I've been playing this mod quite a bit the last few days, as have many of my friends. I really love it! My instinct is just to call it a game, not a mod, that's how impressive it is. Some of the artistic direction is not exactly to my liking, but I'm not the sort to get the pitchforks out over that. My only real gripe was some of the map design.
That was, until this fateful small ship showed up and landed. I don't get many landed UFOs for whatever reason, a chance to score big! Little did I realize I was stepping into catgirl hell.
Theatrics aside, fighting smugglers was really, incredibly frustrating. Searching here indicates that the behavior of the catgirls and ethereal only being visible from certain angles is intentional? I find it very hard to accept. Only with intense savescumming(something I haven't done for any other mission in this run) was I able to salvage this mission. I'm okay with hard missions, missions you should run away from, but having invisible people moving through my squad, slicing them up, one of them alternating between lightsabering and mind-controlling people... for a little while I was convinced that the game was glitching. It wasn't until my third or fourth attempt that I even knew the ethereal was there, and only through desperate cheesy time travel that I was able to research a catgirl and learn of their allergy to smoke before returning to the mission.
Getting a finally survivable outcome didn't feel like an achievement, it was just finally over. It doesn't really feel like having better troops or gear would even help deal with it, my only recourse is just to hug the left side of the map until I'm certain there aren't any more meleeists left. It was so intensely frustrating that it motivated me to register and post!
It hasn't put me off the game, though. Still playing. Just afraid of the next smuggler ship.
P.S. I noticed there was a big chunk of the smuggler UFO I couldn't reach. I was puzzled by this until I realized that it's a smuggling ship! Hidden compartments and all! Great touch.