Recent reviews by Lushen

Best of its class that I've personally tried. Extremely good support with a strong community backing it.

Surprisingly deep management system, and you actually have to pay attention to what you're doing or you go bankrupt REALLY fast. If I had any immediate issues, though - actually engaging with the idols under your management is a whole full-fledged system that's actually hard to find the in-game time to divert attention to, and it gets downright unmanageable once you start getting sister groups up and running. And despite the warnings about mature content, it's mostly just bullying and social media scandals so far instead of anything... particularly risque.

An anime-style XCOM is something that, conceptually, has "my kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥" written all over it. But in execution? Leaves a lot to be desired. The writing's poor in two senses: a stiff localization (admittedly, not the worst I've experienced by any measure, but why measure yourself against machine translations?), and flatly tropes-reliant characters. The Masteries system should've allowed a high degree of playstyle customizability, but five hours in every character pretty much plays like every other character -- reflective of a lack of in-depth understanding of what made XCOM 2, in particular, the master-class of puzzle-chess design it proved to be.

What Troubleshooter ultimately did prove was why a completely different game was designed the way it was. Like with Chimera Squad, Troubleshooters uses a turn-order based combat system instead of XCOM 2's all-at-once movements. This is actually to its disadvantage. Where in CS, that same system used in a much smaller and more intensive firefight scenario turned every room into a cunning optimization puzzle, encouraging you to figure out the best way to combine wildly different operator skillsets into a Rube Goldberg death apparatus, the sameness of Troubleshooters' unit abilities and large maps mostly made the turn-order system a tedious encumberance to your gameplay experience.

I'm planning to put a few more hours into this to see if the mid-game's better fleshed out. But five hours in, I am thus far unimpressed.

The new Breach phase skips over a lot of the early staging tedium in a fight. The missions themselves are short and frantic - well-paced, and rarely overstays their welcome. Still need more time to see if the characters develop more, but they're acceptable personalities for now, with a good mix of potential tensions.

Visually beautiful, if a bit underdeveloped at this time. Worth keeping an eye on the platform, though - it plays host to a number of interesting live events. Hopefully further optimization will smooth out some of the wrinkles, as some of its user-designed content is decidedly ambitious in scope.

Incredibly tough, even on just "Veteran" setting. Much more like classic XCOM in that you'll be churning through legions of rookies. Contrast this to XCOM:EU/EW, where the loss of anybody during a mission feels like preventable odds--in XCOM2, some missions will leave you thanking RNGesus you managed to evac with anybody.

Note that the guerrilla themes apply beyond just the aesthetics. A lot of missions will be on tight timer limits, forcing you to scramble. Fighters will also be affected by PTSD, and Will reductions are more frequent than the previous installment. They're hammering home the fact that you're making do with civilian volunteers, rather than trained pros, but this adherence to thematic cohesion does often come across as a gameplay burden.

Finally, in terms of performance: until Firaxis provides an optimization patch, expect a lot of lag. Turning off anti-aliasing can help, as does canceling cinematics, but there's going to be a lot of unavoidable stall-outs as the game processes combat results. Once spent a solid minute waiting for a single grenade result to register--between the odd angles, the burn damage, and everything else, the enemy unit ultimately clipped through a wall. Weird.

Past the optimization problem, the game is very pretty, very deep, and VERY fun. I trust Firaxis to do what they need to do to make it shine. In the meantime, there's bug-eyed alien bastards to gun down.

Good hunting, Commander.