I just finished the game on Normal, and I was never swimming in money! But then I lost three countries, and I wasted some early money on gear I didn’t use much. Also, I was conservative about selling off alien corpses – way too conservative, as it turns out. Still, I lived the entire game from paycheck to paycheck, just holding out til the first of the month so that I could buy another Officer Training upgrade, or new armor, or new weapons, or better interceptors, or whatnot.
I played with no Ironman but should have done so, as I almost never loaded saved games (except twice to get around minor glitches). I lost 10 soldiers total, including 3 from the tutorial and 3 on the final mission. Final score was 3948 or some such. 28 Steam achievements. Won the game; not sure I fully understood the victory cut-scene.
Anyway, I had loads of fun with this new incarnation of XCOM. It had me just as addicted as the original game. I liked the new squaddie abilities, the redesigned single-base strategy layer, the graphics, the glam-cam, the music, and of course the core gameplay, the tactical battles. As with the original, I found Mind Control annoying, but next game I’ll prepare for it better (by getting the Will upgrade earlier).
To be sure, I didn’t love everything. The engine doesn’t handle multi-story buildings briliantly, though I was able to manage. I yearned for some sort of LOS tool to tell me what my snipers could see from where. All too often I’d think I’d have set up the perfect sniper nest (with the Squad-view ability, or whatever it’s called), only to find that the sniper apparently had a blocked LOS. I worry that the strategic game is too much on rails: one always must prioritize Engineers in the early going, it seems. Also, sometimes the squaddie abilitiy-choices seemed like no-brainers.
Still and all, these are minor quibbles, at least for me. I loved this game. On to Classic/Ironman, at last!
