I'm still.... digesting... the classes and abilities. I'm not opposed to them, per se, but I'm not excited about them. Still, it's looking decent.

It looks great.

The question to me is how quickly do the missions become repetitive, and how quickly do I get annoyed with the 5 man squads.  Honestly though, I'd almost rather buy this for a console than the PC, that way I wouldn't be as disappointed if there are issues with game play.  Does that make sense to anyone?

I'm very excited about this, I'm going to pre-order it for sure

Only 15 minutes in, looking good so far, although I have to say I think the suppression fire looks really annoying, not as a gameplay feature, but simply due to the fact that it's "realistic" in the sense that the animation loops to show continuous fire to keep the target suppressed.  Seems distracting and annoying...

Yeah I hope there is a way to turn off suppression fire animations.

My main concern  is that you cannot do partial moves which really limits your ability to do tactical planning. In the original if you spotted an enemy mid move you could stop and run behind cover or fire off some shots. Now that time units are gone its really easy to waste your turn because you didn't know something was in the shadows. I think this is the main reason its hard to keep your soldiers alive.

I am also worried about how scripted the scenarios are, and they also seem way smaller than the original as well. 

I think it's shaped up nicely minus a few minor changes. The way I see "suppression fire" and "partial moves" is almost like a new way to incorporate the missing "TU's" from the classic games. If you saved TU's and didn't use them all your squad member would have enough TU's left to pull a snap shot based on reactions if an alien came into sight. Which could also kind of be seen as suppression fire in a off-turn way.

The new soldier "classes" more or less fit the way you'd need to build a character in the originals. If you wanted one of your guys running around with a rocket launcher they better have high STR or they'll barely be able to move. In the new game that would probably be the "Heavy" class. Also, I got used to this feature playing some of the later "UFO:After" games which used it and it fit in well with soldier progression. At this point in gaming just adding stat points without any other new skills would just be the lazy way out in design terms. 10 or 15 years ago that was ok. for today's gamers? Not so much. Hence I'm sure soldier classes will probably have specific skills too.

There are still some changes I don't like. You start with only 4 squaddies and by end game have 6. I think that's pretty weak. It should be 4 to 8 by end game. Giving me 2 three people teams doesn't excite me as much. The only one base thing still bugs me, and for some reason they said they had trouble doing base invasions/defense missions so I'm pretty sure those won't be in either.

It's not our old-school X-Com, but, it's close and it's the only "official" sequel we're getting. With all the core concepts involved and mostly intact, the same game-play, I think it may truly be a great successor. The final proof will be in the playing though.

And something else, possibly the one thing I always hated about X-Com that apparently they're keeping it the ability to lose the game through nations deciding not to fund you. In the new game, it seems that lose the funding of 8 nations, lose the game?

Why?

I get losing the game if you don't have any money, or maybe if absolutely every nation abandoned you if anything, but it was always possible to become self-funded, If I was still well armed and not everybody else in the world is dead, the game isn't over, it shouldn't end there.

Something to mod out, anyways.

I am sure base defense will come with an expansion. BTW, multiplayer of this game looks awesome. There are videos from PAX of MP and SP. Go check them out.

Going to stay away from it, just looks horrid...

I'll be sticking with the Xenonauts version instead.