Wasn't able to play when it came out, but just liberated Ernie Island last night and had a blast - while not perfect (nothing is) you've redeemed a lot of skepticism and finally made a worthy successor to JA2. IMP + Barry + Fox + Kalyna + Livewire starting off, picked up Wolf after my first cash infusion. The merc voice lines are just the right side of campy for me most of the time - one exchange between Fox and Wolf was a bit much, but Kalyna's innocent response at the end redeemed it. She's a new favorite! I wasn't sure about Livewire but she's growing on me too, it's a nice touch that while not being a stealth character she favors it due to not being a traditional commando type.
Combat is great - love how overwatch is implemented. Shooting through enemies with a rifle on one of two shots was a treat.
Some constructive criticism:
1) I'm playing on a steamdeck (don't have time enough to be a proper "gamer" these days so I own that and a M1 Pro for work/general use and the black bars between text using GPTK seem annoying) and it's really hard to set up stealth encounters on the controller. Moving six mercs into position as enemies stroll into a town is near impossible, or having someone lean out more than I wanted in an overwatch and trying to get back to them and cancel it etc.
Would it be possible to get a "pause" mode when in real time controls to line up overwatch cones / queue up movement orders? This is probably less of an issue and more of a gameplay challenge with M+KB.
Another tack would just be force turn based mode vs pausing real time (which might be more in the spirit of the game).
2) Steamdeck overall works great - creating a custom save is annoying with the loop from the keyboard. Could there be an option to just save when hovering over a save by hitting X and not having to go through the naming? At this point I just have one save I use as a snapshot and overwrite.
3) Softer - it'd be nice to modify overwatch cone width (to some extent) ala Phoenix Point. Not critical, and I guess scope type will play into this down the road.