I beat it on Normal difficulty. The original X-Com (UFO Defense) from 1994 is one of my favorite games. Unfortunately, this is worse in practically every way.
The only aspect that I liked about it is the addition of skills acquired by the soldiers when they get promoted. Unfortunately, you have no say as to what class, which the skills acquired are tied to, they get assigned upon their first promotion.
With the positive out of the way, now for the bad...
You start out with only having 4 soldiers on missions, which can be upgraded to a whopping 6 -- as opposed to starting with 14 in the original game.
You only have one base.
Your base never gets attacked.
You only have one Skyranger to send out on missions.
You can have attack craft on each continent, except Antarctica, but you don't get to choose where the craft come from to send out to intercept a UFO.
You can't attack UFOs with more than one craft.
The missions and UFO sightings are all predetermined.
You don't hire engineers or scientists. You can only increase them by completing missions and what you get at the end of each month.
You can only have up to 20 soldiers available.
Choosing what soldiers will go on the mission is terribly set up, as it doesn't show what the soldiers on reserve have equipped.
The "backpack" is a misnomer, as it's simply one (or two, if the soldier chose the skill in a specific class) extra item carried. So, yeah, a soldier can't wear a vest (for extra HP) and carry a grenade.
Laser weapons need to be reloaded, except for laser pistols (all pistols have infinitely large magazines). Um, yeah.
Movement has been simplified. You can either move and then shoot or throw a grenade, or dash twice as far. Unless the troop has been assigned the class that allows firing after dashing, dashing ends their turn.
You can't shoot at a spot, such as a wall. The soldier MUST have an enemy target to shoot at.
There's no friendly fire or the possibility of hitting a target you didn't aim for.
A satellite only has a one-time reduction in panic level of the country it's over. So, you basically have to hope for a mission to take place in a country that has become max panicked after you launched the satellite, and each country can only have one satellite over it.
The amount of money and items needed to make items is very limited. On a first playthrough, you're pretty much guaranteed to be constantly short of funds or necessary items.
On the technical side, I had three instances where the game locked up:
Everything but the d-pad, PlayStation button, and the analog sticks became unresponsive, requiring quitting out of the game via the PS3 menu and restarting. It didn't happen again.
During the enemy's turn (thankfully the first turn of the battle), it froze up on a specific alien's movement. I was able to bring up the game manual and reload, but it happened again, requiring loading a different save file.
Upon initiating the end game sequence, it completely froze up the PS3 almost immediately after confirming I wanted to start the final sequence. This required powering down the console with the console's power button. It didn't happen again.
There's just no sense of a grand, global mission, as it's simply a sequence of a handful of missions you take care of, one at a time, each month. I don't see myself ever coming back to this game. It's definitely not worth the $60 I paid for it (counting the gift card I used). Heck, it's not even worth the $10 out of pocket I paid for it.
