First off, thanks to Major Malfunction who provided valuable input and whose words I’ve shamelessly copied here.

Keep your minis and terrain. Throw away your tokens and cards. This version of the game is different.

The good news is the minis are still amazingly impressive. The bad and ugly are the new rules. It’s not all bad, there are some things I like.

What’s different? First of all, less bookkeeping. The prior edition had each model with a certain number of hit points before dying.

Now, each model has one wound but with varying degrees of toughness, saves and status before they finally die. Bosses are tougher than faces (named heroes previously known as either underbosses or side kicks) who are tougher than hands (previously known as hired hands).

The net effect is that your units play in a similar manner as before; bosses are still tough to kill, hands die in droves, but no need to be constantly marking boxes on their stat cards. It’s different, but I’m ok with it.

The previous edition also had models activating individually. Now hands form a unit and all models in the unit activate when the unit does but, you activate each model before going on to the next. Hands units also now have coherency.

The old version of the rules did allow hands of the same type and within a certain range to do a coordinated action but that mechanism is gone. The new one speeds up play a bit and overall, I like it.

Models have actions they can take when activated. The total number of actions is your Limit.  But those actions are modified by the action deck which gives you a random number of action points (AP).  You spend action points to perform actions and if you repeat an action, it costs more action points.  But your number of actions is capped by your limit.

The first time you use an Action it costs 1AP, and then 2AP for every subsequent use.

So to Move once is 1AP, but move twice and it's 3AP.  But that would be two Move *ACTIONS* so would only count as 2 towards your Limit.

Then there is the difference between a Shoot Action and an AIM action point

It is the most poorly explained part of the game and adds a totally unnecessary level of complication that serves no purpose whatsoever. If we ever play this again, we may well house rule it to eliminate the action deck and change everything to straight actions.

This is the bad part if you weren’t sure about my feelings on the matter.

Another new element is the Adventure Deck. This random card allows you an in game bonus or extra victory points if you meet the conditions. It’s very much a risk/reward situation and I actually like it.

This would be the good.

And the ugly? A good rule set, that admittedly needed some play balancing amongst the models and factions, got an unnecessary makeover and unnecessary complications.

Overall? There is a good game here but you’ll have to work to draw it out.