Hospital Ship Simulator 2035 X-COM2Started playing this. Was worried that the game would be too easy by reputation, and... hmm. Turned out harder than expected, but not for the reason I would have thought. If you go in with your "best" team, the game is fair enough. But the D&D-esque HP inflation means there's a much starker difference between Rookies and Vets than in the 2012 X-COM, and certainly vs. the original 1994 X-COM. And you can't always deploy your best team, because they are healing from the horrible injuries they sustained last mission. And while I suppose it is REALISTIC that your soldiers have to take long timeouts after getting blasted by plasma cannons, this can mean big problems in just plain having enough troops to deploy. I pretty much always get a "Troop understrength" warning after every mission. I'm currently slightly stuck because I have a retaliation mission to handle, I'm very low on supplies due to constantly having to feed Rookies into the meat grinder (oh how I wish I hadn't wasted Supplies on stuff like longer drop timers or an extra scientist when now I don't have enough to buy better armor for my squad), and 2 vets + 3 rookies are not really handling Mutons with tanky officer & thin man/snake backup. Stun Lancers feel like a particular issue for rookies; they just run straight at them and murder them. (But if their damage was less, they couldn't even pretend to threaten vets?! Moral: nerf their damage but give less HP on promotions.) Maybe I should just reload the Geoscape and ignore the mission while waiting for my teammates to feel better? Ugh.
Random comments stuff:
* Why is everyone Spider-Man? Climbing buildings ain't no thing in the future. You don't even need the spider-suit, vertical movement, especially vertical movement up, seems way too cheap in this game. You'd think that being on the third floor of a building would offer some modicum of safety, or at least warning, but nothing like Stun Lancers cheerfully running from far off up pipes/ladders to zap your snipers up there. Then a MEC tossing a grenade that blows up the roof and sends everyone plummeting to their deaths on the first floor from fall damage. (It'd be sorta okay if only PCs could do this, or if soldiers on Overwatch automatically got a crit on enemies trying to scale ladders near them.)
* Mind control is still really brutal. It's okay if only a Rookie bites it (Serra murdered Priscilla in a fit of jealousy over her being the better healer, I can only presume), but (in events I reloaded) I've totally had a vet wipe out two other vets while mind controlled. That kind of roll going badly seems really centralizing on an Ironman run or something.
* I like how Canadian Amelia got a single kill, then died from a Stun Lancer running straight at her. Very much honors how training up recruits works in FE8.
* I love the trolling in the metaplot. "That first time you played X-COM, got stuck, and restarted? That was the real campaign. The next 6 times you played X-COM? That was you controlling the ALIEN side while thinking you were controlling humans." A good way to make the Commander seem like a badass for authentic reasons rather than "everyone loves you just 'cuz" too.
The current roster of the Fallen (Ignore Peter & Ana, the prologue mission forced deaths, and Charlie was a rando dude as a mission reward). I think it's missing two people who didn't get saved properly due to the Internet being out at the time, but I forget who.
