Definitely. For me, probably it will be the GOTY of 2012, but Im not gonna buy it just now. Maybe I'll get it at xmas sales.

havent heard about the title until like just 2 weeks ago. played the demo. preordered immediately. so HELL YES!

I'll bite.
Is it because it's steam exclusive? (It's not, it's steam exclusive for PC, also available for PS3 and XBOX 360). Or is it because you don't like it as a game?

No, I lost my interest when they revealed that they made the game faster by limiting the squad size and removing the action points as I will rather play Silent Storm or JA2 if I want to control a small squad. That two actions per soldier thing may have been okay if the squad size would not have been reduced.

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.

You can't specifically (or generally) target aspects of the environments? Are you serious?! Purposefully destroying parts of the environment was a huge source of tactics in X-com, from making new doors to flank enemy positions, to opening up shots for other squad members to take, to utterly leveling structures and all aliens within them. Only being able to take shots at visible aliens is incredibly weak.

Echoing the above, I dislike strategy games where you cannot move after shooting. It makes for uninspired move, die stalemates.

Just to address this one issue, you can still destroy cover. You can use grenades or rockets to destroy cover (which I've done a couple times to clear out a better shot for one of my squad).
But yes, there is definitely limit to what you can shoot. I think part of this though is that there isn't a movement point system anymore (though I can't comment on liking it or not as I've never played any of the older games), and so the game is very focused on move into cover and shoot game play. Which I don't find bad. But I can see where you're coming from with the majority of your dislikes.

Kind of.

Probably won't be getting it this year. Dishonored, Hitman Absolution, and possibly AC3 will be keeping me occupied ;)

I noticed, but it looks like soldiers can't carry more than one each (and not even all classes can...) so their use is extremely limited. I'd rather not waste them to blow up a bunch of wooden crates.

As for the cover system, it's an interesting idea and I would welcomed its addition if only it worked. But I have to assume it's bugged at this point. In my last game a single muton oneshot two of my soldiers who were out of his sight, behind a corner on the opposite side of the building. If not even two walls and a bunch of furniture inbetween can offer any protection, then I might aswell leave my team in the open and run straight for the aliens...

Considering that there shouldn't be mutons in the demo, maybe it was a bug. We will have to wait for the final game.
"In order to save the city we had to destroy it"

-- SimonG, Commander X-Com, on the Chryssalids incursion of Berlin.

While that is true I think that as you get more into the game grenades become less important as actual health-damaging weapons. The normal ones only do three damage (which is not a lot when you look at some enemies' health), and so I'd assume you can upgrade at some point, but I think there is probably going to be some sort of strategy to using them to blow out cover (to either force an alien to move to a different position, or give your soldiers a better shot). But yeah, your support person doesn't get frag grenades because s/he has smoke (I think that is right), but other than that I think each class can carry one grenade (maybe there is an upgrade for extra as well?)

Okay, now that I know that the targeting is also limited the game become an insult to the original in my eyes. What were they thinking? That modernized graphics would sell the game to the fans regardless how much they throw out features from the original?

I was going ignore this game, but now I will need to read some reviews just to see if any old guard reviewers have the balls to call out this pretender, review it as the hollow imitation that it is and score it accordingly.

So, you waiting for a "review" that confirms your preconceived notion of a game you haven't played simply on a singular piece of information.

Wow, you are an inspiration to us all ...

Anyone else got their Civ V pre-order codes yet? I did, which came as a surprise since I didn't pre-order directly from Steam and thought they only handed out codes for those who did order from Steam directly. But I'm a little unsure about what to do with the code, since I'm not usually into games such as that. Is the game good and will I like it? Again, bear in mind I don't usually play that kind of games. Or should I just trade it away, and if so, what would you say is the game's market value today? Although, there's also the fact I've no idea which game I would want in return... :P