Played a couple of missions now.
The gud:
1. By far most important - modern, western tactical game that's not a nuxcom clone, hallelujah! You get certain amount of ap and different actions, movement and overwatch have their respective, varying costs, as god intended. I also didn't see any sub-simian iq, arbitrary bs like "you cannot move after attacking" so far. Once again - huge kudos just for that. I know this might seem like a low bar to clear, but this day and age I see this as a huge win.
2. Maps and encounter design is decent, having different points of entry for bigger fights is nice.
3. The home base layer seems to have a surprising amount of depth and available options.
4. There are two separate gud boi/maximum renegade axes that seems to unlock a lot of stuff, like exclusive characters and base upgrades. Nice and replayable.
5. Positioning is important the way it should be important - for flanking and blocking, not chest high walls everywhere (although the cover system does exist).
Ymmv:
1. I like both rng and deterministic games so always hitting, but dmg being random does not bother me so far. This is how it worked in AoW3 and I love AoW3. Although, in AoW3 there was also an extremely rich morale system and shitload of different options, skills and combos to consider. Kinda funny that I'm still waiting for a modern dedicated tactical game that would come close to a strategy game from 8 years ago when it comes to tactical combat. Anyway, I'm rambling now.
2. Not entirely sure what to make of character system so far. There are classes, stats and skills like there should be and overall it seems very similar to their van Helsing game with unlocking base skills and then spending additional points to unlock different upgrades for them. Even the basic attack being a skill with additional unlocks is here.
3. Game runs, looks and controls ok and the art direction is fine. There is this smudgy filter applied though, which I'm not a huge fan of.
The meh:
1. Withholding final judgement as it was just a couple of initial missions, but seems way too easy. I played on hard and got barely damaged, let alone being afraid of losing a character or an entire encounter. I think I used a health potion once, this was when a boss and a couple of goons focused fired my two handed damage dealer for one round. There's still one additional difficulty afair and ironman mode, so not panicking yet.
The bad:
1. Itemization seems 100% modern shit-tier hns-like, with different colors of randomized items with boring modifiers. As uninteresting as it can be so far.
