Keith: No, you're no longer leveling the landscape... not even close. You get to blow up some boxes on occassion. If you've got a heavy with you, however, you can use your *1* rocket (ONE!) to pop a hole in a wall to get at a particularly annoying target.
Alright, impressions. I disliked how long the tutorial phase locked you into particular activities. Once I've opened an 'area' I would have liked to have made some choices and played in it a bit. Don't bother. Ram through it until you're done with the interceptor/downed UFO mission.
I'm playing Classic/Hardcore. No saves, no recoveries. It's HARD. Not necessarily good hard either but we'll see how things go. What I *really* don't like is mid-mission spawns. That's just crap, particularly since they're not map-edged. Highly annoying.
I just massively lost my first mission. Laid my entire non-rookie squad out into bits and pieces.
The skill trees for the individual characters is actually pretty decent. It adds a lot of flavor to it. The smaller squads invests me more in each particular character too... but I'm not naming anyone else after friends until I get some better blinkin' armor.
Reaction fire is crap. It's not working the way I'd expect, ie: enemy moves from cover, SHOOT IT. No, it only works on newly seen enemies. Seriously? I wonder if I'm just not using it right.
Gameplay itself is reasonable once you get used to it. In/out of buildings is visually choppy and the controls are a little touchy, with no undo. However, it's not meant to be speed chess either. They're not horrible, it's just one of those little annoying things that will get on your nerves now and then.
If you start losing men to cover the flanks of your other guys, you're GOING to die. I don't care how badass that one dude is.
You reload a lot. I mean a LOT. It's a bit rediculous, actually. You'd think these guys would learn to burst fire... and they're HUGE, for gods sake, get a bigger clip on that thing.
The whole 'one item in backpack' bit is very tactically limiting. You want to bring a taser? No grenades for you! Medkit? No grenade, no taser! It really eased the balance of the game on the developers, I'm sure, but frack, really?
First impression: It's a decent game, it's X-Com, but it tastes a little funny. Like changing your brand of coffee and you're not sure if you like it yet funny.
