Prez wrote on Oct 9, 2012, 17:43:
Well I've been playing the hell out of it and it really is well done. I am doing my best to beat down that voice that pipes up every so often to remind me how different this is than the original and having marginal success. I definitely love the challenge - I have been wiped out on several missions now, and (like the original) it is really hard to recover from a disastrous mission in which you lose all of your best soldiers and your global approval rating bottoms out.

What the game does, it does extremely well. But I have complaints (surprise surprise). I am not so enamored with the fact that there are no base defense missions. Those consistently were some of the most intense, nerve-wracking missions in the first game (and it was also neat to run around inside something you built yourself) and it is a crime that this feature didn't make it in. Also, I remember fondly attacking alien bases as they started popping up all over the world - those were awesomely difficult and terrifying, but their not here either. My biggest concern, the lack of action point movement, is not as jarring a change as I expected and in fact it works really well. I lamented he lack of randomized maps, and I still do; this is mitigated somewhat by a large variety and randomness of starting points, but I still wish they were in here. Squad size, another huge concern of mine, is still a sticking point with me but it is not a deal-breaker. I would have liked to see squad size upped to 6 at the start and expandable to 8 though. Despite these gripes, the game is extremely fun, challenging, and addicting - three critical trademarks of the X-COM brand so that is a relief.

I hope the game sells well enough to warrant a sequel with those crucial features added back in. Firaxis may be on the verge of doing what began to seem impossible - pleasing hardcore X-COM fans with a modern re-imagining.