I've been playing games too long to get overly excited about this. Note when he describes part of the game as being randomly generated and when he doesn't - specifically, parts of civillization building and planetary exploration seemed as though they would be pretty linear in comparison with the early game's open-ness, and he made no mention that features such as your species' architecture or the look of function of the UFO would vary based on your choices.

It's like how developers seem to make with every game the old promise that it will have fully destructible environments, but ingame that feature always turns out to be cheap, unsatisfying, or nonexistant. Not that this game makes that promise: I'm talking about the general rule that games are always much cooler when you aren't sitting down to play them.

In short - looks awesome, but looks are usually deceiving.