KickStarter Phoenix Point - the new game from X-COM creator Julian Gollop

[MadMaxHellfire]

has this bombed yet?

 

[cvv]

I'll take the key seeing as the game is free and even though you're a belligerent, ignorant arsehole who pissed all over our concerns to chase Chink money I will be doing my best to enjoy my free game.

Don't you feel uncomfortable, concerned and ashamed to use a belligerent Chinese spyware in your house?

 

[cvv]

no it wont

Dude, look, EVERY.SINGLE.THING about this game will be bad, wrong and despicable ITT. Just some heads up. Don't take it personally.

 

[ArchAngel]

I'll take the key seeing as the game is free and even though you're a belligerent, ignorant arsehole who pissed all over our concerns to chase Chink money I will be doing my best to enjoy my free game.

Don't you feel uncomfortable, concerned and ashamed to use a belligerent Chinese spyware in your house?

USA has been spying on us for many years, why not balance it out by also letting Chinese do the same.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

Sorry to interrupt your sperging folks, here are my first impressions, after doing the tutorial and first couple of missions.

Bitching first, codex tradition:

• art style is crap - the armours look stupid american hand-egg style, instead of proper military gear; textures look weak, especially on buildings; everything is fucking brown or unsaturated; vehicles are also meh. I thought they are building this on unreal, not unity - everything looks fucking plastic due to crappy unity shaders.
• voice acting - really scrapping the bottom of the barrel here, really bad acting
• ui - strong consolitis: you can't rebind controls, you get prompt for controller actions in tutorial even though controller is disabled (I like my xcoms kbd+mouse, thank you very much); strong gui hipsterism: everything is fucking flat, can't tell a button apart from a tab. Everything is too fucking big and you can only see several manufacturing/research topics at a time.
• base - base is just 2d grid of a thumbnail of a facility, it's not even connected. Looked way better even in original X-COM, immersion ruined. Nice thing is every facility seems to have some useful description text. given that you won't spend much time on this screen it's forgivable.
• geoscape - pretty ok, though the red mist looks like shit. They really should made it to have a nice smooth and fuzzy edge and not that horrible, jagged ugliness. Also strange is that if you direct your air transport to fly somewhere, it goes there and time passes even though there's a big "PAUSED" text displayed next to the timer
• encyclopedia - feels very incomplete, lots of items don't have even basic descriptions beyond "this is a phoenix gun" and stats. Really, a little bit of blurb wouldn't hurt. Lore pages could use some pictures, especially the entries about people

Things I liked:

• missions feel actually pretty fun, though I can't really say anything about variety yet, didn't play long enough
• UI shows you which discovered enemies you can shot at after move; there's good indication about how much damage you will do
• Action point system is X-COM like, but with 4 instead of two, and shooting a gun can take between 1 and 3 APs (at least the crap you have at the beginning). So it's more feasible to shoot then scoot, as opposed to nuxcom shooting ends your turn.
• cover is very important and can be nicely destroyed. grenades are your friends. doesn't feel too popamoley
• there's no pod aggression mechanic from what I can see
• your soldiers are very fragile and aren't easy to replace, so you need to play carefully. it's not nuxcom level, but it looks like carrying several medkits on your team will be a necessity
• effects like bleeding and poisoned are great, so is limb damage. hp/limb damage restoration at end of mission is bit unintuitive so make sure you read the tutorials. it might make sense to heal up your soldiers before you finish the mission (killing last enemy auto finishes), in order to avoid their recovery time in med bay. Need to see how medkit cost will factor into plans, as it has instant build time so it's only a matter of resources getting more.
• inventory system, while rather simple looks to be working very well

Overall, it's pretty good gameplay and rather rubbish presentation, so I'm enjoying the game overall.

Maybe Gollop over time found out that Bulgarian devs are as good as they are cheap

Having lived in Bulgaria for quite a long time, I can tell you that there are plenty of really good devs there. Thing is, I doubt they are doing games, as all the companies present there (Gameloft, Ubi, was couple other but don't remember which) paid really crap and had super long hours. You would get way better salary and working conditions working for one of the big outsourcing houses, some small but quite cool tech companies, and especially for the big companies like SAP or VMWare. So lots of talented folk didn't make games but enterprise software. Homegrown companies like Haemimont (Tzar, Tropico series, Surviving Mars) and Chaos Group (V-Ray renderer) got some good game dev/graphics talent, so I'm not sure if Gollop could be competitive. I don't know any of the devs in Snapshot personally (at least none of those I saw on the videos they posted), but still think it's fucking unfair to slam down all Bulgarian devs. Same goes for cheap - I got a pretty decent salary when I worked there, nothing you could compare to London, but ok even for EU standards.

