What is it with western military characters looking more like Starbucks baristas instead of actual soldiers?

It's how these people think what is trendy or modern. It's a combination of marketing and the fact these people's only exposure to others is the workplace, Starbucks, and their cat dominated apartment.

Hence why the aliens look best, that requires them to think slightly on how it looks.

>implying my XCOM squdas weren't mad-max teams already.

Because having distinct designs works well when you have multiple characters in your game. Making every single person an operator in design wouldn't work well

Why the fuck do I need to explain something so simple?

to make them more interesting than the generic dehumanising effort of most uniforms.

It's possible to create a team of characters that don't look like a bunch of smug faggots though.

I actually gave it a shot and completed it and it's not nearly as bad as Zig Forums says it is, but it's still not great. Writing is kind of cringe for the most part, but there's not really anything excessively SJW in it, just your usual cheesy, "Woah guys, we're all so different but work together as a team, isn't that great!" kind of lines and some cringe attempts at Marvel style quips and banter. The mainline story I assumed was going to be retarded and blame everything wrong in the world to hardcore anti-xeno humans, but all the factions you fight against in the game are actually either ex-advent, crazy psionics, or alien races that want to get the fuck off of earth by any means possible.

Gameplay has some neat quality of life improvements over XCOM 2, combat doesn't feel as janky sometimes with how action points work, and instead of the game being split into your turn for all your dudes vs the enemies dudes, each character has an individual turn order which is in part determined by how you stack them up before breaching an encounter.

Unironically like the breach mode in it too, gives you a little bit more control in how you start your mission. The game is super piss easy though, even on the highest difficulty because of how powerful your dudes are. There's maybe one boss that they accidentally made difficult but the rest of the game is a cakewalk.

>look like a bunch of smug faggots

I feel like you're putting intention where there is none. They're certainly lighthearted in tone, but that's it

Nu-XCOM has always looked retarded. Lego armors with flashy colors that don't follow any sort of pattern.
I'm 100% certain I would have mistaken the giant snake with the Californian barista if they were wearing the same uniform.

>The game is super piss easy though, even on the highest difficulty because of how powerful your dudes are.
>Blueblood
>Terminal
>Patchwork
>Torque

Literally unstoppable

>They're certainly lighthearted in tone, but that's it
Yes, I am sure that's it and nothing more.

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I'd usually run:
>Blueblood because almost immediately you can make him one-shot nearly any enemy. Give him AP rounds and he will basically destroy most elite enemies within a turn or two.
>Cherub entirely because he has kinetic shield. That shit is so fucking good.
>Terminal because you basically need to have her if you want your dudes topped off on health.
>Torque or Zephyr: Torque is good mobility, high crit chance, and bind is so fucking good for taking annoying enemies out of combat. You can play her super aggressive too if you just spam kinetic shield. Zephyr is fun as well because she can really easily dart in and out of combat, and if you can make kinetic shield, basically that and her parry ability makes it so unless everyone gangs up on her she can't be killed.

I found after a certain point though it really doesn't matter who you bring with you because of how easy it is.

Most opinions on here are hyperbolic. Learn to turn the dial pack when reading opinions

>actual soldiers
all look the same. when we got our heads shaved in boot camp it took me a week before I could tell who was who, except the black guys

desu i still keep thinking i recognize ppl who ive known for years only to find out its some other 170lb 70in tall white guy with blond hair and a medium fade

I just get sick of the kind of people on here who parrot opinions about shit and don't even bother to play video games anymore. Like shit, I thought this was going to be an SJW mess from the start too, gave it a shot, and found out it was just a mediocre game that still did some neat new things with XCOM that weren't horrible changes like most rebooted franchises. I swear, half of the people on here who are so investing in politics end up being exactly like most annoying SJW's who just scream into the void so no one can interrupt their worldview.

hahahah imagine being this afraid of "sjws"

Not always, like I played Gone Home thinking it couldn't be so bad, and it was indeed that bad.
It's just hard to tell apart hyperbole from people who are being serious some time. There's nothing wrong with forming your own opinion if you have the time to play a game that's probably mediocre at best, but from my experience I would say random anons on Zig Forums are more trustworthy than anyone else on the internet.

