I am surprised that the game is getting mixed reviews, got impression the game is good after watching TB video.
My opinion?
Its really, really good. Its more dynamic than before, the strategic game actually has meaningful decisions and plays out differently with each playthrough. All the classes are beefed up (this game makes me excited about supports). Stealth is... secondary, sure, but it adds an element of control to when you trigger pods and that's always a good thing. Visually its got this cool style that mixes several genres of sci-fi. Its more difficult than before but you the player have more control. Overall it feels like they took what they were trying to do with EU and made a much more polished product.
But, its also flawed. The mission timers are too low (you have about 3 turns to fuck around and you have to spend the rest literally dashing towards the objective, that's one turn to deal with each pod sometimes). The timers can result in good,intense missions sometimes but then you get an unlucky level setup and its like WTF game. I can't contribute much to this conversation yet but the consensus seems to be classes aren't balanced and lategame isn't balanced either. Load times are bad and, oddly, the performance in the "ant farm" strategic view seems worse than the performance in the battles. Overall its like Witcher 2 or Empire Total War; it can theoretically look miles better than the previous game but there isn't a PC on earth that can run it at max settings. The graphical *style* is better tho even if it has technical issues.
So, in short? Better than EU. Lord knows EU was a flawed gem from the start, and this apparently makes modding so easy you can tweak the relevant values yourself. Also less brutal line of sight and pod pathing glitches.