Finished the campaign on Normal Iron Man this morning. I restarted once as I didn't realize the importance of satellites until it was too late on my first go. I did try classic but I don't have the patience that I did when I was younger, barely lasted a couple of days before I got fed up and switched to Normal.
I felt the first 3/4 of the game were sublime, perfectly balanced and a real challenge (without the almost unpredictable elements of classic) without being infuriating (again unlike classic).
My one complaint though is that as soon as you get the high level tech, the game becomes a cake-walk in Normal. It's just far too easy, i strolled through the final level without losing a soldier (though I did come within 5-HP of losing an assault at one point, but I healed him up easily enough). Shooting down ships is a certainty once you have the highest level fighters + weapons and even the so called strongest enemies can often be wiped out with a single headshot from a sniper, if that fails you always have double tap anyway. Even the final 'boss' fell to a headshot-double tap combo in one turn. I wouldn't mind if my soldiers were just as vulnerable, however the final tier armour is pretty much untouchable, the heavy defence variant survived two direct hits from the very big robot thingies (this was the guy with 5hp left) and no one ever seems to touch a sniper with ghost armour. I became careless in the last quarter of the game tbh, just running and gunning my way through without a care in the world.
It's a shame, it's as if they developed the high level tech and forgot to add anything after. I got my hands on some of the end game kit literally the day before the final mission, so didn't have much of a chance to play with them. Maybe an expansion pack is on the way...
That ending also made Mass Effect 3 look good.
I would have bottled it, I'm very cognizant of my lack of any kind of luck in situations like that.