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

I think the final proof of the puding will be once the steam version releases with all the DLC. It's clear to me many things were cut with the intention of adding things back later through DLC. The UFOpedia being the most egregious example. That the devs have the gall to charge for this, (if true) over time instead of actually fixing the game we were all promised is yet more proof of Gollop's hubris. Jesus christ this is not a good game in it's current state. And I say that as someone who hated XCom 2 after a while.

 

[ArchAngel]

I have been watching people on twitch play since release (3h now). Everyone I watched seem to have fun. Or they are all faking having fun.

 

[geno]

Reading the PCGamer review, this seems to be a total Eurojank game, for the good and the bad.

 

[The Anus Of Discontent]

My review, I've worked on it about as much as the devs worked on the actual game.

Spoiler

 

[Mazisky]

Those kind of games get a lot better after a couple years of patches and added content. Steam version will be the real version.

However, it really hurts me the post-apocalyptic setting, everything feels brownish and cold. Both original and Firaxis were much varied in this regard, because they avoided the apocalypse cheese.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...saving-a-new-world-the-good-old-fashioned-way

Phoenix Point review - saving a new world the good old-fashioned way
Another X-COM in all but name.

Phoenix Point carries Gollop's legacy forward capably, if conservatively.

I'm saving the world again, much like I've saved it a dozen times before. I've taken command of yet another team of ragtag soldiers and scientists, and returned once more to frantically scampering back and forth across a terrified planet, responding to panicked reports of strange creatures unleashing horrifying attacks. I've been scavenging their weapons, analysing their biology and reverse-engineering their technology. The fate of humanity itself rests on the shoulders of fewer soldiers than would fill a classroom and the invisible, intangible people who presumably exist behind them, fixing their weapons, tending their wounds and laundering their blood-stained undershirts at the conclusion of every suburban skirmish.

Even if a wider network exists around this handful of heroes (perhaps including whoever it is who does tech support for their radar, compiles their budget breakdowns and patches calls through to admin and HR), there can't be more than a hundred people who support the human race's last, best hope against a threat as cryptic as it is colossal. Phoenix Point, true to the X-COM and XCOM lineage to which it is so close a cousin, is fundamentally about guerilla tactics once again. Small squads of scrappy soldiers subvert a larger, slower force, turning its tools and equipment against it, before eventually finding and slicing off its head. And the key to this dynamic, the key to these guerilla tactics, is momentum. How it's paced and how it progresses.

It's really all about the journey, not the destination, and the friends you made along the way. In this case, those friends can include much bigger weapons, furious firefights and exciting revelations. I don't remember how I completed any game in the X-COM series, but I remember so many examples of the first time I met a particular alien, uncovered critical information or turned the tide of a hectic battle. Phoenix Point brings back all those furiously exciting feelings, giving a gentle seasoning to some very familiar flavours. I've been thrilled by its surprises, intrigued by its developments and also a little bored by another scavenging mission where I wait for the last enemy to blunder into view.

Set after the release of a long-frozen alien virus causes mutations and madness across the globe, Phoenix Point has you trying to understand not only how to combat this apocalyptic change, but also why your Phoenix Project, a secret collective created to defend humanity from such existential threats, has completely collapsed. You are, it seems, the last cell of what was supposed to be a powerful and protective organisation.

The world is now factional and the first of those familiar X-COM flavours is the subtle tang of X-COM: Apocalypse. As you emerge, blinking, into a world ravaged by both climate change and a new trend toward tentacles with everything, you encounter three substantially different takes on how to get by: through discovering religion, embracing a new kind of ecology or just making bigger guns. Exploring an initially blank planet, your transport craft hopping between each location you discover in real time, you gradually map out a scattered network of survivors. Call in on any of these and you can trade resources, hire new personnel or even steal their lunch.

