Being 100% honest:
- Willpower is just a mana with addition of one of the worst morale systems I’ve seen:
- There are no intermediary stages: soldier are either fighting at full capacity or frozen in panic.
- There are no other factors than companion death that will affect morale (not counting in attacks that hurt willpower rather than health), so even a lone, wounded and crippled recruit is perfectly happy while being shelled by Chiron, pinned by few snipers and assaulted by several crabmen at the same time. You really can’t get any closer to “This is fine” meme.
- When several of his companions die and soldier panics, he actually takes a deep breath…and just a turn later he’s back in the “This is fine” mood.
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Free aim is surely a cool feature, but more of a fluff on its own. It’s not required to implement limb damage. It’s not required to prevent dreaded misses at 99% chance (and I can guarantee, you’ll have as many of such misses with sniper rifle in PP as in XCOM; difference comes with a) burst weapons, where XCOM got one roll for whole burst while PP has separate roll for each shot which results in much less extremes; b) XCOM is not scaling into 100% shot chances).
Secondly, this system has its own faults too (for instance hitting fast moving objects is just as easy as stationary ones…because everything is stationary in player’s turn). -
Factions and diplomacy is really nothing to write home about. Repetitive, abusable, unrealistic (they’re seemingly big boys, and yet PP can literally do everything better). Best thing about them is that they exist (and Kudos to SG for at least trying not going XCOM’s lazy route).
There are many more “sins” but even then, game is not a flop. It’s playable, it’s improving, so I wouldn’t dare to call devs incompetent or unprofessional. They deserve respect for what they’ve done.