Hi! Let me put my two cents.
First, this is a great game. It's the same feeling as the old UFO (or X-COM) and I am actually playing through nights with it. However there are a few points that I don't like and some even make me pissed because it spoils the fun. Perhaps worth to address.
- Reserve points. It is annoying that you can't save some TUs of your soldiers to return fire if the enemy strolls into their crosshairs. Yeah, I found the button but actually my soldiers very rarely shoot back, if ever. It was way better in the old UFO where you was able to ambush careless enemies. Nevertheless there's not even a Reaction value for the characters as I noticed. Maybe it'd be worth to implement.
- Soldiers gain experience way too slow. After fifty or more missions my best guy is still only Competent in Assault Weapons while he'd be already a superhero in the old UFO.
- The thing that pisses me the most is the "balancing" of the game, namely the better weapons you have the tougher the opponents become. Indeed there's supposed to be some challenge but not like this. I mean what the heck happened to the weapons, or are my soldiers up against Terminators? A simple Taman grunt takes more than a burst shot from a Plasma Rifle from point blank range, although it's not wearing any armor. And they tend to become wonderful snipers as well, they can hit my soldiers with a plasma pistol from kilometers without a problem. Soon it comes down to this: if the enemy sees you, you are toast, period. And it all ends up in playing "Retry" again and again - there goes excitement. It seems my soldiers have no chance, and it's not the kind of thrilling no-chance-but-we-are-heroes thing. It's the game-unbalanced-to-unfair-and-rather-boring thing.
- Have anybody mentioned that there are way too many tactical missions? It'd be useful to have a difficulty setting to set them. Actually there's an UFO landing somewhere every hour and that gives really little time for strategic playing. Also it chewes up soldiers real fast and here we get to that stupid Retry button again. (Hey, the solution is NOT removing the Retry button!)
- Talking about tac missions, it's quite boring when all off sudden an avalanche of Harvesters appear and all land in the same environment. I'm just done with the 6th farm shootout in a row and I am quite bored. But you can't just skip these.
- Why the heck are soldiers scattered everywhere around the base when an attack occurs? A long set of rounds pass by just moving them in position. Meanwhile the aliens barely move, actually they are just holding positions. I can find them always at the same spots. I don't even have to look just throw a grenade into those rooms.
- It is rather odd that a field medikit can heal a mortally wounded soldier just immediately, but it takes weeks in a high-tech hospital for them to recover. Also, recovering takes waaaay too much time.
- In the old UFO there was fatigue, soldiers lost Energy points if moved too much. Now soldiers don't get tired. It is an important game aspect, why drop it?
- Also in the old UFO, when a soldier got wounded, he lost one Health point every turn from then on, until the mission ended or he died. Now the soldiers can fight on without a flaw with half of their heads chopped off with a Kerrblade. WTF?
- It would be really useful if the radar told what size is an UFO it just spotted. One might lose less interceptors.
- For the technical side, I still can't get any sound on my Mac, but I barely get a thing of how to recompile the game. Should I really start learning a new profession just to play a game properly?
- No, I did not read through previous posts so I don't repeat what others already wrote.
- Yes, I still like the game, it's the best I've seen for long years.