These factions will drop you a line to ask how you are, put in requests for you to perform tasks and offer subtle reminders of how their hot take on post-apocalyptic branding is always trending. While everyone gets along at first, each sliding into your DMs with passive-aggressive complaints about the others, it's inevitable that this escalates. They press you to take sides and offer their technologies. Any actions or opinions that are seen to favour one inevitably frustrate the others. It wouldn't be the apocalypse if humanity wasn't turning on itself.

The ongoing exploration you perform in this broken world is closer to XCOM 2 than any other game in the series, making you an ever-hungry itinerant who much push farther from home, despite the risk of overstretching yourself. As well as uncovering more settlements, you also discover supply caches, a smattering of plot-critical locations and plenty of relics of the past. Something fishy is going on and through all of this runs the salty tang of series classic Terror From the Deep. Why did much of humanity stride off into the sea? What's in the ever-encroaching mist that is slowly swirling inland? And is it really worth equipping your squad with melee weapons?

Spoiler

I've been very selective with the screenshots and plot I've shared here, as the game's slow reveal of its backstory matches well with the introduction of new elements and both can feel very satisfying. Another paragraph of plot is filled in just as you discover another class of soldier to recruit. You take a new weapon onto the battlefield only moments before facing something so much meaner than anything yet seen. The game escalates, at least to a point, and there are some very cool moments that I really don't want to spoil.

And those turn-based battlefields feel resolutely X-COM and XCOM, with the modern presentation of Firaxis' interpretation meeting the variety and fragility of the 1994 original. Yes, you can Blow Shit Up at your leisure, so worry not if no-one on your team has eyes on the enemy. There's nothing to stop you blind firing into the middle distance, hurling grenades around corners or levelling a building with heavy weapons if you so much as suspect something scaly and wet is slopping around inside. God damn does it feel good to go to town with the heavy artillery and, when a faction reaches out in dire need of backup, it's 1994 X-COM all over again when you incur no penalty at all for blowing their pristine property to bits. Just so long as everyone gets out alive.

Whenever the enemy lumber into view, it's a palpable pleasure to squint down your sights and decide if you first want to shoot their head, their legs or even the weapon they're holding in their briney hands. The crosshairs shrink as you take control of your seasoned sniper and shoot a foot out from under the protective shield of a crab-like creature. Then your assault trooper misses wildly with two shotgun blasts, cutting a nearby tree in half and blowing up some discarded gas canisters. This is a normal day at the office for Phoenix Point employees, though be warned all this excitement is occasionally marred by the third-person camera choosing to bless you with some truly terrible and utterly inscrutable angles.

Combat mixes older mechanics with newer ones to present a palatable package. There's the cover system, different classes and specific abilities we know from our modern XCOM, but also more freeform movement closer to earlier X-COM. A technician can shoot four times if they sit in the same spot, or a fraction of this proportional to how much they run around. An experienced assault trooper can unlock unique dash actions, while your heavy weapons soldier launches into the air with a quick burst from their class-specific jetpack.

All this is rationed out through two different currencies. A soldier's action points determine how much they can run and gun, but most special abilities are triggered by will points, which gradually increase with experience. Will points are also a soldier's morale, sapped by seeing friends die or by psychic trauma, replenished by a quick rest or taking out an enemy. This is simple and pleasingly effective, substantially limiting the amount you can press everyone to perform their party tricks. It also presents many important opportunities for spending both to get the upper hand. For example, it takes two will points for a sniper to reduce the cost of their next shot, which opens up the possibility for them to spend action points to both fire and go into overwatch after. They can't perform this combination indefinitely, but at critical moments it's the right way to use a limited resource.

And so you do, and as your ever-pressed soldiers start to take the same locational damage as the enemies you're blasting limbs off, they begin to sound exasperated and doubtful. Did that one just second-guess their orders? Probably, but they did just lose the loss of one arm and, with it, the ability to fire their fancy rocket launcher.

There's opportunities for cross-class combinations, too, with skilled snipers dashing like assault troopers, and curating and customising a roster that begins to fill with weird specialists hired from other factions is both fascinating and occasionally fiddly. While it's again possible to name a heavy weapons grunt after a close friend so that you can tell them how they blew up a cache of alien eggs last night, I do miss the stats that track how many kills my soldiers have, the missions they've been on and a record of those lost in the ongoing struggle.

