It's weird seeing XCOM as a third-person shooter, but interesting nonetheless, especially considering that it seemingly tried to copy the formula of Mass Effect series: grand plot, lots of dialogues with the famous dialogue wheel, combat abilities and squad commands to make encounters more engaging, linear missions with environmental storytelling and periodic converstations, additional small missions, ability to talk with different people at base.
Part of the formula has been implemented pretty well.
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[*]Plot is, indeed, grand, intriguing and makes you want to continue playing, to find out what happens next. Threat to humanity is proper, and so is the response to it of XCOM. It progresses slowly, with each mission introducing more exciting details about what's going on, properly immersing player in the world. Some moments are simply peak writing.
[*]Dialogues are rather interesting and well written: characters are disctinctive and have some deepness to them, they talk about situation on hand, in details, with personal opinions and reactions, making them interesting to listen to. The voice actors also did fantastic job, easily capturing attention with the way they talk, thus making characters more believable.
[*]Combat abilities and squad commands allow for strategic approach: turrets, mines, [strike]biotics[/strike] alien-technology based anti-gravitational measures for combating the foes, special attacks - all that provides diversity and greatly rewards thoughtful, step-by-step approach to the battle.
[*]Missions are linear and long, each major operation is an adventure that contains many notes with lore scattered around, firefights and occasional chit-chatting between characters. Surroundings change throughout the mission, keeping them fresh, their details tell a lot about what was going on in the area prior to the arrival of XCOM team. Minor operations are very much similar, just shorter and with less diverse area.
[*]After each major operation some characters at base have new things to say, and sometimes they can even ask player to do something for them. It's a nice change of pace and a way to learn about the world, if you are interested.
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This is a lot of good stuff already, but alas, there is another side to the medal, and it's much less attractive.
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[*]Lots of drama, the bad one, which comes just for the sake of drama. Many questionable situations and actions that make no sense but create tension, or suddenly relieve it. Bad guys come victorious when plot demands, and so do the good guys, and no good reasoning behind any of that is present. Facepalming and rolling eyes are induced throughout the story.
[*]Some dialogues are oversimplified and lack common sense. Why? Who knows, perhaps developers decided that writing believable characters all the time is too much job, or that it's funnier, or it's not important. Either way, they can and will cause you to cringe from time to time.
[*]Combat abilities are pretty basic: few abilities for squadmates, no psychic powers, no grenades. You use them all in the beginning of the encounter and then simply shoot the enemies while everything is on cooldown. Squad positioning is garbage because squadmates automatically follow the player if it moves beyond certain radius, and they love to constantly run straight through the enemy's fire when it happens. They also run away if grenade has landed in their position but don't come back on their own. Moreover, sometimes their brain dies, making them stuck in place instead of following commands.
[*]Combat is weird in general: enemies love to push player's position to die faster; every hit does extreme damage to you and squadmates, but enemies themselves can tank lots of bullets, especially the heavy ones, which are simply bullet sponges; the only efficient way to kill a foe is to shoot it in the head, but later in the game most of them are shielded, and so even simple foes turn into sponges, all the while player and squadmates get a backpack that provides some minor buff, but only one at a time. Most of them are useless. Oh, and there are no armouring options, not even clothes can be changed, only their colours. No wonder that XCOM agents die so fast: they have no proper equipment, and it's just sad.
[*]Missions are linear and long. Although it makes each operation an adventure, it gets stale to wonder more or less the same environments for one and half hours straight. After all, they are mostly made of same decorations, even though their placement is changing, and there isn't enough conversations and unique encounters so that they wouldn't become dull.
[*]Little quests at base are simple "Go there, check this thing, return", all they do is waste your time and give access to technology that you either already have or will have in the near future, and they have no influence on the plot. Same with the minor operations, sadly: no matter what descriptions and characters tell or do in them, they're completely detached from main plot line and bear no significance.
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Moreover, there are other problems, smaller, but omnipresent.
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[*]PhysX effects are broken: they make FPS drop extremely in certain locations, and in others - to crash. Developers said that it can't be fixed, which means PhysX stuff should be disabled in settings. Why did they implement it in first place if it causes such severe problems - is a mystery.
[*]Everything is seemingly unpolished, incomplete. Audio cuts out; all audio is noticeably compressed; lines of dialogue have no pause between them, making characters spit them out instead of saying; music and sound effects are either bugged out or not introduced to some parts of the game where they clearly should be; cutscenes are in extremely low quality; animations are simplistic; UI and menus are confusing and ugly.
[*]Most weapons are deprecated, they just don't do enough damage or are precise enough to be useful. There are only several guns worth bringing on missions. Moreover, game forces player to use alien guns very soon, because it's much easier to find ammo to them than simple bullets, even more cutting down the viable arsenal of weapons. But even then it's easy to find yourself sitting in cover and using combat abilities instead of shooting, simply because shooting does almost nothing to the target.
[*]There are different ways to move around cover, but they are unintuitive and require pressing several different buttons, it's easy to get them messed up during firefight.
[*]To use abilities and issue commands, it's imperative to open a commanding menu: you can't bind abilities to the keys, nor it's possible to send squadmates to cover of choice individually without it, only to issue attack move to the same location, and only for both of them. Menu slows down time but doesn't stop it, meaning that while you are busy giving individual orders without any control of you character - you will get shot at, and so will your squadmates, and that will happen even faster than without slowed down time, all because it slows movements but not the reaction of enemies, or the speed of their bullets, making it extremely easy to get severely damaged or die while using that menu.
[*]When command is issued - it can't be cancelled, even if you're still in the menu, even it's queued, even if it's your own character. Accidental commands will be completed, and you won't be able to move until your character does everything you've told him to do. It's an extremely dumb design.
[*]There are no manual saves, only checkpoints. Game crashed, you died in the end of long fight, or you want to end playing for the moment but last checkpoint was 20 minutes ago? Too bad.
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Overall, game has many problems, and could be much better than it is. It reeks of being rushed, sadly. But I genuinely did partially enjoy the difficulty of combat and uniqueness of story nonetheless. So in my opinion, it's worth the try, at a discount.
