Much like that kid whose parents are brother and sister, Aftershock is ugly, ungainly, but still barely functional.
That said, there have been many imitators of that game, mostly lackluster, but Aftershock is not as horrible as some would have you believe. I've found it to be exceptionally buggy and it has crashed me back to my desktop just after finishing a tough mission (thus forcing a reload and doing the mission *again*) far too many times. Yet, I still play it. I like pain, what can I say? I bought my wife a riding crop so she can whip me. Playing Aftershock is similar to being whipped by a hot woman in lingerie: they both look great, are guilty pleasures, but ultimately you cross the line where pleasure becomes pain and you have to stop and heal. Aftershock is extremely repetitive in its mission structure. You have the ubiqitous kill 'em all missions, rescue a friendly, escort friendlies, capture an enemy...and that's about it. The maps come in only a few varieties : post-apocalyptic ruins, rolling hills, downed alien vessels (a nice nod to Aftermath when you actually shot down those ships), and underground military bases. On some very rare story-driven missions you actually defend your floating homebase which is fun and nicely detailed.
There is a story behind the game that is actually pretty decent but it unfolds very slowly. Most of the beginning is taking one province after another until you finish some key research that slowly eeks the plot to you. Eventually, you reach a resource gold mine when your income so far outstrips your outgo that it makes me wonder why the designers even put resources in the game in the first place since they only matter in the very beginning. Base building is simple. You have capital cities with three, four, or five build slots and you build either factories or labs. Eventually, an education requirement appears and you must allocate one or two slots to schools so you can build the more advanced structures like Hyper-Energy Labs, Jet Propulsion Labs, and the Psionic labs and factories. All of your labs and factories pool their resources. If you want to build a piece of armor that takes 24 hours to complete, two factories can do it in 12, three in 8 and so forth. The game forces you to tear your stuff down somewhat regularly as new building options come available and also forces you to waste slots on defense, to stop your areas from being taken, but I've found that even having defense is not a sure bet to stop invasions. You don't even get a message that a base is taken, you'll just notice that a base is highlited red instead of blue on the map, then you have to go and retake it. Annoying.
You do have three races, humans, cyborgs, and psionics each of whom can use certain requipment. Humans can wear the widest variety of armor, cyborgs (who are all male), use implants that are permanent additions and tend to have the most health and best overall defense, and psionics (who are all female), can field a wide variety of psionic items. These characters can further train in specific fields such as leader, medic, commando, etc which affords them the ability to use new items or increases their skills. Combat is pausable real-time and includes the usual suspects like cover, crouching, prone, and the like. Nothing too ground-breaking there, but it is functional. Sniper rifles though are horribly overpowered and you can basically clean up a squad of enemies with two decent snipers firing .50 cal rifles.
Aftershock seems a little underpolished. Very early on you get some research options that are locked to you, but they appear on your list. For instance, you keep seeing Detection Lab but you cannot build it. It is not until much much later in the game do you even run across the right trigger to make this research even possible. Why list it so early? The diplomacy is held on by duct tape and not very relevant. There are several of these minor "why did they do that?" in the game.
I would not go so far as to say Aftershock is fun, but it is playable. I really like squad based and turn based strategy so it appeals to me despite its flaws. You have to be digging the genre and be a fan or you will be miffed. I recommend it but hesitantly.