Initial release fails, but the mods make it really good.
On the other hand, when I got into my first tactical battle... YUCK. Something was awfully wrong there. First, where the hell were my stance and movement buttons now?! I actually had to refer to the manual to find out how to crouch, since I'm not one who randomly hovers his mouse for 4 seconds over his soldiers "just because". The obvious lack of accessible hotkeys for practically all important combat actions was also another shock. Then, in the aftershock, I realized that said actions were limited to shooting, crouching, selecting and moving. Fire modes, taking aim, reserving APs and other useful features that added tactical depth in other games were just missing.
Another letdown was that I expected an encore from the awesome semi-realtime system found in the UFO trilogy to at least be available as an option (where you could choose between turn-based or real-time, just like in Apocalypse). This would have been a huge boost to the fun factor, since you'd get to choose turn-based with the strategic and tactical decisions that you would see unfolding, or real-time where you had the option of adjusting your tactics in an instant and queue up orders and such. Of course, this would have required a bit more development time coding-wise and a bit more playtesting and balancing to make sure both modes were at a correct difficulty level. But then again, they could have just thrown in real-time without any balancing and we would have forgiven them for it -- though we can't forgive the lack of tactical options and the atrocious UI controls.
My review so far contradicts the rating I gave, but that's because my rating is not on the vanilla box game but rather on its *current* state. Fully patched and with the proper mods from the community, this game becomes a gem. Community mods give more tactical options, fix the clumsiness of the tactical controls, add more content and/or features, and basically make the game a lot more enjoyable. Taking just the bug-fixing and clumsiness-removing and option-adding mods which don't change the actual content already improves the gameplay tenfold, since you can now enjoy the game the way it was meant to be without the extremely tedious pacing and the bad design and UI.
Also, for a game like this, sure, the graphics could be a lot better. Even though released much later, it still comes up far behind any of the UFO trilogy games, and the sound effects aren't anything special.
All in all, a game that should have stayed in development, maybe have gone through a reworking, a little longer. And that should have gotten more external playtesting and implemented the feedback from those playtests.
The community, on the other hand, DID implement that feedback, and the end result is just the graphics and sounds' short of perfect. Now, if only someone were to make a game which incorporated the graphics and gameplay features of Afterlight into the system, build, theme/scenario and gameplay design of this game...