoot an enemy in the FACE! I want them to die. END OF STORY!
If you attempt to play the game as a tactical squad game, operating in ways that makes sense and using good tactical and strategic options, you will be destroyed and yes, enemies will takes everything 4 guys can throw at them and gut them the next round.
If you game all the ridiculous skill and class combinations and play it like a turn based force unleashed, the game becomes absolutely trivial.
In their effort to retain some fans of firaxcom, they utterly compromised the vision of an xcom apocalypse for the modern Era. The OP is on the right thread in the the much hyped “evolution” of enemies was shunted off into ultra basic hp/armor boosts for enemies, and their only real tactic is rush forward and blast away, hoping they kill PP before PP kills them. I am not sure if it really WAS laziness, or if they just lacked money, time, or the skill to implement it.
I didnt play any difficulty other than Legend and truth to be told… there was no much challange. Same with “difficulty spike” - I didnt notice any of this. Same with winning about Sirens.
Maybe there is some bug and Legend is swapped with Easy? As was with check box for DLC activation.
It happens because at some point in the game enemies start accumulating armour. There are several ways to overcome armour in this game, mostly they are connected to tech trees of other factions. So you are expected to find these tools and use them.
In my playthrough I did it by researching paralyzing sniper rifles of Synedrion. These rifles have armour penetration of 60, so they neglect almost any armour in the game.
Of course there are other wayss to do it.
Are we playing the same game? I mean, have just finished at Heroic level, had a lot of casualities (20/30), found just 6 bases. Never found this famous diffuculty spike sincerly. I want to replay after patches and DLCsbecause yes, it’s clear, the game is uncomplete
I’ll agree the headshot effects were disappointing first time I played too, one does kind of expect it to be more effective. For a lot of enemies the face isn’t the most effective place to shoot, unless you are intended to try and panic them. If the enemy is using two handed weapons, shooting arms is super effective. Arthons aren’t two handed but disabling an arm takes out the related weapon.
For game balance reasons I see why they’ve made headshots less effective, as breaking someones face is a little easy… although if we look at the world wars (rl) soldiers have always had better helmets than any other piece of armour - this game has the armour as the same. Maybe another way to appoach this would be to have the head be super effective, but also increase it’s general armour. Maybe even break it into smaller pieces - eyes, brain, mouth, all different things. Brain would always have armour from skull, but if you damage that there should always be consequences.
Aliens might not have so much armour on the brain, but possible multiple cortex’s.
I know I digress from the original topic, it’s just got me thinking about it.
Agreed, which is why I think there’s better ways to deal with this than just nerfing the old ‘break face’ fun times, like using real helmets.
The location targeting kind of reminds me of Fallout 1 & 2, which had the great ability to target eyes and groin (not just head and torso), which were super effective, and added to the fun of the game.
Because in XCOM you do not need to think about advanced ballistics and positioning?
If the soldiers cannot hit the target or do not kill, then you are really doing a lot of things wrong.
For example, they (new players) do not try to turn off the arthron’s shield, find vulnerable points in the armor, and use the terrain to hide after the attack.
I’m sure that the cover system confused many players who came from XCOM - I’m in full cover, why does the enemy hit me? Not realizing that here they work completely differently.
That is a false statement. Arthrons with a machine gun (about which you are talking i suppouse) can instantly kill a soldier only in close combat. At long and medium distances they have too much dispersion (if they without grenade launcher though). Not to mention that near half of their bullets hit cover instead troops. If your man are dying - thats mean you cannot hide them in proper cover before enemy turn or retreat.
Or you just dont get how armor system works ? Not offence just my thougs.
Game isnt perfect at all but not at bad as you said so. I find it quite harder then XCOM but not much.
It’s a weird side effect of the scaling difficulty. If you score too high on missions, the game punishes you and ramps up the difficulty. You are more likely to score high starting on easy, so it’s much easier to get hit with spikes. Folks who specifically picked easy are also likely taking their time and not preparing for spikes, because they assume “easy” means “easy” lol.
If you don’t play it ‘properly’ AKA not using the stuff thats insanely OP imbalanced, its really easy.
Hell, the tank alone basically wins half the game for you.
If you avoid using the OP shit, than the game is nearly impossible.
Basically this whole game atm is knowing which things are stupidly OP and using lots of them.
Seriously, I don’t know how the game got released in this state. Its pretty appalling.
(And yes, Completed UFO:EU, UFO:TFD, X-COM Apoc, X-Com Interceptor and the new XCOMs)
Says a lot when I’ve happily completed all of those games, but this game failed to hold my attention for more than a few hours before I was fed up and the mass of bugs, poor game balance, poor game-play and in general the way most of the game mechanics just don’t seem to have been thought through very well.
I was very excited for this game and really wanted to like it… but really, this game isn’t much fun at all.
.