Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
I can't say I've had any problems like that in PP so far. The enemies seem reasonably well placed, and the maps are small enough that I end up in contact with most of them pretty quickly. I haven't had any issues hunting around to find a straggler at all. Firefights generally feel pretty intense, although the game is definitely balanced more towards fewer, individually more dangerous enemies than XCOM or Gears.

Tactically Gears is really, really good. I wish they had fewer (or at least optional) side missions, and the gear system was less miserable to deal with. Not that any of these games has made micromanaging every single dude's guns and armor anything but an interface mess, but it's so granular in Gears that I really start to feel it.

Incidentally, if a game like this just replaced equipment micro with broad classes that subsume a lot of equipment options, and universal equipment upgrades as a replacement for equipment micro, I'd be right there for it. XCOM 2 got so close to this by having a universal upgrade method for the guns, but then every single one would be individually modified, and we're right back to square 1, figuring out whether Alice or Bob gets the good rifle today.
I'm finding Gears a very mixed bag. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the classes and the skill system – every one of the four sub-classes for all of the five main classes seems really well designed. Each time I level up I find myself thinking "man, I really want BOTH of these skills, it's so hard to choose just one", which is exactly what you should be feeling in a level-up system. Very few duds or trap choices as far as I can see.

But then you have to deal with weapon mods and gear, and it's just utterly miserable – cycle through three different screens just to switch out one weapon mod that gives you a 7% damage bonus instead of a 5% damage bonus. Then you have to re-cycle the mods on all your other characters. I don't know how long it actually takes but it feels like it takes forever.

Oh, and the difficulty system is all kinds of whacked-out. First time I tried the game I figured I'd put it on max difficulty. It was fun, and challenging . . . for the first few missions. Then I ran into Sniper and Heavy enemies and discovered that they do enough damage to one-shot you something like 50% of the time (as in, half of the shots they take are an insta-kill). And it turns out that the geniuses who designed the top difficulty setting decided that there's no more 'down' state for your soldiers, which not only makes a fairly large part of the Support class useless, but means that any hit from a heavy weapon on one of your soldiers means instant death. Which means game over, which means restarting the mission.

After reloading the first mission of Act 2 nine times, I gave up . . . which was when I found out that the various sources on the Internet saying otherwise were wrong and that you in fact CAN'T change campaign difficulty mid-game. So I had to restart the whole thing. And it turns out those missions are a lot less fun the second time round.

On the plus side, this time I'm getting to see the Jack bot and the Deviant enemies, which is nice (though the bot gets annoying).

By contrast, I think I played something like two and a half full campaigns of Phoenix Point before feeling as though I was done with it, and I'm still planning to come back once the Festering Skies DLC comes out. Having a strategic layer makes a big difference!