While I'm not typically a fan of turn-based games, I thought I'd give the XCOM series a go since so many people have said it's great, and about 20 hours and a complete campaign later, yeah I think I see why.

By far the greatest strength of XCOM EU is the personality given to your characters. I would stream this in Discord calls every once in a while and had my friends create soldiers, which led to some laughs and sadness when one would land a lot of shots in quick succession or proceed to die. Besides my personal soldier, one of them even ended up being the "hero" of the story who decimated everything in her way. I knew the character storytelling was interesting before playing, but I didn't expect to become that attached to characters that frankly don't have much to say.

The gameplay systems also add a lot to the experience, particularly outside of individual battles. Having to choose between certain countries to protect while others collapse and stop supporting XCOM was great, since it never felt like a choice was particularly easy. Combined with researching and purchasing upgrades for soldiers, managing a pretty tight economy, and building up the base, and the sense of progression is great.

Only have some minor gripes with the game that hold it back from being a masterpiece. Namely, that you can't either pause during or fast forward an enemy turn. The amount of times a turn started with something that made me want to load a save, only to have to watch the other five aliens on the field necessitate that loaded save even harder, can be really annoying. Also the odd bug here and there, including some that made me close and relaunch the game itself.

But yeah, I'm really happy with the 20 hours I sunk into this game. It isn't too long, has plenty of strategy, and feels rife with personality. Will totally be checking out XCOM 2 at some point soon.

P.S. Found out after I finished the main game that Enemy Within is the same game but with added features. I only feel slightly stupid