Voxette

Awesome!

I know it's still in Alpha, and I don't know what will be changed, but I hope the overall quality of the textures and animations on the Battlescape is improved. Things are just much less crisp and defined than Xenonauts 1, which I thought looked excellent. Also, the way the edges of foliage interact with fog of war is very unappealing and results in a lot of jagged edges. I understand the need to switch to a new game engine, but I really liked the 2D look, and I think it's going to take a lot of work to achieve the same level of fidelity in 3D (look at an old 2D game like Desperadoes or Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood compared to 3D games even years later...). I hope there's still a lot to be done, and that it will look great! It would be a shame if the sequel continued to look inferior to the original. Note: I'm not talking about the obvious placeholder art.

I think this is really promising, to start in a phase of the game where the alien invasion is still secret. This plays into the whole X-Files style "black helicopter men" mythology that makes the concept of playing as the usual "bad guys" covering up the alien invasion so interesting. And without some kind of DEFCON or other potential conflict between the superpowers, I don't see the point of having the Soviet Union in the setting. It was really underused in the first one and I was hoping that would be rectified here. I really hope some form of this makes it in!