Grumbel

that is with a shift to mostly motion control and free to play/casual gaming; 

Should the reviewer be picked because they are a fan of the source material, genre, a fan of the series? Should they try to go into it as open minded as possible about the new experience the title brings? Depending on how this is handled should there be a counterpoint sub review so you get another opinion to balance things out?

User scores are emblematic of a gaming culture who likes to be as negative as possible. Hell, the internet likes to be as negative as possible. It's as if fun can't be had unless one is bitching. When I see someone who is that negative I can't help but think that they must live miserable, angry lives.

I am ok with concept art and making-ofs as unlocks, but they should be something that is unlocked essentially automatically once you complete the game. As rewards for complicated achievements they however kind of suck, as they are rarely worth the effort on their own and thus will just make me go to Youtube to watch them instead. A game shouldn't lock that content away from the user, just far enough that he doesn't accidentally spoiler himself. 
 
When it comes to sucky unlocks my biggest complaint would be costumes, but not because they are a bad unlock, but because they are incredible badly placed unlocks in most games, i.e. you get them once you finished the game twice or other stuff like that, thus you get them at a point when you are already done with the game and have no longer any use for them. Tomb Raider: Legend was one of the few games I have seen that did it right, it had a lot of costumes and a lot of conditions under which you got them, so you constantly got new costumes to play with and could use them while you where unlocking new ones. Thus you actually had something from your reward instead of it just sitting dead on your hard drive.

All nice and good, but I would remain careful and not overhype it. As much as people want another XCOM, what is often forgotten is that there have been more, a ton more. There have been four or so games in the UFO series ( UFO: Aftershock, UFO: Afterlight, ...), there has been a GBA conversion of the original (Rebelstar: Tactical Command), there was a real sequel with XCOM: Apocalypse, there are at least three fan remakes and there have been a few games from the creator of the original game that use similar mechanics (Laser Squad Nemesis, Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars). On top of that there have been a bunch of oddball sequels of the original series and whatever other stuff I forgot.
 
Point here is, people have tried again and again to recreate the XCOM experience, yet all of them kind of fell flat and didn't quite held up to people expectations. So maybe this one will be finally it, but chances are, it will just be yet another XCOM-like game that just didn't quite recapture the magic.
 
At this point I am not even sure that trying to redo XCOM is really the right way to go, it has already been done and people had more then enough years to replay the original. So when this one stays to close to the original, it might just end up being kind of boring, as people already played it enough.

You guys think Republique is going to make it?

In A New Beginning you play a large part of the game as an older guy and that was fun. More generally speaking, the whole fantasy RPG genre would be a perfect fit for it. There are lots of fantasy settings where you have old and powerful magicians all over the world, but you never actually get to play as them, you just fight them or become their apprentice.

I would like to see some games focus on actual photorealism, what they are doing right now isn't photorealism, but on some kind of hollywood-hyperrealism, where the colors are all wrong, the contrast blown up to eleven, everything is more blurred then it needs to and whenever to things touch each other, they explode. I'd like to see a game that doesn't look kind of realistic, but actually feels realistic and not like Michael Bay has taken a piss all over it.
 
Of course not every game has to look like that, stylistic is fine too, but lets keep in mind that just because it's stylized, doesn't mean it's any more original. All those Team Fortress 2 clones kind of look rather boring and all those indie games doing their nostalgia pixel-art thing also starts to get really boring, as it has simply been overdone. So when stylized, do what Raymen or Braid did, do a style and make it look good, don't try to do a lame imitation of somebody else's style.
 
The most important thing however isn't the graphics anyway, but the interaction, animation and physics. A lot of modern games look perfectly fine already when things are standing still, it's when the graphic start moving when it shows that everything is just another primitive video game.

All the stuff that plays in Stark in The Longest Journey and the Dreamfall. The Moment of Silence is also pretty decent in that area.

Why would it ever be boring or frustrating?