While this might be a fun game I can't possibly recommend anyone buy it.

For starters, the tutorial is among the worst I have ever seen in a game, it lasts at least 2.5 hours where you cannot take ANY action except what the tutorial says to do, so you aren't really playing, just playing along. But it also doesn't tell you anything useful beyond the most basic concepts. There are a ton of interrelated systems here and none of them are really explained. I ended up doing a ton of googling (you will too if you play this game), in order to learn basic fundamentals like how enemies are activated and that strategies like sneaking around don't work at all (despite being encouraged by the game). The amount of reading you will have to do to understand how enemy activation works, what facilities you should build to not lose, how powerful you should be before doing missions, how to get the resources you need, what resources you DO need, what items work and which don't, and how to stop the aliens from winning is substantial and not explained by the game ever.

Next is the outright difficulty. This game suffers from a number of problems in its difficulty that much more challenging games don't. For starters, it is highly uneven, the beginning portion of the game is the hardest for some reason. Secondly and more importantly, if you do even somewhat poorly at the beginning (like you would if you jumped right in only playing the tutorial), then you will be very harshly punished later on, your game rapidly becomes unwinnable with even a few lost missions as you won't have the skilled soldiers or the resources you need to even begin to meet the later challenges. I followed the advice of 'don't save scum' which by the way is TERRIBLE advice, and so ended up never getting a soldier higher than level 3 (out of 10 or so iirc). This meant that when I had to desperately try to do the most essential missions to stop the aliens from winning they were impossible.

This feels like a game that was designed for an extremely niche group of super hardcore players who have mastered the game mechanics and exploits and know exactly what to do. Like I said, for those players its a great game. For the rest of us though, sucks to suck I guess.

Interestingly the one thing I don't have a problem with is the randomness of probability based shots, lots of people complain about that but it seemed fairly even to me. Problems arose when I fought enemies with dozens of health pips and at most my soldiers could do five or six damage per turn. With only four soldiers (thats the cap unless you know ahead of time to build a specific upgrade) and far more enemies, things go south quickly.

Experienced players might read this and say things like 'of course you did poorly, you didn't upgrade the macguffin" or "those enemies are supposed to be countered by this specific weapon" or "you need to focus on doing this mission or you lose" and while that might be helpful, the fact that I need to do research before starting rather than diagetically learning the lessons myself (something I find quite fun in most strategy games), is a critical design flaw, and makes an otherwise well put together and very impressive looking game, quite poor.

I'll try again with some of the mods that make the game more accessible, but at a certain point I can see myself just losing interest rather than trying to patch together an enjoyable experience.

Conclusion, save your money and time. Apparently the first one is better, maybe try that one.

While this might be a fun game I can't possibly recommend anyone buy it. For starters, the tutorial is among the worst I have ever seen in a game, it lasts at least 2.5 hours where you cannot take ANY action except what the tutorial says to do, so you aren't really playing, just playing along. But it also doesn't tell you anything useful beyond the most basic concepts. There are a ton of interrelated systems here and none of them are really explained. I ended up doing a ton of googling (you will too if you play this game), in order to learn basic fundamentals like how enemies are activated and that strategies like sneaking around don't work at all (despite being encouraged by the game). The amount of reading you will have to do to understand how enemy activation works, what facilities you should build to not lose, how powerful you should be before doing missions, how to get the resources you need, what resources you DO need, what items work and which don't, and how to stop the aliens from winning is substantial and not explained by the game ever. Next is the outright difficulty. This game suffers from a number of problems in its difficulty that much more challenging games don't. For starters, it is highly uneven, the beginning portion of the game is the hardest for some reason. Secondly and more importantly, if you do even somewhat poorly at the beginning (like you would if you jumped right in only playing the tutorial), then you will be very harshly punished later on, your game rapidly becomes unwinnable with even a few lost missions as you won't have the skilled soldiers or the resources you need to even begin to meet the later challenges. I followed the advice of 'don't save scum' which by the way is TERRIBLE advice, and so ended up never getting a soldier higher than level 3 (out of 10 or so iirc). This meant that when I had to desperately try to do the most essential missions to stop the aliens from winning they were impossible. This feels like a game that was designed for an extremely niche group of super hardcore players who have mastered the game mechanics and exploits and know exactly what to do. Like I said, for those players its a great game. For the rest of us though, sucks to suck I guess. Interestingly the one thing I don't have a problem with is the randomness of probability based shots, lots of people complain about that but it seemed fairly even to me. Problems arose when I fought enemies with dozens of health pips and at most my soldiers could do five or six damage per turn. With only four soldiers (thats the cap unless you know ahead of time to build a specific upgrade) and far more enemies, things go south quickly. Experienced players might read this and say things like 'of course you did poorly, you didn't upgrade the macguffin" or "those enemies are supposed to be countered by this specific weapon" or "you need to focus on doing this mission or you lose" and while that might be helpful, the fact that I need to do research before starting rather than diagetically learning the lessons myself (something I find quite fun in most strategy games), is a critical design flaw, and makes an otherwise well put together and very impressive looking game, quite poor. I'll try again with some of the mods that make the game more accessible, but at a certain point I can see myself just losing interest rather than trying to patch together an enjoyable experience. Conclusion, save your money and time. Apparently the first one is better, maybe try that one.