First off, Goldhawk really knocked it out of this park with this one. Best entry in the genre after the OG hands down! Fixed all the quirks I disliked with the first Xenonauts and was great fun. I saw few things I'd like to see improved, some of which I'm sure could be easily patched, which is a testament to how well developed Xenonauts 2 is.
Free camera panning would be a Godsend. The cardinal panning often makes it very difficult to see tight corridors and between trucks/barriers. This alone would be a massive QOL increase.
The mission variety early game was a breath of fresh air in this genre which I greatly enjoyed. Was disappointed to see it go so quickly and be restricted to the norm for virtually the rest of the game. Bringing in those alternate mission types (escort, save abducted humans, ambushes, etc) for the rest of the phases would add a lot of fun, reduce combat fatigue, and make repeat playthroughs more enticing.
In my two playthroughs it was quite rare to encounter landed UFOs. Due to the plethora of UFOs to shoot down and the generous timeframe to salvage them with troops I never had to do a night mission. Would be great if night landings played a greater role in the invasion.
Some items have no graphics for ground placement which can be quite annoying in some circumstances. Even just skewed versions of the inventory images with a mild shadow would solve this. I'd like to see throwing items as well but it's not a big deal at all and I'm it'd sure quite a bit more work.
Would have been nice to get an improved grenade launcher at some point. Not really because it needed buffs, but because it felt a bit off going from normal tech to high tech while we still had that one bit of old gear tagging along through the end. Increased TU efficiency in changing grenade types would be very welcome on a higher tech version. Would also be cool to see the grenade launcher have access to all the grenade types.
How training works is quite nebolous. Would be nice if we had some clarity in game on this important mechanic.
There should be an achievement for completing an Iron Man campaign, and there could easily be quite a bit more achievements.
I really hope we see another entry sooner than later this time around as the current engine is perfectly suitable, I'd preorder yesterday! Cheers to Goldhawk for this solid game! This is a notoriously difficult genre to succeed in and as an X-Com player since 1995 who's played them all, I can say this is the first release I feel has done it solidly.