So I have been playing some Invisible Inc. I've completed a run on Beginner, and now I am trying my hand at Experienced, which is no walk in the park (despite still being below Expert, "the way the game is meant to be played").
It's not exactly a roguelike, because the game includes "Rewinds", which allows you to start again from the beginning of the previous turn. You get 3 rewinds per mission (one in Expert). Once you've used them all, you have to live with the consequences. Which include the possibility to have your last agent quip when all hope is lost Rewinds are an interesting design choice to handle extreme difficulty spikes, because even late game there can be unpredictable "YOU LOSE" scenarios, and rewinds allow you to find workarounds.
One of the more interesting things of the game is how different all items, augments and programs are, which can completely change the way you approach a level. From invisibility cloaks to EMP bombs, from door traps to portable cover, etc.
What really surprised me the most is the approach to stealth the game has. In most stealth games, you are more or less expected to get rid of most of the guards one way or another. In Invisible Inc., while you can KO (or kill) guards, it's usually more of a short term solution, because KO'd guards wake up quickly and start hunting you down (and killing guards is expensive and noisy). So what you are supposed to do is exploit their (huge) blind spots and patrol patterns to move across levels completely unseen.
I've beaten Expert. Setup was Decker/Banks and Seed/Brimstone (Brimestone is not particularly good, though). I've tried my hand at Expert+, but it is very harsh, I didn't do well. Now I often run Endless Ironman (Standard Endless but with 0 rewinds).
Yeah, I classified it as rogue
lite. Rewinds are interesting. They really help with those mistakes where 1 tile is difference between everything going find and total clusterfuck.
Yeah, you can really build your characters differently. I've tried to experiment with many different builds, but it's still hard to see how strong some are. Though, what I've found really great is Decker (or somebody else with access to invisibility) plus the augment to knock out people when you go invis. That knock out actually ignores armor, which is brutal.
Yeah, the thing that I hate the most is the first time I knock out a guy. Even if I can keeping him knocked longer (like 4-5 turns), I just know that he is going to be a problem. It's similar with killing, that +2 on alarm clock is huge, as once you hit alarm level 4, you cannot do anything smoothly anymore.
Aside from blind spots (unless you face some 180 degree sight guards, which are a pain), I've found that getting their attention to irrelevant stuff is very powerful. For example, if a guard notices more than one suspicions thing ( "?", like opening a door, running, or noticing you with his peripheral vision), he will only follow the last one seen. So, sometimes you can afford a guard noticing one of your agents which are in critical locations if later, during the same turn, another agent gets the same guard to notice something else.