They don't give scores on that website - their reviews are just an opinion. At least it wont affect the meta-critic rating.

These guys are the writers of PC Gamer magazine in the UK. Personally their reviews often seem more like a student trying to impress in an English literature assignment rather than a game review, they try so hard to sound intelligent. I know some people like that style of writing but it doesn't work for me.

I love 4x games. I played one game of FE after version 1.0, took me about 5h to finish one medium map with 3 AI on challenging. I don't feel any need to come back and play more.

X-com I finished once on ironman classic, I almost finished another time on non-ironman classic and started 4-5 more games. I cannot wait for bug patch to finally come out so I can play more. I love tactical squad based games (including such rpgs) as much as 4x games. 

Overall winner by far in fun and challenging department is X-com:EU.

I would not call it the greatest gift to gaming but at the time it was a mind blower with its physics engine. Just like HL1 was a mind blower with its realistic graphics (for that time). 

And both HL games will be forever remembered in the same group of FPS games like Doom or Duke Nukem3d or Crysis (mind blowing graphics) and Far Cry(first true free roaming FPS)

XCOM was fun for a couple of hours and then it got boring. It was more like a choose your own adventure book than a good strategy game. You got to do X and Y by choice, but you had to do Z eventually. The tactical battles were just the game grueling thing over and over and it broke up the action with so many little cut scenes that the game just felt disjointed. It wasn't a bad game, but it isn't something I would enjoy doing over again.

FE is different. Last night I picked up my first game I had started playing (played to midgame and stopped) and I decided to finish it. 3 hours later I look up and 2 inches of snow had accumulated and I had just finished my first game by Quest victory. I didn't get bored after that three hours. I want to go back and try to play with a different kind of Sov and use a different strategy. The thing is that XCOM doesn't have that option. I can't play the game a different way than I did my first play through. 

Would you have said the same thing had they given a glowing review.....I think not. 

Not true. My first longer play was with Snipers which by late game became OP. So I started a new game and played without snipers and got a completely different experience. 

It seems from your post you expected some awesome base management part of the game. Even old xcom was primarily about tactical combat. If you don't find tactical combat in new x-com fun then the game does not offer anything new for you.

I was expecting a game that kept me guessing and made that each battle was different. By the 12th or so tactical battle it had became a chore to play because you just did the same thing over and over. I mean I admit the bomb defusal and the citizen escorts added a nice spice to it, but those were fairly few and far between. The game just became tedious and gave you few options. If I wanted to play a game like that I would pick up a FPS and try and play it. I like variety in a game and it just didn't provide all that much of a variety. One playthrough was good enough for me. It didn't draw me back in. 

Playing through without snipers doesn't mean a playstyle change. There are few play styles in this game in my opinion. I am not disputing that the game is well made and fun, I am disputing the fact that the game is highly replayable. It isn't. There isn't nothing in the second playthrough that I couldn't get in the first playthrough. I could say I want to play a harder version of the game, but there isn't anything that is added besides the difficulty. In FE I can go in and play turtle one game, expand super fast the next, find a happy medium. I can build a sov that is melee or that can sit back and cast spells, hell he could just sit in a city and command everything from there. I can design troops to strike a hole in the opponents armor or I can build up a champion death stack. There are more than just a couple of ways to play the game.

This is a good example for illustrating the different tastes people have in games.

I loved every tactical battle I played in XCOM, it was the strategic portion of the game that killed it for me.  I absolutely hate it.  It ended up being a gamebreaker for me.

In contrast, these are the only tactical battles that I absolutely loathed.  In my view, escort missions and timed missions are the laziest, lamest, most horrid way of trying to add variety and artificial tension to a game.  I would like to find every game designer who ever added them to any game, and beat them with a whiffle bat until they see reason.

So yeah... two very different opinions of the same game.

I don't agree that a game should ever be given a pass with the "Mods will fix it" excuse.  For one thing, sometimes quality mods just never materialize.  Secondly, it can happen more often than not that a mod doesn't fix the things you think should be fixed, or it fixes those things but then adds other things that you really don't like.  If a game can't stand on its own out of the box then it should be marked down.

That's an interesting point.  Used to be that you'd buy a strategy game, read through the novel-sized manual, and then spend months and even years perfecting your play style.  Now days it seems that people want something that is easy to learn, easy to play, and can be finished in time for the next round of game releases.

Completely agree. Personally, I almost never find mods I like--usually any sort of balance is lost, and the AI can almost never handle them. I think the standard for a game to get bonus points for being moddable is to have a widely-recognized very good mod like FFH or (dare I say it) Counter-Strike. (And the AI, as I recall, couldn't really handle FFH.)

That said, from what I've read seanw3 and heavenfall seem to be on the right track.

While I think there's something to this, I'm pretty skeptical of the "kids these days" types of arguments. Several years ago I would have agreed. These days I don't have much time to play games, and I don't want to spend it rolling over an AI that can't put up a fight or performing busywork between End Turn clicks. So while I don't particularly agree with the reviewer, I don't think "streamlining" is necessarily a bad thing (which is separate, of course, from any AI issues).

I think it is a very good review.  Not that I agree with it, but it is a review which clearly states what the reviewer values, what he does not, and if you read it carefully, you can tell whether the game is for you or not.

Fallen Enchantress is not for everyone.  It may not be for enough people to be a success.  I like what it is, I love what it can become, but I have to say that I find the difficulty for new players at low levels disastrous.

That R/P/S review nailed it on the head for me.

I totally agree with this too.

I don't, it looks like a 77 review to me. Unless games are great and don't release with a pile of bugs or issues they just don't get high scores anymore. Look at all the 79 games and below compared to the 80's and above.