A little late to the conversation. I tried X-Com Apocalypse before, didn't like it. I had X-Com idling in my Steam library after the winter sale, I finally decided to give it a try 2 weeks ago. And oh man, these past few days I friggin ate, breathed and dreamt X-Com 24/7. It'll be coming in into my all-time top 10 (where it joins Final Fantasy 7, Outcast, Wing Commander, Monkey Island,..) Congratulations to Firaxis to finally pulling off a worthy 3D X-com after all these years.
Played it on Normal with constant save-reloading: a critical hit over 5 constitutes a load because of the will penalty. I was totally ignorant about the game but luckily a friend of mine gave the tip "satellites are gold". I still had a very tough time, especially in the middle parts of the game when you have Captains, your first light plasma rifle and the first Cyberdisks - and 3 continents were on the brink of panic. Luckily the alien base assault cooled everyone down. My toughest mission was the Supply Ship. The lobby was guarded by a Sectopod, 2 Elites, 2 Mutons, 3 Chrysallids, and 2 Heavy Floaters. I lost my main team for like 5 times on that one.
My final team had 3 snipers (Volunteer was a Korean sniper who was on the team from day one with 90+ kills), 2 supports and 1 assault - all Colonels (screenshot).
I liked the final mission. In hindsight, it wasn't too hard as the central avenue was a cakewalk for my sniper mamas. But I did move up slowly and carefully, so there was a sense of foreboding throughout.
The Ethereals kept Mind Controlling my support medic, most of my other team was untouched. My Psi Support (a badass Belgian dude) dodged 4 Elite attacks and 2 Sectopod strikes and gave my snipers perfect vision for them to double tap away.
The game was patched so I had no audio issues or victory/failure glitches.
My mind likes the ending - I'm happy my best soldier had the gift, was the Volunteer and saved the Earth ~ if anyone, it had to be her ~ but my heart laments that I lost another Shepard :(
I'm not sure I'll be doing the Classic difficulty with/without Ironman. I thought the game was pretty hard already - and Normal allows you to make mistakes without being (too) brutally punished for it.
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