Neo X-Com 2 addendum.
I lied, we just went back and finished it. The final mission is incredibly good and singlehandedly raised my opinion of the game. Finally, FINALLY, at the very end, they pulled off a huge final showdown where all our niche skills became relevant, the entire system worked and was important, and everything the game (and its predecessor) built towards and tried to say was real, actually WAS real. There were tactics to be had and some amount of actual challenge! It legitimately felt like I was playing a real new X-Com game, better than the old ones, and my soldier building choices throughout the game had actually mattered!
We still roflstomped it with 0 deaths (and 0 deaths/0 resets overall, except for the two guys in the tutorial that I think have to die?) and little real danger, but it COULD have gotten hairy, and the last turn or two were legit scrambles, which is far more than I can say for the rest of the game (and the first entry). Also add "shorter than I thought" to the possible negatives.
But still - a strong finish and positive final impression does a lot for me, especially from a modern game when so many of its kin are stuck in the mindset of "don't bother, people only play the first 4 hours." I wish the rest of the game had been that good. Turns out all you need to make it actually good is to expand the scale a bit, after all! Taking that final fight as a starting point for design, rather than an ending point, could have built some amazing stuff, and I hope the promised mod support will deliver some goods.
So, yeah, okay, good game, well played, opinion moved up to positive despite remaining gripes.
I especially loved the completely random human apartment thrown into the middle of the alien base. That answered a lot of my wondering re: "Is this intentional self-parody, or a bug, or oversight, or what?" It is totally parody and I feel better about laughing at The Jokes now.