IGN review is quite harsh... I haven't played the game but judging from your descriptions this is just not a fair score.

Than again, most of SC players might use a lot of mods to make it more X-COMish. Mods have no effect on the review naturally.

Even without any mods the game is very good. It replaced Xcom as my favourite game, and i'm not easily convinced I'm not sure what the IGN reviewer expected, maybe something like an Xcom-FPS 3D in a Unreal Tournament style, i prefer the isometric round-base strategy system. And UFOET is exactly that. A very good one.

The review is basically a review of a 12 year old FPS player. "Patience during research and production? Waiting for a turn to end? Meh, don't like it". That's his style. Give him some blinking lights and a mouse-click orgy and he is satisfied.

For all grown-up Xcom-Players: Get this game! It's cheap and you will be pleasently surprised. My score 9.0 fwiw

i read the review and i think it's an accurate portrayal of the game. i've played through entirely, so i think i have a strong sense of what the game does well and what it doesn't. the only thing i would disagree with in the review is the music for tactical missions -- it's atmospheric and ambient, and it does have a bit of a creep-factor. the rest of the game music is sub-par though...

i don't get the sense from the review that the reviewer was expecting an XCOM-fps at all. not sure where you saw that, aralez.

the complaints about less management in the geoscape are spot on. a lot of management is taken out of the player's hands and is automated. this does make planning finances a lot more difficult, especially considering that salaries/expenses are deducted daily rather than at the end of the month. add on top of that the fact that the finances screen doesn't show expenditure projections. there's no management for living quarters, storage, interceptor ammunition, or hiring/firing.

the complaints about the tactical game are accurate too. there are no random maps, only pre-generated maps, so there's a lot of repetition. there are only 200 in the game, and they are pretty limited. considering that most players who have beaten the game have gone to more than 300 tactical missions, there just aren't enough unique maps for one game. for an example, every single battleship the player shoots down will land on a golf course -- every single one. the map feels like it's the same one every time, just rotated. there are missing features like saving AP and a tactical map. in fact, before the patch, there were no speed settings either, which was frustrating considering how slow soldiers and vehicles move. the review is correct about the alien AI too -- without mods, the aliens will walk around in the open, making no use of cover and having no sense of self-preservation, and make extremely limited use of buildings. it's almost not worth it to investigate the buildings.

there are a lot of other issues that this review doesn't even touch on, but that have been discussed at length over here: ufo-scene.com, like the lack of encumbrance, the lack of a meaningful role for morale (there are no panicking or berserking soldiers in UFO: ET), the lack of a complex weapon damage-type system with a resistance/weakness system (there are only three damage types in UFO: ET), the way that aliens and weapon tech scale together so that old technology is obsolete, the lack of an item for incapacitated soldiers -- meaning that if the player wants to flee a mission, s/he will have to leave all downed soldiers behind for dead since there is no way to rescue them -- and those are just a few of the big ones.

i'd check out the conversation on the ufo-scene forum. lots of good stuff is being discussed.

i'd recommend this game to XCOM vets simply because it'd be something new for them and that the prospect of further mod development is very promising, but i don't think the game has a lot of replay value straight out of the box. after beating the game, i found myself playing XCOM and TFTD once again, waiting for the mods to be updated with the missing features that were present in all the XCOM games.

Did it really replaced X-Com as your favourite game?

Yes it did