Meta-data:
I completed the main story on normal difficulty.
I didn't get all achievements, nor did all missions.
I played on keyboard & mouse.
TL,DR: An interesting premise with mediocre implementation. It fails to bring the best of XCOM, the best of tactical games, and the best of the cover third person shooter genre. If you're interested in the story, I recommend watching a playthrough.
Would **not** play again.
The good
1 - The story premise is interesting. An alien invasion during the Cold War. Mix of old-tech and alien tech.
2 - The environments cool looking, if a bit same-y.
3 - It's cool to walk around The Bureau and talk to NPCs.
4 - The outcome of some quests change depending on your choices.
5 - The last two missions are cool.
The Bad
1 - The story itself is only mediocre.
2 - The side stories are forgettable. Some characters are charismatic, but you don't see them for long enough to actually care about them.
3 - The Bureau quests didn't seem to have much impact aside of unlocking a dispatch mission.
4 - The game relies on auto-saves, which is bad because they are far in between. Specially during the Bureau segments, you must do everything in on go.
5 - After one or two missions, the maps start to be very same-y. There's also no verticality anywhere.
6 - The game lacks the classical "learn from your enemy" and "upgrade your base" that the modern XCOM games have. You do get alien weapons, but you just collect those from the ground. This isn't that bad, but it is a missed opportunity.
7 - Character dialogue and story progression are a bit messy. The dialogue is very dry, and characters will sometimes talk about things that they shouldn't know yet (ex: William will talk about Mosaic like he knows what it is, but them will talk with other NPC like he never heard about it).
The Ugly
1 - The game tries to mix third person shooter mechanics of cover-based games (Gears of War, Uncharted) with the tactical elements of XCOM (classes, abilities, flaking). It does this by allow you to "slow down time" and issue commands to your squad mates: be it movement, usage of abilities, focus fire.
This combination sounds interesting in theory, but it just doesn't work. The gunplay itself is fine, but the ally AI is simply too bad to allow for any tactical control. Your allies will charge enemies, keep in cover while flanked, and are just terrible overall unless you micromanage them 100% of the time, and this isn't fun. You also can't play it as a pure shooter, because enemies are sponges and your allies go down all the time, and can die (the game says that you can lose the game if all agents die, but I didn't get to this point).
Overall, I feel that the game would benefit from being a pure tactical game or a pure shooter game. The mixture we got wasn't that great, and allied with the game's low production value in some places I could not recommend playing it.
