XCOM: One Does Not Simply "Shoot" a Cryssalid...

[Triaxx]

Second impressions: First, to answer the question, about controls, they work perfectly well. I'm playimg on a laptop with touch pad, and it works very well, because movement uses the right button, and actions use the left. So there's no accidental movement. And anything done with the left cliick, can be backed out of.

Second, I did two things, I upped to difficulty to about normal in the ini. (Normal is where I always play TBS games.) The aliens were smarter. I moved my characters to give the aliens shots, and was suitably impressed by what they did. I had the Heavy on a roof under cover, andthe sniper on the roof with no cover (couldn't reach). Sectoid one shot at the sniper instead of linking up. He missed, but chopped the corner off the roof. The other one took a shot, hit him for 3, then retreated a little bit. The sniper now had a clearer shot at the one who had missed, and dealt him one shot to eliminate him.

The heavy then removed the second with the sort of extreme prejudice only a rocket can provide. With that done, the Assault moved up to engage the next set of aliens. This time, they popped into cover, but there wasn't an action available to deal with them. (Jerks didn't pop til after I'd used Run and Gun already.) Everyone else moves up, but can't get into range to deal with anyone. Floaty alien 1 (can't remember the name) pops up one of the crates, shoots at Assault, and some how manages to not only miss, but also fail to deal with his cover. Floaty 2, leans out, blasts him for five and ducks out of sight. Heavy deals with the one on the crate. Sniper can't get anyone, so I move the Support over to heal. Healing is quite simplified from the original, but he appears to have only three uses of it, so it's still very situational.

Assault is wounded, but I've seen where Floaty 2 is, and with one heck of a toss, his grenade takes flight and all we hear is death scream.

Moving up, I know two things. First, that sending the sniper around the left of the building isn't mybest option, and two that there's no way to deal with these guys easily. Support and assaul go left, heavy and sniper go through the main door. Both of them go out the window, one stands up to try and shoot at me, misses, and gets a sniper round in the face for his trouble. One thing to note, is that when killed these guys burst into a cloud that has two effects, one it poisons anyone who walks through, (seems to have no effect, though as we all know it just might not be a part of the demo), and two it acts the same way as a smoke grenade. Which is FUN. Heavy steps around the corner, opens up and misses completely. Assault ducks around the end of the corner, fires, and misses completely... Round ends, sniper fires, misses completely. Heavy runs up close to the window, getting poisioned in the process and proceeds to finish the issue.

Once back at base, we see the reprecussions of the injuries. Sniper and Assault are both listed as Gravely wounded, with Sniper being out 10 days, and Assault being out 14.

Conclusion: Don't get shot. Yes, that's a little obvious, but it's already been noted as pretty easy to avoid, though who knows what FUN will occur at higher difficulties. We haven't seen it all. I like the way healing has been done, no fiddling around with individual injuries is nice, even if I do like locational damage, it just sort of slows the game down. Second it's much easier to actually heal a target. Instead of having to close to one square, click the medikit, click then try and click the target, you get within any of the eight surrounding squares, when the support moves, injured units have a large, red circle with crosses floating around them, so there's no trying to recall who it was. Once you're there, you click on the medkit, then confirm that's what you want, and the healing is done automatically, with a cute little quip and it's done.

I'm not concerned about the hospital stays, because this is X-com, so them being allowed to live at all is quite the boon. It's realistic not being right back on your feet after being shot. Even so, it looks like there is quite definitely going to be a good reason to get better armor as quickly as possible.

Now, all this being said, the game is tons of fun, the way I like it, but I hotly anticipate the first pistols only iron man speed run.