It's good that Phoenix Point makes all this granular gunplay so gratifying because, as the game gathers pace, you can find yourself fighting a lot of similar skirmishes, over and over. Shooting things itself is fun, but the wider context of small squad tactics isn't quite as thrilling. The enemy AI is mostly interested in closing with you and then firing, with any flanking more a result of their initial deployment than any situational awareness. Enemy powers don't change your tactics a huge amount either and include the now very familiar mind control, smokescreens, turning invisible and occasionally covering everybody in sticky goo. Hunkering down into overwatch mode or a steady and methodical march forward become reliable and mundane tactics, with the deadliest counter you face being simple weight of numbers. This, as you might expect, is best offset by finding and manufacturing bigger guns, but later fights increasingly feel like battles of attrition.

And it's here that Phoenix Point's pacing falters. Plot developments can slow in the face of rising inter-faction tensions and more and longer skirmishes. More time in skirmishes only highlights their AI shortcomings and rising attrition, meaning those familiar flavours start to taste overfamiliar and stale. That compulsion to push ever forward remains a powerful one and the game will keep your interest, but its spark does fade somewhat.

Arguably every game in its lineage has faced this problem at some stage, with the thrill of discovery and rush of the new dampened by a growing need to manage bases, battles and bottom lines. For some players, it meant never quite navigating the endgame and ultimate conclusion, but many of us pressed on undeterred to find ourselves eventually hailed, yet again, as the savvy saviours of our scrappy little species. I don't see things going much differently for Phoenix Point, a commendable new take on a now so very tried and tested concept, a classic recipe with a few fresh twists. It thoroughly deserves its place amongst its peers, neither standing head and shoulders above them, nor falling short by any significant metric.

Playing Phoenix Point has been a powerful propulsion back through my past, pinballing me through 25 years of alien-fighting nostalgia. And if I still find myself returning to it again, keen to blow the floor out from under another tentacled terror the moment I finish this review, then you know it's got much more right than wrong. Even if I never reach the end, I will still have enjoyed the journey, and the friends (soldiers) I met (renamed as my friends) along the way.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/12/03/phoenix-point-review/

Wot I Think: Phoenix Point
Creature creep

Please stay in your seats if, at times during this review, you notice a presence in the shadows. Don’t be alarmed, in fact, should you notice a silhouette wearing a suit and tie – he’s just here to make his influence known. And if he seems familiar, there’s a good reason: the council of XCOM looms over Phoenix Point, and they won’t let you forget it. This is a game about resuscitating an intergovernmental military force dedicated to stopping a global invasion. Where researching the adversary and its weapons gives you a fighting chance to turn the tide. Where the only way to meet the threat is down on the ground, with a few good soldiers arrayed against enemies unknown.

Phoenix Point would be easily dismissed as mimicry, were it not directed by Julian Gollop, the designer of the original, 1994 X-COM. After all, it’s difficult to begrudge a man leapfrogging the developers he’s inspired. What elevates this game beyond a victory lap, however, are the ways in which it undoes the streamlining of the turn-based tactics genre.

The great realisation that Firaxis came to, during its long and near-abortive attempt to reboot X-COM into XCOM was that many of the game’s systemic elements could be replaced by discrete choices: three cities are burning, which do you save? Do you move and shoot, or sprint for cover? Every decision became meaningful and easily digested, like the unprotected brain of a squaddie.

Phoenix Point straight-up reverses a lot of that design process, unpicking XCOM’s neat threads and leaving a pile of knotted fibres on the floor. Soldiers no longer have two moves, but an allotted pool of action points that deteriorates by fractions with every shot, saunter, or fiddle in their inventory. Something as simple as their speed can be affected by gaining stat upgrades, or becoming over-encumbered, or being shot in the leg, or performing a dash using a different pool of points, or one of the other factors that slipped straight over the lip of my brain into the overflow tray.

Spoiler

It’s a painful level of granularity to wrap your head around. Basics like the recruitment of troops and the provisioning of fresh ammo go unexplained. And the explanations that do come sometimes leave you wishing developer Snapshot hadn’t bothered. One loading screen message left me frowning for upwards of a minute:


50% of the time, Phoenix Point’s tutorials work every time.

