Game's not bad so far. The gameplay is something different and for $8 I'm not going to complain. You get some new concepts to play around with, turn ordering is now based entirely on sequencing correctly, there's some nifty gimmicks in play, thematically it looks cool, XCOM's animations/music are fine tuned, and I'm a fan of the aliens aspect in that it gives you a new toolbox of things to play around with. It's not overly complicated by any means, but it's fresh enough.
Story/writing is in fact tremendously worse than what I was prepared for, but I give them credit for at least leaning way, way, way into it. I get the sense that they were going for that like 80s cop/sci-fi vibe mixed with Tumblr shenanigans and, yeah, I'd say they got what they were aiming for. Just that, you know, the fundamental thought behind it is simply not going to be appealing to many; so in some regard I might be biased cause I'm not that audience in the slightest. I think the biggest error with it is neither the quality nor the theme, but just that XCOM2 had a pretty dark tone for the series as a whole so it's like you snap from that to this fluffy stuff - and even in the series' own world it seems way too fast/out of touch. I also might be biased as I do a lot of writing myself and can recognize story beats and character beats, and there's a certain point with some games/movies/etc. where if it's too trite I can predict pretty much what the characters will say (not how they'll say it, but exactly what they'll say, a notable difference) and, yeah, it's just not especially witty let me put it that way. But, again, I do give them credit for going full hog with it.
