As usual, I started the game by playing the tutorial. Even if I am not new to tactical games, and am in fact playing on hard, tutorials are mostly useful to learn about the user interface. Nothing interesting ever happens in a tutorial ... I thought. And then Aurelio, one of my 4 starting characters, died in the tutorial. The tutorial is on rails, you can't actually prevent Aurelio from dying. Even if you turn the tutorial off and set permadeath to off, Aurelio still dies a permadeath. It is start of the "things aren't looking too good" starting situation exposition.

In a way Aurelio's death reminded me of those mobile game ads, where you see somebody playing the game in question deliberately badly, in order to make the viewer think "I can do better than that!" and download the game. Aurelio dies a stupid death, after having been previously wounded as consequence of an equally stupid move. It does somewhat teach the player how not to move your characters forward. Although that is to some degree counterproductive, as moving forward to flank is a very essential part of the tactics of the game.

I saved the game after the tutorial and am now busy downloading the latest Nvidia graphics driver, released a day before Star Wars: Zero Company. Apparently that one fixes problems with stuttering cinematics. Apart from that stuttering, I didn't have any technical problems yet. I liked what I saw in the tutorial, but of course it will take a lot more time to see how solid the gameplay loop and long term motivation is.