Noob here, just got Firaxis' game last week. While it wasn't terrible, I was disappointed. Disclaimer: casual gamer, in the sense that work leaves little time for gaming, but I do mostly play RPGs and RTS games.
Agreed.
More dislike on the movement: I want to flank an enemy with another soldier, but how do I know the location I'm moving him to is still within weapon range? I'm forced to savescum in case I accidentally move him out of range. Either show weapon range limit around the cursor when selecting a move-to location, or allow you to cancel the move like many TBS games (e.g. FFT, more than a decade ago!) do.
Can't move after shooting. I know many lame games also do the same, but this is so arbitrary. Why does it matter whether I move or shoot first? Give me a pool of action points and let ME decide if I want to use them all on movement or shooting or a mixture.
The RNG is fixed. If you reload and take the shot, it will always still miss. Yeah, I don't care about your views on savescumming, this is a singleplayer game, I'll play it my way thanks. Seems par for the course for Sid Meier/Firaxis games though (Civ...).
Equipment restrictions. Oh boy. Thanks, as if I didn't have enough trouble not relating to my soldiers and treating them like walking faceless statistics. Medic goes down, why can't someone retrieve his medikit and stabilize him? For that matter, you can't pick up (or drop) anything, ever. I hear you on the medikit/grenade thing - I seem to recall UFO Defence had way more equipment options back in 1994...
No base defense, base building can be summed up in one word: meh. Conversely apparently aliens also restricted to one base.
Kept feeling like I was being railroaded into missions, and being forced to pick one of three - panic seemed harder to manage, pace seemed artificially sped up. Why the rush? Can't a man take time to enjoy what the game has to offer?
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All in all, looking forward to Xenonauts, it sounds closer to what I was expecting than Firaxis' game was.
