izigame.me

I desperately wanted to like this game, but after about five hours, I realized that it was only getting worse, and it wasn't going to get better. Since I'm past the point of getting a refund, I guess leaving a bad review is my only outlet.
Classified starts very well. It introduces a few new mechanics to the XCOM formula that seem interesting and has decent voice acting and graphics for a game of this price, although pretty bad animations throughout. The basic gameplay consists of dodging German viewcones in stealth sections and playing out turn-based battles after being detected. I think the word for how stealth works here is non-ludonarratively diagetic, as soldiers conveniently ignore the bodies of their slain comrades and only hear loud screams of, "Mein leben!" from three inches away. You can stand behind an enemy and braid his hair for him and he will not notice you, so long as you do not break a window within six tiles of him or step in the single pixel of his vision.
Evading vision cones is the most primitive form of stealth gameplay. It is the bare minimum. And it's basically all Classified has. Unlike a game such as Partisans 1941, though, here you get to do it in agonizingly slow turn-based sequences, where you're forced to watch each enemy and each ally walk to and fro while hoping the German you want to melee execute looks in the right direction next turn to speed things up a little.
It is very slow.
Classified has a problem with slowness. XCOM is also sometimes slow, but one of the things those games do to alleviate the tedium of having to watch each unit run around the map after receiving an order is that--you aren't forced to watch each unit run around the map after receiving an order! If you have five squaddies to move from A to B, they can move more or less simultaneously.
Not in Classified. Here they go one at a time. In fact everything is one at a time. Have two soldiers side-by-side, ready to synchronized takedown to Nazi soldiers? I'm afraid that isn't allowed.
A lot of XCOM-likes struggle with enemy variety. After five hours, this game's is among the worst. Each new type of soldier looks identical but has some new gimmick that makes him agonizing to encounter. Why can't I stealth kill grenadiers? Why do officers need to be double tapped? Why do heavies have so much health? Why are bombadiers exploding when I shoot them at point-blank? And why, FFS, are these melee guys dodging five 97% shots from my entire team on a turn? How exactly am I meant to deal with an enemy who I can't shoot, but can down one of my guys in a single attack?
These aren't fun to deal with. They don't have interesting counters. They're just tedious. When I calculate my movement AP and run to flank a bombardier, but it turns out I'm one tile within the 8-mile blast zone that he randomly emits using the Martyrdom perk upon death, it just feels like Activision is fucking with me again. It doesn't feel like I'm being challenged by the designers in a meaningful way.
Tedium is the name of the game. Stealth sections are not hard, but they are very, very tedious. Skipping out on them is even worse, though, because you'll be morale drained by enemy machine gunners (and thus forced to lose HALF of your action points!) spraying and praying from across the map within seconds of going loud, while your poor squad members, of whom you only get FOUR (+1 often), miss again and again and again. The morale system does seem cool, but you aren't going to have enough men or ammo to effectively suppress the vastly superior numbers you're facing down without thinning them first. Reinforcements? They come from seemingly random entry points, for no narrative reason, whenever an objective is completed. You often only have one turn to react. They aren't hard to deal with, mostly. But they're so goddamn tedious, esp. when your units move very slowly. Can we not have infinite reinforcements on every mission? Please?
All in all, you will be forced to reload constantly, and thus endure more repetitive animations, for no reason, while stumbling through boring and uninteresting stealth sections, so you can complete basically decent but not really very good XCOM-clone combat. And all in service of... a ticking clock down to D-Day. The characters are extremely basic national stereotypes, and while not horribly written, there's nothing more interesting to the narrative than that. Really, for a game like this, they should have gone full XCOM and let us make the PCs ourselves: instead, they've met us halfway, with a story that isn't character driven or engaging, overworld mechanics that are extremely half-baked, and a clock that I don't care about at all. After three hours I had completely lost interest in any of the narrative, in part because it's not meaningfully tied to the gameplay. How are the missions progressing our goal? What's the plot?
There isn't one. Just tickle the Germans until Eisenhower comes to save the day.
This game has an amazing premise. Its constituent parts are not horrible. There are a lot of good ideas, and some good implementations. I might give it another try. But I doubt it. I was wondering why I'd never heard of this game despite it being in my favorite genre, but I know now. In two words, it's not fun.