Mostly agree with this post. The writing and characters actually grew on me, even if the VA is a bit spotty and the setting is a bit corny, the intra-agent dialogues they have are quite endearing. I also really like breaching and hope it is brought back in X3 in some form.

The difficulty feels a bit swingy, in that you either have a comp/gear setup that prevents any enemy from taking a turn and stomp it, or you let attacks through and get agent's focused and KO'd, leading to unstable equilibrium that means next round you won't be able to disable as many enemies to prevent them from having a move etc. Anything that lets you prevent more than one enemy action per turn (verge disable + shot kill, torque poison spit kill + bind) or that lets you have extra actions (motile inducer, terminal's cooperation) feel incredibly powerful, and a lot of encounters come down to how much you can front load your first round. Not bad, but gets a bit samey.

One thing that frustrates the shit out of me though are 'extract your whole squad' missions that throw reinforcement waves at you each turn, meaning that if you aren't near the extraction zone it's a massive pain in the ass reorienting your whole squad as they constantly insert new enemies move's between yours

This frustrates me because there's the obvious joke here of Axiom saying typically overtly masculine shit in his response (eg 'with incredible rage and strength, willingness to charge into battle' etc) because female mutons are supposed to be the Berserkers.

The biggest problem I've had with xcom are ugly ass face models for the ladies. This should have opened up the box to fix it, but nope.

>the VA
god don't remember me man, it's so fucking terrible for the most part. I was so disappointed when I got the hybrid characters and found out they all just talk like normal humans.

But I never had an issue with swing difficulty desu, although I played on expert. Only issue I had was fighting the ADVENT guys first because of all the fucking robots they can get with one of the dark events, but it still wasn't THAT bad. Only bad thing was the fucking final boss for that faction. The fact you're fighting like, eight enemies initially and they non-stop spawn in almost every other round for the rest of the objective was infuriating.

Sure that's a natural sounding thing to say

>western
As opposed to all the realistic military characters in Japanese games?

The pajeet looks like a chad and the nigger looks like Samuel Jackson

and the fact that the alien says a wierd thing, butchering a typical saying. This is a super common basic joke. Like fucking sonic does this with Knuckles.

Mutons before:
>Frontliners of the alien army
>So intimidating they make seasoned veterans shit their pants
>Serious and disciplined behaviour during battle, but can switch to a berserk mode if the situation calls for it
>Experts at plasma weaponry
>They actually survive intercourse with Berserkers
>Kill enough humans and you get sick Elite armor and bigger badder gun

Mutons now:
>Muh kitty >w

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Shelter has become my Officer Good Boy. I got him to Principql Officer and he has been on spec ops ever since.

If xcom had a mascot costume he'd be in it so much he'd be pulling foam out of his asscrack.

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No, that's just his character.

It is of note that there are lipped and clipless sectoids. Apparently it's pretty much pointless whether or not they have mothers since they can't actually eat normal food. I wish they would expand on that.

It’s not even the parroting, it’s that people even go and make shit up about games they decide to dislike from get-go and THEN people parrot that shit. Sometimes the stuff blabbered here is so far-fetched (eg. Celeste’s supposed abortion theme) that it’s actually hilarious if you have played the games in question.

I actually really like the breach mode thing and I could see a more traditional XCOM game using that system as well. Maybe not for every mission, but for some.
I do wish missions were longer, however. 2-3 rooms just means you can blow your powerful ability load and be fine.
I would have wished it was more attrition based with its room system. Imagine having to do levels of 5+ rooms. You'd bleed dry of one-off abilities and wounds would add up more and more.
So you could use this to enable larger teams of mooks, robots actually be useful, etc.

Give him a break, he's just 5 years old.

>Fully upgrading and training her
>Alpha strike, overtime, motile inducer, cooperation
>Takes out an entire encounter by herself
>Gives Blueblood shit for saying she reminds him of his mom
Ummm honey that actually is my job

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extra action abilities really need a heavy nerf. Most CC should be replaced with softer versions as well.
The turn system is used to reduce the requirement for alpha strike...but just replaced it with another type of alpha strike.

They are trying to appeal to the Starbucks baristas that buy these games.