Fun, but with irritating facets
I enjoyed this quite a bit, but it definitely has its share of problems. First and foremost, it does a pretty bad job of teaching you how to play it. In fact, it seems to hold your hand and walk you through a playstyle that will inevitably require a mid-game restart and fails to even acknowledge the satellite coverage system which is by far the most important tool for keeping the game over state away and is the only way to increase your funding.
There's an odd feeling that the game can't decide whether it's about making choices and sacrifices or about preparing for and mitigating randomness. At the center of this are the abduction missions. First of all, it doesn't make sense that the aliens would always attack exactly three cities on three different continents at the same time. That could be excused if it made for good design, but I don't think that it does. Since you always have to choose one and ignore the other two, you lose more than you gain no matter what. It just doesn't make much sense that you could be doing everything perfectly but still get punished. The only systemic answer to this is the installation satellites in order to stop abductions from taking place (which is, again, something they never tell you about) but there are so many major barriers towards a complete satellite network that you'll never manage it until around 2/3 of the way through the game at which point you've probably lost at least one or two countries despite doing nothing wrong simply by virtue of not being able to be in multiple places at once. At some point I'm forced to suspect that the only reason it works this way is because it has the pretense of difficulty and is discouraging and X-Com is 'supposed' to be hard and discouraging.
The game also forces you to make uninformed decisions quite often. Firstly, in terms of research. In the beginning of the game, the order in which research projects are completed are paramount to survival, especially when many of the research items are useless. So there's not much excuse for them to not tell you what the hell you're going to get out of your time investment, and that's doubly true when the results can be as non-intuitive as a sectoid autopsy resulting in powerups for your aircraft.
Second is the obnoxious way enemies get a free turn upon discovery in combat. At first I found this relatively understandable, since random generation + cover based combat = enemies that are sitting ducks unless given the ability to intelligently find cover in realtime. But the more I played, the more holes got poked into this method of working things out. The end result is that if the first of your soldiers to move discovers enemies, you have a whole turn to react to their free movement and it's fine. However, if the last of your soldiers to move stumbles upon a nest of aliens, you're fucked. The aliens get a free turn to move to cover, you get no chance to react, and then they dump on all of your misplaced soldiers.
Speaking of fucked, I got fucked a few times. Most notably was during a VIP escort mission. Once you've found the VIP, enemies start spawning in out of nowhere. My VIP was in cover, far away from present danger, and was intelligently placed. But then two aliens spawned in right next to him and killed him, failing the mission. Fuck that shit, I was playing smart and the game rolled a dice up my ass.
But for all the game preens about being hard, once I got my hands on the second tier of weapons and armor the game became a cakewalk. I ended up with three whole dead soldiers, all from the beginning of the game. And I'm a guy who rarely plays strategy or sim games, and this is my first X-Com. At the same time, I didn't have much trust in the game to put the difficulty above normal. At the end of the day, I have my gripes, but this is a game I would lose track of 5 hours at a time playing and would start sneaky sections instead of getting work done or going to bed at a reasonable hour. I definitely enjoyed my time with XCOM, but I don't think I can consider it the home run it's been painted as by many many people.