Yet that almost perverse dedication to detail is what makes Gollop’s game stand out in a genre where tidied-up versions of his mechanics have become X-Commonplace. Take free aiming, for instance, which lets you wrench control of your shots away from the computer when you think you could do a better job. Often it’s possible to clear a crabman’s shield and hit him right on his dripping chin which, thanks to a VATS-ish body damage system, causes extra bleeding from the bonce. On a couple of occasions, I’ve made an intelligent guess at where an enemy might be standing, and splattered them straight through a sheet of corrugated iron – a rare FPS-like delight in amongst the turn-based tactics.

You won’t see the true highlights of Phoenix Point down the sights of a spider-launching pistol, though – for that you have zoom right out, into the strategic world view. Your mission there, broadly, is to persuade a growing race of creepy crustaceans, the Pandorans, to get back in the sea. Red mist is spreading inexorably across the globe, an aesthetic downgrade for the fossil-like white continents, and there’s no apparent way to stop it. The solution, it transpires, lies somewhere in the Phoenix Point organisation’s own far-flung and poorly-recorded past. For an ancient enemy, an ancient solution.

From your bases, you send out aircraft to distant objective points where, maybe, somebody left some notes about extra-large harpoons or something. But flying straight there isn’t an option – instead, you have to ping between mystery nodes, spending a few seconds exploring each to discover its nature. Often it’ll be an abandoned town where you can scavenge some materials, or the holed-up home of a few survivors. Sometimes, it’ll be a short choose-your-own-adventure sequence; my soldiers once uncovered a luxury shelter, replete with swimming pools, cinema, and dedicated VR room, and had to decide who to donate the projectors to.

As more radar pings pop up on your map, you start to bump into representatives from the game’s three non-Pandoran factions, and that’s when things get juicy. The first I stumbled across were the egalitarians of Synedrion, who were busy bickering while the world burned – or rather, while the world became covered in mildew. I preferred them to New Jericho’s Tobias West, a billionaire genius with a cult of personality all too familiar from the old world. The third lot were a more traditional cult – the snail-worshipping Disciples of Anu, who I suspected were spraying red mist on their cheeks as part of their skincare routine. When the latter called for help to fend off a Pandoran attack, I took great pleasure in driving my APC straight through the statues jutting from their marbled streets. I’m helping!

Gollop’s 4X leanings began to show in Snapshot’s last game, Chaos Reborn, and they’re front and centre here. You get the sense that the simulation could happily continue, whether or not you carried on poking at it: New Jericho researching its weapons, Synedrion building and rebuilding training centres, Anu doing whatever it is that Anu does behind closed temple doors. Factions publicly call each other out on their eugenics or militarism, fall out, and declare war. It’s a pleasure to watch, and to get mixed up when it suits you – carrying out raids to fund a fancy new research lab, then sticking the boot in by nicking a plane or two. Phoenix Point’s ground battles with other human beings are its most rewarding, asking you to clamber through windows and clear bases room by room, and offering a real test to your mastery of the cover system.

It’s a shame that, while mission types are varied enough, the least interesting tend to crop up most. In the early part of the game, you’ll spend far too many matches scrapping with crabs over caches of food – or Apple deliveries, as their logos appear to indicate. Watching an oversized shrimp go to town on a barrel of iPhone parts, when you know there are Pandoran nests and sci-fi cityscapes out there, becomes tiresome quickly.

But that’s where Phoenix Point really is about choosing your own adventure. It’s just as feasible to trade your way to materials you might otherwise have to laboriously scavenge, or to steal them – the simulation is flexible enough that you can forefront the most enjoyable encounters. Not that you should have to do that yourself, mind.

There’s slow-burn greatness in Phoenix Point. It’s a game where you might be exploring a site, bracing for ambush, but instead find an abandoned theme park dedicated to a novelty boy band of hedge fund managers called the Lucrative Lads. Where you dread the thud of a parasitic worm dropping from a roof to the ground at your feet. Where the cold utilitarianism trained by XCOM slowly melts, and ideology begins to influence your diplomacy. It’s warmer, stranger, than its genremates. But it’s harder work to enjoy. Like its most outlandish guns and powerful armours, it takes a few hours’ research to get there.

