What a great adventure. It felt like it ended a slight bit abruptly, but I guess it needed to since my soldiers were becoming insanely powerful. Plus, it's still vanilla.
I was a little confused by the initial radio tower mission. With the warning message, I initially thought THAT was the final mission and was a little disappointed with the squad size restriction. I thought I was going to face an epic rooftop showdown, Ghostbuster-style or something, haha... but the initial enemy count listed via the Shadow Chamber didn't look right. Thankfully, I only slightly injured one of my main soldiers (still brought him along for the final) on this. I was relieved once the "final" final mission popped-up and I saw the enemy count and such.
Anyway... I liked the intel perks that could be chosen before the mission, I hope more of that could possibly be incorporated into the game and/or the expansion.
The final mission was a lot of fun -- especially that last room!
But... !
Omg, the performance of it and the bugs killed the experience a bit. While avoiding spoilers, I've read that the final mission had performance issues, but I wasn't concerned since the game's performance had seemed pretty solid the whole game. It was such a disappointment; enjoying this incredible game and then it all goes to crap right at the very end of it all.
The silly cinematic intro with the avatar appearing triggered like 3 or 4 times on different turns when one of my units approached the altar and the big wall with the elder statue. It was a bit confusing.
Also, I had to shutdown the game since, at one point, things started turning crazy colors like this:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/02/22/xcom-2-final-mission-graphics-glitch/ Glitch-O-Rama is a nice way to put it. I thought my GPU was overheating or something! (Especially since I'm stuck on a single GPU right now and can't use SLI yet until they fix things and prevent the cover icons from disappearing!) Thankfully, this didn't happen again.
My frames have been pretty solid the whole game until that evil room as well... perhaps it's due to all the reflections and watery effects all about? (Wow... now I'm actually hoping we don't get a "Terror From the Deep"-inspired expansion.)
Also, the aliens seemed to freeze-up every now and then during their turns which were a bit slower than usual.
This was the biggest annoyance, however: the third avatar disappeared after I shot it! I cleared everything else on the turn I shot the avatar (with that powered shred cannon, nonetheless, killing the codex behind it, haha) and it disappeared. I spent two or three turns looking for it; by the third turn I was getting reckless and spread my troops out to cover everything because I was getting annoyed. No trace. I shut the game down (again!) to do some googling and to see if anybody else has experienced this. I read that the avatar can sometimes teleport to the beginning of the map! haha... ridiculous.
I wasn't going to chase the thing down so I put all my soldiers on top of the middle platform and kept overwatching them for maybe six turns, probably more. During those turns, I would get those graphical sound wave notifications that an enemy was near, but they were coming from a very weird direction (as in, not in the direction of the entrance and the start of the map). I was really annoyed and kept overwatching and hoping that the avatar was actually still on the map making its way over to me and that it wasn't glitched-out, forcing me to reload an older save do things over (Not ironman'ing it until some patches are released).
Then, after I put everyone on overwatch one more time, a steam achievement popped-up and the game was starting the cinematic. I was like, "wtffff is going on here???" But, then the cinematic closed and it went back to the tactical map action shots as each of my soldiers gunned-down the avatar as it charged back into the final room again once its jog was complete. During the action shots I was worried that it just ruined my cinematic experience, but thankfully, it started up again and I got to watch it all (still slightly confused with the story too).
Again, love the game, I'll continue to play it for a long time. But, they really need to fix this final mission. I can't believe it went down like that, and I can't ever get that first game completion feeling back and experience it properly.
What a major choke... It's like this great singer giving an incredible performance, but at the very end of the song, as she's screaming into that mic and carrying the note, her voice cracks and she uncontrollably starts to cough. Not only that -- as she's bent over coughing, she slips on the stage and falls on her ass. The whole shock of the incident causes her to piss her pants as well while she's lying on the floor coughing. That's XCOM 2, baby.
So.... how was everybody else's experience with their first final mission?