Thoughts on the Special Abilities and Balancing

First off, I beat the game and enjoyed doing so very much, thanks for that devs!

I do not remember all the names for the actives and passives anymore, so please forgive me for that. I only read the name of each once, then used the hotkey for firing it off. The only times I used the radial menu was to check on the actives' cooldowns so I didn't actually read their names ;P

Mule:
In the beginning I thought his passive was pretty nice only to realize after a few missions that I can store stuff in the base. Then it became redundant as I never had 32 items other than the equipment in total on a mission...
The Active had a very short window of missions in which it was useful, in the beginning all the snipers oneshot the enemies anywas, in the end Mule's crit chance was high enough to do a crit every other shot.

Wallace:
Her Passive made Mule's Active look like a joke because it felt like she did a crit on every shot in the last 7 missions. So OP!
Berserk went really well with that since she got those 5 aim stims and a +2 aim armor so the single AP shot would pretty much always hit, now it hit up to 8 (!) enemies in a single turn and delivered a critical on nearly all of them.

13:
Active: Wait, Frank has an active? See, that's how useless it is.
Passive: So he does 33% more melee damage. Too bad he dies the very next turn after actually using that. Wearing the tank Prototype punished his already low agi too much to make that happen.

Linda:
Self Heal was crazy good in pretty much every mission were she had to be brought along because there were no better characters yet. It virtually removed the need to use any medkits at all. Why would you not let me use that skill in the second last mission?
I can't recall to ever have used or have had a need for her medic skill. Then again I used only like 5 incombat medkits the entire game.

Hackerdude:
Active became useful in one of the last missions, were you'd zap those saucers and then instakill them with any hit. Too bad you couldn't use his skill in half (two thirds?) of the missions where those enemies appear. Other than that the skill still was good enough to replace one snipershot on enemies which actually had shields.
Need no AP to reload: Uh... that guy got to shoot like 5 times per combat. All that time he didn't have a single gun which he would empty within one combat. His aim wasn't good enough to use the Railgun and I can't think of any other weapon which could have used that skill.

Dr. Crazy Scientist: (Can't remember the name for the hell of it)
Teleport... I used it once in the entire game. All the other times his 1AP movement range was greater than the teleport. I realize it can be used to run away really quick since the only limitation for the target loaction seems to be "can be seen by Doc" and there is no limit to viewrange. However, why run away when I can shoot baddies instead?
Bigger shields was neat though, put him in a Scou VI + that ridiculous agility of a ~130yr old man and he was a better character to soak up shots than 13, Linda or Nia.

Nia:
Paralyzing the biggest bigshot for 2 (3?) turns is pretty handy, no questions asked.
Regenerating 0 HP forever not so much. On 20maxHP, which I gave her, I thought the regen would finally be rounded up to 1HP per turn (from 0,5). But no, she never regenerated any HP. So I suggest you either round her regen up, give her a minimum of 1hp per turn, increase the percantage, give her a fixed absolute regeneration or a sum of absolute and relative hp regeneration. Or at least let the less than 1HP regeneration accumulate so she gets 1HP in four/two turns on 10maxHP/20maxHP. Another Alternative would be to let her regenerate fully after each combat.

Commander Keen:
His active was pretty neat in the beginning when he didn't yet consume 3 aim stims, wore a +2 aim armor and had a 6(7?8?9?) accuracy assault rifle. So in the end it was only useful on enemies in full cover and/or more than 15 tiles away. Other than those cases it seemed like switching from two 86% hit chance shots to one and one certain hit. I guess that was also thanks to his passive, which I didn't really understand how it worked. Did it add a flat 10% tohit chance? Or did it increase the already calculated chance by one thenth of the chance? Well, in the end it was better than all the absolutely useless passives I guess.


So to the balancing part: As many others already stated, snipers op, assault rifles meh, shotguns useless.
Grenades became allimportant in the later part of the game, would they (mkII plasma grenades) have been available in the shop, I'd even had used the 1xxx credits (gold? energy? resources?) I had accumulated up till then. So some mechanic that allowed to modify the vendors offered items would have been nice.

The AI/Leveldesign showed some major flaws during my playthrough:
1) Enemies do not open doors
2) If they have no way of attacking you or their 1AP hitchance is 0 they opt to do nothing.
3) AI leaves excellent cover for even the least bit of accuracy improvement

The third (and first) was easy to exploit in many levels, the second was especially easy to exploit in the very last mission were my snipers killed off most ranged enemies without those even taking cover before there was a walkable way between the platforms.

Fullcover objects not giving any bonus to dodge chance when the actor is not right behind them proved to be a major annoyance in a few levels, namely the second last and the ambush on the bridge in maintenance.

Retaliation is a very poor design choice. Reaction fire or even an overwatch mode would have been neat. This made especially dealing with turrets way too easy.

Other than that some ingame explanations to game mechanics would have been nice. I didn't realize damage reduction does not affect shileds until the very late stages of the game for example.

Edit:
Oh I forgot: Since I used hotkeys nearly all the time and realized you can click on those red arrows on the screen edges, I had no troubles with the UI at all.