 

[Infinitron]

Reading the PCGamer review, this seems to be a total Eurojank game, for the good and the bad.

https://www.pcgamer.com/phoenix-point-review/

PHOENIX POINT REVIEW
A turn-based strategy game full of great ideas, but also annoying bugs.

A terrible virus has overtaken mankind: the Pandoravirus—an alien threat that's mutating and twisting our world into one controlled by swarms of hybrid creatures emerging from the seas. Society has collapsed, as have society's saviors, and new social movements have risen. A few rogue military operatives seek to revive an old initiative dedicated to securing mankind's future. It will not be easy: Phoenix Point chooses strategic complexity over tactical simplicity, simulation over abstract gamification.

In this, Phoenix Point is very much a successor to the original X-COM series, which makes sense as it's designed by X-COM creator Julian Gollop. In terms of core design, turn-based tactics games don't get much better than Phoenix Point. To my disappointment, its systemic success is marred by copious bugs and poor AI.

It's still heavily influenced by recent turn-based games. The design language of the interface will be very familiar to anyone who played a game released since Firaxis' XCOM or XCOM 2. Otherwise, Phoenix Point strikes off on its own path. It's a world of weird fiction monsters, heroic sci-fi soldiers, and the body horror they share. It has some wonderful visual design and a well-established, consistent aesthetic that makes for a creepy and atmospheric ride. It's never quite clear where the worldbuilding is taking you next—and it goes to some wonderfully weird places.

The sound design and music, on the other hand, are bad. They actively undercut everything the graphics accomplish. Some of the soldiers and monsters' voice lines sound like they were recorded inside a tin can. The biggest, meanest alien beastie sounds like a twelve-year-old imitating a tyrannosaurus rex. The music behind it all alternates between annoyingly shrill and forgettable.

But most of the time I didn't care at all. Phoenix Point's campaign does fascinating things, centering core tensions you can never easily solve. Beginning with an aircraft and a handful of soldiers at a single remote base, you uncover the landscape of the ruined world and take on its problems. Exploring is key, as you need to quickly find and reactivate old Phoenix Project bases to expand your capabilities—as well as take on missions and unearth caches of vital supplies. As you stretch out you encounter factions of people divided into Havens, fortified settlements of a few thousand. You quickly realize that over 99% of Earth's human population is gone. Now mists are rising from the oceans to claim the rest.

To save them you'll have to pick sides. A few neutral Havens aside, the three human factions generally hate each other. New Jericho's billionaire leader wants to cleanse the world with fire. The Disciples of Anu worship mutation and want to leave humanity behind. Synedrion can't decide if they're an autonomous collective or an anarcho-syndicalist commune. Each group has novel ways of fighting the enemy, so allying with one over another earns you unique technology. This alienates the others. Despite the extinction-level threat, the three factions are in fact so absurdly petty as to dislike that you've saved a few thousand of the others.

That's probably fine, because the tension on the strategic level is absolutely electric. You're always strapped for resources, deciding whether to send out an exploration team or hold them back to defend threatened Havens. It's a series of ever-more-vicious choices, where expanding your own capabilities in the long term means deciding that Havens will fall in the short term. Eventually you're fielding dozens of soldiers across several teams, but you've expanded the scope of your operations to cover the globe and it's never enough.

Despite this frantic action, the overall path of the campaign is meandering. Figuring out how to progress takes a lot of swinging in the dark hoping some strategy you try is the one that lands. That's a slog in the mid-section of the campaign as you grind through similar missions looking for direction. It feels bad to need to have played a campaign to understand how to play the campaign.

But the tactical battles only lag through pure repetition, not out of a lack of interesting toys to play with. There are six classes, each with unique abilities and equipment. Each soldier also has three statistics: Strength for HP and inventory, Speed for movement, and Willpower for morale. Stats and powers are simple, but spending points to advance is rife with hard decisions. Conversely, new weapons and equipment are often measured tradeoffs rather than obvious upgrades.

