For less than $15 is said “screw it” and gave it a shot.
Played the (short) tutorial and started a game on Normal. I’m just getting my sea legs, but so far I like it. It’s definitely Pandemic with some twists:
Funding - Just about every action costs money. Building bases in cities adds to the $/turn. Right now it’s a fixed amount, but I’ve suggested to the developers that it be changed to make it more like XCOM, with the funding from a city dependent on the level of infection.
Tech Tree - There’s a small tech tree that when researched either slows down the spread of the disease or improves the effectiveness of your team.
Random Events - Every so often an event card pops up giving a choice of responses, each with different consequences.
Team - You still are limited to 4, with each allowed one action/turn. The big difference is that any team member can do anything, although they all specialize. So while your security expert can administer treatment and reduce infection in a city, the medic does it a lot more efficiently. Along those lines, team members earn XP every time they succeed at an action, and become better at their specialty as they level up. Also, some actions cause team members to become sick themselves and lose health. At that point you have to rest them for a turn or two to regain lost HP. You start the game with one specialist, and recruiting others costs $. Interestingly, you can have multiple members with the same specialty, so there’s nothing preventing a game with 4 researchers, for instance.
That’s about what I’ve uncovered so far. It seems to be in good shape for an Early Access release, with no crashes or game breaking bugs that I’ve discovered. It seems perfectly playable at this point, although I’m sure there are some balance issues I haven’t run into as yet.
Also now that it’s available there’s a bunch of Let’s Plays up if you want to check it out first.