This game is insane. The sheer amount of ... stuff ... in this game puts fullprice games with 5 DLCs to shame. And the best part is that it's good stuff that actually enhances the game.

Basically, imagine that Firaxis-XCOM and a korean RPG had a baby. And that baby then got addicted to tradeable card games. That's Troubleshooter. A tactical squad game held together with RPG story and a bonkers amount of stuff to collect. And every piece you collect gives you more options on how to skill your characters.

To give you some points of reference, it took me 130 hours to play through the game (including the first DLC, which is free btw) on Hard. And i still have not seen 35 of the almost 290 enemies. I am still missing 90 of the 730 skills that you can equip onto your characters to customize them. I still didn't discover 120 of the 380 combinations of skills that unlock further bonuses. In the 150 hours i played the game, it constantly offered new stuff to me, it didn't get stale along the way even once. AND I COULD STILL PLAY FOR ANOTHER 50 HOURS AND STILL CONSTANTLY FIND NEW STUFF. How insane is that for a game that costs 20 bucks and is actually good?

I am a huge XCOM2 fan, i spent 4 years playing and modding that game fanatically (If you are aware of A Better ADVENT and the related mods... that's me). Troubleshooter has all that stuff in it that the modding community put into XCOM2 over time: Varied character classes, oodles of skills, varied enemies. Along the way it also solves the alpha-strike issue that XCOM2 has by making defenses equal to offenses. I genuinely enjoy the tactic layer here more than in XCOM.

Let me be fair and list three things that Troubleshooter doesn't do as well as XCOM: It doesn't have permadeath for your characters, so it's missing a good deal of that XCOM-style suspense. As a korean game translated on a shoe-string budget, its english translation is shaky. The missions are fixed and not randomized. There's some minor variation in some of the missions (like being able to choose one of 4 entry points) but the lack of randomization is certainly a negative. There you go, that's literally everything i have to note on the negative side.

Oh, and i didn't even talk yet about pets, constructable robot minions, the crafting system, random Diablo-style loot, buddy systems and some of the other extra mechanics this game has. You know, all that stuff we modded into XCOM2 after the fact. Frankly, this game has too much in it. Didn't think i would say that about a game, but here we are. It's the Gloomhaven of video games.

And this was put together by 6 people in Korea. Eat your heart out, 2K.

This game deserves awards. It's a 10/10 for me and i am eagerly awaiting the next DLC. Whatever Dandylion puts out next is going to be an instant day 1 buy for me on principle alone.