First of all, I've played every 4X game in existence, with my favourite being Alpha Centauri by far. Pandora has a lot in common with Alpha Centauri. In fact, it seems to have been intended as a partial reimagining of that game, updated with modern gameplay. So I'm going to be comparing the two a lot. And if I sound overly critical, it's because Pandora has so much potential.
One of the awesome things about Alpha Centauri was the atmosphere. Dark graphics, claustrophobic music, the mind worms, even many of the techs and facilities, all contributed to that being a dark, sometimes horrifying future on a dangerous, alien world. The occasional interludes also gave the game a sort of a storyline with the emerging alien godmind. This all is missing from Pandora. I never felt pulled into the world, not once did I stop thinking I was just playing a game, albeit a very enjoyable one.
Alpha Centauri also gave you a pretty good idea of the different factions' ideologies and even the personalities of their leaders, and reasons to love or hate them even before you encountered them in any given game. Here we have pretty much the exact same factions, with the exception of the Peacekeepers, but I don't really care about them. I don't know how the factions were formed, why they came to Pandora, why they are in conflict or even why I should pick any of them, other than comparing their gameplay advantages. And that's boring.
The aliens are also disappointing. On first glance they seem threatening, but as soon as you build some troops with snipers and flamers you can easily clear your continent from hives and never have to worry about them again. Again Alpha Centauri did it better. Psi combat and increasing moral made alien units a threat even to late game units, and the increasingly common fungal blooms meant your cities were never safe.
Now I love the basic gameplay. Unit design, the fact that minerals and food are global, base specialization, etc. The random tech tree is also a really nice inovation. But I do have some small gripes with the game as it is:
Diplomacy is pretty basic, with few options to interact. The absence of a planetary council despite some techs referencing it is curious.
The AI needs improvement. They keep early, cheap units long after they've become obsolete, their cities are too crowded, they send me gifts even after I've declared war. I've yet to have any trouble conquering them.
Research Queueing is a feature that's missing and would be nice to have.
Wonders are also something that's missing and would be nice to have.
Hills are completely outclassed by mountains, only useful as a place to plant forests. Forests themselves are only useful for the pollution reduction. Which at least is realistic, I guess.
When a new city is founded tha game should automatically send you to the city screen, or at least notify you the production queue is empty like it does when something is completed. I've lost quite a few turns of production because I forgot to set something to be built.
Population requires extensive micromanagement. The worker autoplacement is horrible, and I constantly have to tweak them. This is made even more difficult by the fact that sometimes there's no notification for growth.
Unit upgrades are way too expensive. It never seems to be worth it to upgrade an obsolete unit instead of building a new one. This might be related to the AI always having obsolete units if it's set to prefer upgrading over building new ones.
It'd be nice to be able to set units on auto explore and not have to worry about them until they ran out of dark hexes.
The map wrapping around on all sides is extremely weird. The planet would have to be shaped like a donut to allow that, and NASA has yet to discover a Donutworld.
And after the latest patch, the game has slowed down to a crawl. It's become practically unplayable. That's one of the reasons I found enough time to write this post.