I can't play this game any more. I've tried it twice. It just doesn't work for me.
The ground combat is just what it should be. It has lots of nice tweaks over the original. My only complaint on the ground is the lack of options with ship assaults. In the original, I remember blowing open the roof of the small alien ships and filling them with smoke. I remember motion sensors and ship walls that could be blown with explosives. I remember bouncing grenades around corners.
Those are small flaws. Here's the big flaw that convinced me to quit trying: The strategic game is very narrow. It's designed to produce a specific plotline, just like a good alien-invasion movie. Armed with experimental technology, humanity's only hope lies with our plucky wisecracking heroes as they launch a desperate assault on the alien mothership.
The strategic game presents a very narrow unmarked path to walk. Expand too slowly, and your political support will collapse. Expand too quickly, and you'll go broke. Buy too many scientists or engineers and you'll go broke. Buy too few, and you won't keep pace with the increasing alien pressure. If you buy too many soldiers, you'll go broke and waste player time grinding on characters who don't matter. Buy too few soldiers and you won't have any defense when the aliens invade your base. How many soldiers are enough to defend a base? I still don't know, and I no longer care.
The only way to find that unmarked strategic path is through trial and error. The strategic game isn't simulating anything that I can predict, so every strategic decision for the new player is essentially blind. Was I supposed to buy more scientists at the end of month 2? Should I spend the last of my cash on missile arrays, more radars, or better equipment for my soldiers?
The strategy game is a "guess what I'm thinking" game. If you didn't guess that aliens would start base invasions as early as November, then too bad, your game is screwed, try again. Next month the aliens might have tougher ships that my air weapons can't handle, or tougher armor that my ground weapons can't pierce. You can't build both, and if you guess wrong, my game is screwed.
And the trial-and-error nature of the strategy game wouldn't be so bad if the feedback loops weren't so long. It can easily take a game month to realize that you spent money in a way that you shouldn't have, or you didn't spend money in a way that you should have. And during that time, the player has invested many hours in ground missions.
Last night I realized that all my careful soldier maneuvering probably didn't matter at all, because my game is probably doomed because I didn't buy extra scientists three weeks ago for a laboratory that I should have built two weeks before that. Instead I bought extra soldiers to protect against the base assault that killed my game last time, but now maybe I've bought too many soldiers, so they're a game-dooming waste of money.
It'll take me a game month and twenty man hours in ground missions to find out why my current game is doomed, and which decision that I've already made is the bad one. I've played lots of tedious strategy games. I've mastered Dwarf Fortress and Crusader Kings 2. I loved the original X-Com. But I don't have enough patience for Xenonauts.