I don’t feel any tensity from haven defense missions like XCOM terror missions. In XCOM there’s the sound of burning and people screaming from time to time, and then intense combat music when you engage the enemy. There’s none of that in this game and it’s disappointing, ESPECIALLY the lack of combat music (Or any other music in general besides the ambient one). If every faction had their own theme when I’m doing one of their story missions, or when I’m raiding one of their facilities, that would help a lot. They already have beautiful maps done for them already. I don’t need super intense battle music or loadout music like XCOM does (And I do love XCOM’s music) but listening to the ambient soundtrack of this game 24/7 is putting me to sleep.
Artwork and Flavor for the Phoenixpedia. In Xenonauts one of the most entertaining things for me to do, oddly enough, was read the lore, descriptions of the weapons, etc. It really added to the atmosphere of the game, every time I encountered a new enemy I looked forward to the future autopsy of them and reading the description, which more often than not hinted at their possibly abilities without directly spoiling them. Likewise with the aircraft, weapons, other equipment, etc. In this game not only is the artwork just weird see through 3d models (Some people might enjoy it, I definitely do not) the descriptions are super short, usually 4 to 5 sentences max (And none for the weapons, armor, equipment, etc). Yes there’s a ton to read in the LORE page, but without any meaningful introduction I could care less about reading all that.
Another thing about flavor : I actually don’t care about learning about this game’s aliens. Like at all. There’s no dramatic voice over introduction when you encounter a new type, there’s no roaring Mutons, hissing Vipers, or angelic sounding Archons, the aliens barely make any intimidating noises if any. In Xenonauts whenever I encountered a new alien I played super cautious because the aliens in that game can do some seriously jacked stuff. There’s nothing to really get me excited at fighting new aliens in this game. I know if I research their corpses I’m not going to get a super detailed and flavorful description, or a breakdown of what they are from Tygan or Vahlen. There’s not even a description on the research option for what the possible rewards are! Just “You get X amount of resources” or “It requires X laboratory spaces in the containment facility.”
Now to be fair, I haven’t made it very far in the game yet. I’ve restarted a couple campaigns since I’ve found the game challenging, but once I learned you can spam Dash I’ve been able to hold my most recent one so far. About to research Pandoravirus and then start capturing aliens. I’ll edit this post if anything happens to change my mind about these things, but right now I find the game severely lacking in the flavor department.