SheBear: It does allow you to skip the first tutorial mission, but then it bugs out (for some reason) and you are only able to have one type of alien enemy in the second mission (which ever one you pick to replace - or not replace - the sectoids in the first revel area), and you can't get more than a squad of four.
Thanks, but that doesn't seem to work for me. No matter the settings, skipping the first mission makes my soldiers turn invisible and the game just freeze when trying to move them.
Anyway, I found the strenght to drag myself through the tutorial and played a few custom games. If anything, I'm less and less convinced by the gameplay now. :(
- The cover system seems to be pretty poor. Aliens were consistently shooting through walls, crates and whatnot with extreme precision and no damage penalty. My soldiers too were able to get a clear shot at aliens completely out of their FoV, but at least their weapons did have to break the alien's cover first.
- The "two actions per turn" rule makes no damn sense. Apparently, in a single turn a soldier has the time to: run to a wall,
climb on a rain pipe all the way up to the first floor, then run across the roof and find cover near the border. Or, he's allowed to run to a window, crash the glass and then shoot. And yet he cannot do something much simpler, like
first shoot and
then move away, OR shoot twice, OR taking three half a meter steps instead of running 20m?
Totally arbitrary rules, I really wish they had kept the old movement points system.
- Last but not least, there's a disarming lack of freedom and environment interaction... what's the point of having a highly destructible scenario if I
can't shoot at it?
In the old X-coms you could fire at fluel barrels to catch the aliens in the conflagration. Blow up trees with laser rifles to have a better view of the zone. Killing unseen enemies by unleashing a barrage of fire on their estimate position. Heck, in Apocalypse you could even plant charges on the ground floor of a building, so that it would collapse on itself killing all aliens inside.
Here what can you do? Shoot only at aliens, and only if you see them.