izigame.me

Try this game, at least on sale. It is one of the best XCOM like experiences and one of the best 40k game (I know, I know, the bar isn't high)
I don't intended to write a review for this game, but after hesitating to buy it myself at first, when I saw so much negative reviews I finally bought it and now I've finished the game. And boy these negative reviewers are misleading either due to incompetence or due to spite, it's hard to tell. Mind you that I was playing on a normal difficulty, scared by all the reviews and game is not easy, don't get me wrong. However, I've finished my campaign with 0 (zero) marines/assassins ever being downed or killed, including boss fights and that, if you ask me, as far from 40k feeling as it gets, but was satisfying nevertheless. So, I will base my review on quotes from other reviews I saw just now and it can get pretty long, sorry about that. Also, I'll leave the comment section open for people I quote to get back on me:
- "the enemy will always injure your soldiers if they are alive at the end of a turn" - lies, in a midgame they will barely get a chance to move. But to add some hints for cases when enemy is going to have a move next turn: 1) You can severe it's limb carrying it's most dangerous weapon 2) You can make it attack it's allies 3) you can create a killzone with "overwatch" and hazardous environment like fire so they will not reach you alive 4) focus on ranged troops and keeping distance with melee ones to finish them off next turn etc.
Most importantly, HP threshold to be in the "wounded" states are much lower than XCOM, and adding the fact that you can boost your off-mission healing to +300%, your wounded marines will heal while being on route to the next mission. Don' t forget to use your Apothecary healing, Medicae skulls or play around armor. Also worth mentioning the augmentation mechanic that expects your marines to be critically injured from time to time so they can be augmented during the recovery process. I don't like this mechanic btw, because I have never met this condition during my playthrough on normal
- "you do not have access to weapons or grenades that can efficiently do area damage and defeat large groups of enemies. That's right - the two ranged weapons with an AOE cone have very short range and don't do enough damage to take out even the weakest enemies with one volley, meaning that even if you expose your unit by moving into a favorable position, you will certainly be overwhelmed with attacks next turn." - wow, that must be a joke. There are selection of grenades and they are OP the whole game, I had a grenade focused Purifier with a flamer and he was like literally deleting chaos terminator squads in 2 throws during the final mission lol. Also, there are AoE abilities, too many to list them here. AoE firing modes, even for some melee weapons, I had 2 such melee AoE weapons during my playthrough and during the early stages of the game - a lot of environmental AoE objects like explosives, fuel tanks, statues, braziers, cranes with detachable cargo, all this will help you with crowd control
- "Unlike XCOM's two action points per turn, units in this game have three. For you that is almost irrelevant, since you need to usually save one to boost your armor to reduce the amount of damage you take turn after turn after turn. Having 3AP means the enemies, however, can move incredibly long distances to get into melee or flank you, always ensuring you take damage." - Baseline of action points(AP) is three, that is correct, but: 1) Boosting your armor is rarely a good AP use, excluding your tank characters 2) This game is almost built around increasing your AP through combat. There are a ton of abilities that are adding or refunding the AP. The first one you will probably see is execution (when humanoid enemy is stunned, melee attack will have an option to execute it giving +1 AP to EVERY marine, it can be further amplified by gear and abilities to give 2 or even 3 AP per execution per marine, yeah that crazy much), you can even build your squad around stuns/executions with access to advanced classes in a midgame like paladin and chaplain. Other honorable mentions are : "Honor the chapter" ability your first ever marine(Justicar) can unlock, crits with melee/ranged for some classes will refund AP (I had my Interceptor get 2 AP after melee crit that can trigger 2 times/turn, 1 AP refund after teleporting 2 times/turn), basically every class has ways of reducing AP cost or refunding AP, when meeting certain conditions, and one of the first stratagems is to give any marine +2AP. The list goes on.
- "enemies are always ridiculously much stronger than your squad on later stages of the game. In X-COM you are weak only at the beginning, when you do not have technologies, here you are always feel weak." - same as XCOM, mid-late game you have so much tools to use that, if built correctly, your squads will finish missions with enemies don't even scratching them
- "Games are about fun, not about frustration, when unbalanced difficulty spikes on normal (!) difficulty level just force you to witness constant failures of your squad even when you try to play carefully. I had never such experience even on hard level in X-COM." - it is hard to believe that XCOM veteran that played it on Hard can have not even a hard time but any form of a challenge on Normal difficulty in this game. I am not a hardcore XCOM/Tactical player and, again, I've finished my campaign without losses. Something that is not that easy to achieve in XCOM
I will cut this here, feel free to continue this discussion in a comments section, I think I made my point for the doubting people to at least give this game a try. It definitely deserves it despite a very valid list of flaws other reviewers have pointed out. But solid 40k/XCOM inspired games are too rare to be that picky, especially during deep sales. Have fun all!