I thought it was a good turn-based strategy game. Good mechanics with the six soldiers. Each one was unique and served a purpose (even if that stealth soldier who shanks everyone and gets an extra turn was a little OP). The leveling up was handled well with gaining new abilities. Solid difficulty curve. Lots of content with individual bonus missions.
Full disclosure, I had only played two tutorial missions and continued today while I had to wait somewhere. I'm following Youtuber ChristopherOdd's Let's Play of XCOM Enemy Within right now and I'm totally addicted to it which spawned me popping in Shadow Wars finally. I tried playing a Fire Emblem before that to get my fix but they're so different. It helps that Shadow Wars has the original X-COM guy working on it, it seems, as I feel it reminds me a lot of how XCOM plays. It also makes me wish XCOM Enemy Unknown and/or Enemy Within were on 3DS and/or WiiU. Shadow Wars tells me the 3DS could definitely handle a graphically scaled back version and watching the Let's Play on the GamePad also shows how the UI is almost entirely readable just from the PC version.
But err ... totally off topic, sorry. Mario! Yay! Still gotta wait at least two weeks before my copy gets here