These tradeoffs play into the strategy you develop around your forces. Phoenix Point's tactical combat is about simulated bullets, hundreds of hit points, hit locations, overlapping fields of fire, and careful movement. A solid strategy going into the fight will always prove better than tactics turn-by-turn… mostly. The balance isn't entirely there. Willpower is spent to use abilities, a frustrating impetus to not use your cool tricks lest your team collapse into a spiral of panicking soldiers. Unless, of course, you can find a way to spend all your willpower that leaves your enemies dead. Focus-fire strategies based around doing massive damage quickly can dominate, as can abusing action-free movement to zoom around.

Those few abuses aside, your soldiers' precious action points are a resource spent in miserly increments. The semi-realistic ballistic physics models each shot rather than binary hit or miss attack rolls. You can automate shooting or take direct control and aim it yourself. It seems like a gimmick from the outside, but in play it really won me over. There's nothing quite like the feeling of shooting off an enemy's arm so they drop their shotgun.

Physics extends to the world too. It's all modeled with various kinds of hardness. A wall of corrugated metal won't protect you for long, but a concrete blockhouse is a fortress. Cover is destructible, and since you can free-aim your soldiers' weapons I found heavy cannons and machine guns very useful at times. That said, there's no elaborate environmental destruction going on. Terrain pieces break apart, PhysX about for a moment, then vanish—nothing like some of the images on Phoenix Point's website. You will see object hitboxes that don't quite line up with the models, soldiers on auto-aim shooting into adjacent stair rails, and crabmen huddling behind trash cans.

Speaking of aquatic horrors, Phoenix Point's population of beasties is quite good—though limited. In lieu of varied enemies, the Pandoravirus instead cooks up a wide panoply of new weapons. As the campaign continues enemies get tougher and gain new abilities. Arthron crabmen start nearly unarmored but gain thick shells, grenade launchers, and poison spit. Triton fishmen are four-armed: two for carrying human weapons, two for jellyfish tentacles or bloodsucking maws. Supposedly these upgrades and evolutions are procedural, based on how you fight the enemy, but if so it wasn't obvious. There are also human opponents from the three factions and some post-apocalypse raiders. They get upgrades as their faction researches new stuff.

A real highlight is the minibosses, Sirens, who are both heavily armored and can mind-control. I loved every time one appeared, throwing the tactical situation into chaos as I both managed existing enemies and mitigated the new threat. The boss fights against the huge Scylla fall flat though. They should be tactically interesting, as they boast all kinds of powers, but are actually just about pouring every bullet you have into one large thing.

Undercutting all the cool design is the combat AI. It's competent at best, but at least once a fight downright broken. It fails at simple, vital tasks like setting up effective overwatch fire—sometimes shooting directly away from you or into a wall. I once saw a fishman spend its whole turn running full tilt to the top of a three-story building. The fishman then immediately used its precious Will points to activate the dash ability, leaping off the side of the building and landing two spaces from where it started… now out of cover. Phoenix Point also hangs during enemy turns, sometimes for as much as a minute, before deciding what to do next. Twice during my play it hung and never resumed. I timed it once for 15 minutes before I closed the program.

Those two moments aside, Phoenix Point isn't broken, just buggy. I never encountered anything game-ruining, or that wasn't fixed with a reloaded save. It never outright crashed to desktop on me, nor did it have visual glitches. It loaded quickly enough from an SSD, but slowly from an HDD—slow enough that I did some reading. I did have problems with soldier abilities working only sometimes, with a character refusing to do anything for a turn, and once I found a dupe bug for equipment. It's simply not for those who can't stomach bugs that have to be fixed by reloading from saves.

Despite shortcomings, Phoenix Point won me over. In that way, it's just like the X-COM: UFO Defense that I fell in love with years ago. It's a bit of a mess, but it's a mess filled with clever ideas and idiosyncratic gameplay you won't find anywhere else. Mush X-COM: Apocalypse and XCOM: Enemy Unknown together and you get Phoenix Point. Unfortunately, someone's put a cup of roaches into the batter too.

THE VERDICT
77

PHOENIX POINT
Strategically delicious, Phoenix Point’s biggest problem is lackluster technical execution.

 

[cvv]

Watched two streams, the conclusion is this is a very solid basis for a REALLY good game. Wait a year or two, get it in the Definitive Edition with all the patches and DLCs and have an absolute blast with it. Gollop did not disappoint.

