Beat it last night. On Rookie or whatever the easiest setting is. Crazy that that's the easiest setting. It was a really hard game. I only reloaded if one of my top few soldiers died, but I still probably averaged one reload per mission.
It was still a very fun game at times (I played on PS4; put it in my GOTY voting; P.S. it chugged a lot there at the end on PS4), but I feel they need to do better with the difficulty settings. Like, I'd gift the game to my casual brother if easy mode was easy mode, but it's not, so I'm not going to bother. He'd no doubt get frustrated early in and quit, even though he'd probably enjoy the gameplay.
I probably liked the first game more due to this, among some other little things, but it was still a cool game. I hope they make another, but with additional, better-thought-out difficulty settings.