Phoenix Point

This game can be best summed up as “two steps forward, two steps backwards”.

It looks very pretty. There is a lot of player agency. You can mutate or mechanically augment your soldiers, and there is a leveling system for each class. There is a “free aim” system which allows you to aim at specific enemy parts. And a lot of other cool stuff.

The DLC that introduces air warfare is so poorly thought that it’s like it had no QA for balancing. There is a bug that makes opponents skip their turns in some instances when you load a tactical map from a save. Upgrades are not really upgrades, but they are more like “sidegrades”; which makes research very underwhelming most of the time. On maximum difficulty, the more successful you are, the game is designed to keep increasing the number of enemies on the tactical maps until the point you will become overwhelmed, which is an incredibly poorly thought mechanic.

I hope mods will “fix” it and do another run in the future.