X-Com 1 and 2 (new versions) are great games, even if they moved away from the large squad slaughter that was Enemy Unknown, terror from the deep and partially Apocalypse. I personally really enjoyed looking at black sections of the map and thinking "that will cost 3 rookies to explore"
Everyone is aware of the "95% to hit meme" around X-Com, and if you've played Phoenix Point, the difference is especially jarring. If you haven't, aiming in that game is purely a probability cone, so standing point blank next to an alien means something. In X-Com it doesn't mean diddly squat.
I finally figured out what the problem with X-Com is, and why it's always uniquely frustrating. With it's pod based mechanics, fake stealth and drip fed enemies. What you are seeing on screen has no relevance and only serves as a distraction. Being right next to an Alien and missing is irrelevant because where the character and alien are on screen do not correlate with the game.
X-Com is, for all intents and purposes a very fun card battle game. If it were a Dos prompt game, with exactly 0 visuals, nothing would be lost.
Try it next time you play, completely ignore the visuals and imagine your character as a card drawing a dice based attack against another card.
Those % to hit chances are all effected by the location of your character in relation to them. The Flanking bonus alone takes impossible shots and makes them near guaranteed. Standing point blank to the enemy means a whole lot, and anyone whose ever actually played the game knows it. Everything visual is relevant under that umbrella and disproves your entire point. If you want to drag it to pedantic, literally every game could do without visuals and just be a number on the screen and accomplish the same thing.
The problem with the "95% chance to hit" meme is that its brought on by lack of information. There are a lot of pure raw numbers going on behind the scenes to make that final one, and often times your starting units just literally lack a high enough number even with every advantage multiplier to get to 100%. The game doesn't explain its own mechanics other than a vague notion that is good enough but leaves you with a lot of those Xcom Moments of confusion when they happen.
But that's why the most popular mod for the game was a literal higher difficulty, more complexity one. Because once you have access to more information the game becomes a lot more manageable and predictable to a point of needing more difficulty to return the challenge.
Both of the new Xcoms are littered with issues, like the retarded stealth and pod mechanics, but the RNG to hit thing isn't are egregious as it seems once you actually understand what its calculating and how to work within it (grenades bandaid everything).
I've played the literal Card Battle game that Firaxis made after Xcom 2 (Midnight Sun) and it plays nothing like Xcom.
Even understanding why the hit rates are the way they are, it doesn't align anywhere close with reality. An elite commando unit, that misses shots that are only yards away, or even point blank, it just pure frustration. It doesn't make logical sense, unless the characters you're controlling are untrained retards with the worst vision on the planet. No amount of "but we need it for gameplay balance" will overcome that disalignment with reality and reason.
That type of gameplay makes the player realize that the gameplay revolves around babysitting retards that couldn't tie their shoes without somehow dying horribly (oops, the 99% chance you had to succeed somehow rolled a negative crit, causing the shoelaces to somehow pierce the brain and kill your character, and the character behind him). That type of gameplay logic occurs in many more games than just X-Com, too, and is why I no longer play them. It's a souring experience.
What X-Com is trying to present to you is a simplified (& cinematic-fied) turn-based version of a chaotic battlefield. The overhead grid map with near-perfect visibility is a bad way to actually conceive of the combats. Instead you should be thinking about the first-person shaky-cam, night-vision version where your guy is mostly hiding behind cover or running flat-out into a dark building, only to see a grotesque alien waiting for him around the corner.
In real combats something like 99+% of "shots" won't actually result in a hit on target, even with elite soldiers. X-Com if anything is overstating how accurate soldiers in real firefights are.
I agree, to an extent. I'm not saying experienced special forces are perfect aimbots. But still, the game contradicts itself in that regard, which is why the "95% chance to hit" is so memed on. The dice rolls are not reflective of the information you're given. It would be better if the game gave you accurate percentages according to how they calculate it, which is just another layer of frustration in these games. It's obvious that the percentages given to the player aren't accurate. Also, I can't tell you how many times my characters had perfect shots lined up, on enemies that were in wide open terrain, with no obstacles or other impedances, at very close ranges, and they missed, over and over and over and over, even with automatic weapons.
This, in turn, forces another layer of frustration on the player, to save and reload countless times, just to not be screwed over by the game's dice rolls. And in harder fights, this has to be done multiple times, just so you're not gimped in subsequent fights by being perpetually worn down by attrition and undermanned, or staffed with noob troops with low stats, because your better troops kept getting sacrificed to bullshit RNG. It feels unfair, because it is.