It's fine, but I don't think it's great and there's a lot that I don't like about it. The game is basically Midnight Suns with an XCom-lite combat system, but I enjoyed Midnight Suns a lot more.
The randomness of combat is something I've never liked much about XCom; missing a 90%+ shot, or two of them in a row, is never fun. This game tends to sort of double down on that mechanic by making crits extremely important, since they're the only good way to ensure that you're whittling through massive enemy health bars quick enough to manage the number of foes that you're facing while they keep spawning more waves at you.
The Coil are not fun. They're an enemy type where you'll get split missions that pop up, and you basically get the opportunity to prevent them from getting one buff or another; like an enemy can get two overwatch shots, or larger grenade radius. Or you might have to choose between melee enemies moving 2x as far, or enemies receive buffs when allies die. It adds up quickly, and by the time you're halfway through the game it's absolutely infuriating dealing with these guys who will heal to full if you kill someone, or get an extra move and turn invisible because you attacked them, or whatever. It's bad enough that I can play maybe one mission worth of the game before I need to shut it off and play something else, or else I get irritated. I -hate- these enemies, and not in an "I want to beat them" kind of way, but in an "I don't want to play this game because of them" kind of way.
The story and characters are mostly okay, but they all feel fairly generic and unimportant because the game has to be able to go on if someone perma-dies. The character creation options feel about on the level with other EA games like NHL's create a player more than what I'd expect for an RPG, but I was mostly able to make something I liked. The base and upgrade options feel a bit superfluous because you never have enough credits to actually engage with these systems to any meaningful degree.
I'm always broke, I'm always leaving missions behind on the table that I don't have time or resources to get to, and I'm always struggling fighting Coil regardless of any progress I might make. I think this might have been choices made to give you a reason to replay the game, but instead it just feels terrible when you're playing through. If you're a completionist sort of player like I am, systems like this are a stressful and headache inducing nightmare. When the best way to approach things is to not care and just play, I stop caring and don't want to play.
I've also had a few crashes, and there's nothing worse than getting to the end of a long battle and having it crash out on you, forcing you to replay the whole thing. The game looks really nice, but it doesn't run very well and stutters fairly regularly even on a 5080 and 7800x3D.
This isn't a bad game, but I don't really like playing it all that much. If you're an XCom diehard you'll probably like it a lot, but I'm not. I'd rather play Midnight Suns or one of the Expeditions series of games for my strategy fix.
