The cartoonish graphic might be a bit of a turn off but it is servacible and beyond that, there is a well polished and great game there. After the event of the 2nd UFO series, earth cannonically surrendered and some of the survivors were relocated to Mars. You job is to build enough terraformers to turn Mars to Earth 2.0 while fending off left over Reticulans, invading Beastmans and the re-awakening Martians.
The combat is pausable realtime and worked smoothly and fast paced. The different races of enemies were different enough that you require different equipment and approaching to take them on without getting massacred. Incidentally, since you are playing a small colony, there are only 3 new recruit if one of your original character dies.
There is a pretty extensive list of technologies that you can research, reverse engineer and manufacture. However, I highly recommend using Shadowarrior's Total Rebalance mod which add tons more gears for your sqadies to use. http://www.strategycore.co.uk/files/?dlid=546