I was so excited to see another new XCOM game coming out. I bought it immediately on release. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, but I was sure it wouldn't be a waste of my time or money.
Boy, was I wrong.

Upon first opening the game, the first thing to come to my attention was the main menu. The menu is horribly designed, and probably one of the ugliest I've seen since playing the original Avernum.

It wasn't just appearance that struck me though, before you start the game you have to select a campaign, which is just a glorified name for a set of save files, and try to start the game. I say try because while it may sound simple how I said it, I found myself confounded by the horrible design choices during my first attempt to play the game.

When I finally did get into the game, I was stopped during the cover tutorial by a crippling bug that made it so that nothing but me could move. This is a problem, because in the cover tutorial you follow a soldier who is supposed to get gunned down. Instead of dying, he stands in your way, completely blocking you from progressing. While you might normally be able to walk around him, the game developers decided to super glue you to cover for this particular segment.

After saving and loading multiple times to try and only enter cover after I'd passed the soldier, I finally made it past the tutorial to discover that the entire game was broken, and was unable to get past a section where I was supposed to kill all the enemies. While I could get headshots that made heads explode, it failed to register their deaths. Plus they weren't firing back anyway, so there wasn't much point.

I posted on the support forum and tried reinstalling, reformatting, everything to get the game to work. Others were experiencing this bug, and 2K offered zero help.

Fast forward to now, I have a completely different computer and am able to run the game. Let me just say, I wasn't missing much. I only bothered to play the first half hour or so of the game (the rest of my playtime was me trying to get the game to even work), but allow me to share my impression with you.

You start out in a promising cutscene laying out a bit of the story. There are alien artifacts, secret agents, and alien infiltrators. It loses interest quickly however, as the artifact is miraculously consumed to give the hero superpowers. Amazing, right? Not really. And to be honest, as much as I want to love this game as an XCOM fan, I honestly doubt the story is going to get any better from where I am.

Aiming is awkward. They opted to have no reticle that I can see, and while it's still possible to hit things, it takes a lot of effort to try and align your enemies to the center of your screen, rather than align a reticle to their heads.

There's also an ammo system, and while I didn't manage to run out without being able to restock, I had to scour the area for weaponry for bullets to use after every firefight. While this isn't a bad mechanic persay, it seems like something they put in there for the sake of realism, not for the sake of fun. Why make me bother gathering up ammo for my guns when I always have enough for a fight - provided I vacuum up all the guns area after a fight like a good boy. It's just a chore.

The game seems to stress the importance of using your allies and commanding them to gain you the edge on the battlefield, but your allies are less than dependable. If you try to order them to a location to flank and attack an enemy from what seems to be a safe location, they seem to manage to die every time. You end up just ordering them to hang back and having the battle devolve into you shooting as many explosive barrels as possible and blind firing from cover until everything dies.

I was trying to give the game a chance to redeem itself, but I lost it once one of the characters said "they've shut down communications worldwide." It doesn't take a genius to figure out what's wrong with that picture.
If I can't access the internet, that means that every server in the world has been shut down - not that I don't have internet access. Surely the other servers can't contact each other either.

I ended up quitting the game once I got into another boring firefight. It was time to express my disappointment to the steam community and move on to playing Skyrim.