Apocalypse was very good game idea that lacked polish/balance.
The game had very interesting cityscape fighting.
Very interesting battlescape fighting.
Very interesting item progression (with stealth fields, energy shields, teleporters, and personal anti-alien weapons...)
What it lacked - simply balance
* Organisations got pissed very easilly, coupled with that you can ONLY get crucial wares from ONE organisation (only transtellar will transport your items and personell, only megapol will sell you heavy armor, only marsec will sell you light armor, only nutrivend will sell you medikits...) this made it really annoying to fight aliens in cityscape. You basically could not afford to fight them after certain time into the game, unless you start by expanding to max engineer count and start mass manufacturing for profit to fuel your bribes. Boring, annoying, and stupid
* Organisations relationships were flawed in that "enemy of my enemy if my friend" made the city very soon turn into two big alliances. At start only some organisations are at war, but then they start liking other orgs that harm their enemies, and so on and so forth and then the whole city is divided. Problem is ALIENS also are an organisation. What this means is that the more aliens deal damage to the city, the more organisations hating those who receive damage start LIKING aliens. I had both megapol and government allied with aliens just because overspawn seriously pwned their opponent's buildings. THat was insane!
* Weapon balance at start was comparable to X-Com1 where you also use select one or two type of guns with addition of some heavy weaponry perhaps, but was very annoying because of limited clip supply - you had to stock worser weapons just because your favorite's ammo supply was out
* Weapon balance later was too screwed by the allmighty toxigun, which only came in one variety. At least they could have made it in a sniper variant in addition to the minigun variant (that looks like pistol but fires faster than marsec minigun!...)
* Excessive use of explosives by aliens freqeuntly dictated the squad tactics. Since aliens liked to throw grenades right in your face, corner ambushes and close quarters combat in general meant you will get close to no loot from a battle - since one unlucky grenade will screw everything. This also meant you couldnt afford to have those rockets hit walls - had to lure and even take the hit instead to save loot (!).
* Alien item progression was not balanced. The idea of score making aliens bring new items was good, but the idea of speeding it up on superhuman made aliens go almost instantly from devastator through shield, stealth, vortex to entropy. Which wouldnt be a problem if entropy wouldnt be completely negated by shields. This meant that if you're lucky to research shields before they get it - its easy, if not - its insanely hard.
* Shields overall made your squad nearly invincible and changed tactics considerably. Carrying two shields and throwing away one in case its almost depleted meant you could withstand even rocket fire. From the moment you got shields no soldiers never had hit point loss till probably last game missions.
* Personal teleporters were so imbalanced it allowed you to finish all alien buildings in one real life hour. Aliens were completely not using them to their advantage, and you could just destroy aliens by having more than one on person and doing blink-in and blink-out.
* Money balance was also screwed - in the beginning you have very hard time affording anything, and once you researched biotransport you have like infinite money. Its not even remotely comparable to laser canons of X-Com1 - this was just insane amount of money, enough for you to start bribing whole city to be allied to you.
Overall, the game idea, engine, variety of items, storyline, idea of having 10 distinct endgame missions was great. Balance was not. It could easilly be fixed, and attempts were made, but nothing could fix the endgame where you just dominated aliens like crazy (their toughest unit could go down from toxin c without a single shot done by it - compare it to fucking superhuman sectopods...)