 

[orcinator]

I decided to not pay attention to this and just wait for release. Quite a shock when it turns out the ugly spess marine armor was your starting gear.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

I have been watching people on twitch play since release (3h now). Everyone I watched seem to have fun. Or they are all faking having fun.

a lot of stuff was cut, so people are disappointed and that feeling is overriding everything else. They are throwing a tantrum. I really do understand because some of the choices like the decision to make the armor look like motorcycle riders with dozens of little shoulder pads pasted on is so bad compared to the original art design. I just can't understand why they would ever think this art style would sell better. I never hear a single person that prefers it. They often seem to be selling to some mythical retards with credit cards that nobody actually knows, but somehow everyone is sure exists-- and they are also sure they like stupid looking shit and that they love to blow stuff up real good with da awesome button.

But in any case if this game was presented without out all the pre-hype drama people would reacting much differently, and yes I do understand a large part of it was how dishonest and entitled the developer behaved. I think that after it is released on steam and after that after all the DLC and MODs get their turn that it will be better than any of the new X-COM's, but we likely will have to wait at least a year if not closer to 1.5 years for that to come into being. People will get over the initial disappointment, and the base game is a solid framework to be able to provide a good tactical turn based game.

Even now it is fun, if not exactly what everyone dreamed and hoped or even initially funded. A lot of the frustration is likely because people can see the potential the game has, so it feels like a lot has been lost. But it is not lost forever, its just not all here right now. I suspect even the better more apocalyptic art style will be modded back into the game down the line. This just seems to be how game releases go now, especially highly complex games, so I think its just best to get used to it--its not like most people don't have years of backlog. That is how I approach it at least. I never expect to really be able to play a game on release day except to just fuck around with it for a few hours. Then I put it away for 6 months or so and come back.

 

[cvv]

a lot of stuff was cut, so people are disappointed and that feeling is overriding everything else.

If it came out on Steam people would probably say something like "Mang a lot of stuff was cut but it's ok because the core of the game is really good". Instead they say "stupid BBS piece of shit fuck this game everyone playing it deserve to burn in acid pools".

You starting to understand?

 

[Alpharius]

Played several missions on a free version, seems like a really cheap nuxcom clone so far. Well, the geoscape and combat mechanics might be slightly better, but it looks like the game's highest difficulty is gamejournalist one. Could improve later on but i have doubts.

Just finished a mission against enemy synderion soilders, 8 enemy vs four of mine, which also had better weapons and they've managed to shoot me only once before they've all died. Due to mindlesly running in circles into an overwatch. The missions against the crabmen were even easier, because even if melee crabman gets into range (which almost never happens) he'd need like 3 full turns to kill a full hp phoenix point soilder, lul.

Btw the realistic ballistics system somehow still allows for missed shots at point-blank range.

 

[orcinator]

I flew too far and lost the starting squad to an ambush mission.
That's apparently a game over since you can't find a haven if you don't have men.
That's cool, more hardcore than early game X-Piratez, I guess.

Almost lost em all in the first tutorial scavenge mission, partly because the starting loadouts don't got no reloads (and the brain fucklers from apocalypse being a thing).

Edit: oh yeah, and true line of sight but not being able to change your stance already proved to be annoying in the second real mission.

 

[udm]

Edit: oh yeah, and true line of sight but not being able to change your stance already proved to be annoying in the second real mission.

Flagged this a year and a half ago. It boggles the mind how something so basic can be overlooked.

 

[Dodo1610]

It's sad this game has huge potential but I fear it will fade into obscurity soon thanks to Epic store exclusivity. And unlike most Epic exclusives they can't expect to make that much money on consoles either since even Xcom 1+2 sold better on pc

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

It's sad this game has huge potential but I fear it will fade into obscurity soon thanks to Epic store exclusivity. And unlike most Epic exclusives they can't expect to make that much money on consoles either since even Xcom 1+2 sold better on pc

its coming to steam though

 

[Au Ellai]

Of course the RPS derps whine that there are tactical options instead of such a limited amount of choices that it may as well be a CYOA game. "There are more options than shoot, run and gun, and pick one mission out of 3! Look at all this progress that was undone by giving the player options and choice! I don't want to use tactics in a tactical game, it hurts my brain having choices."

Fuck I know I shouldn't read RPS, it makes me mad every time. That raw fervent idiocy is so pants-on-head retarded I'm still not entirely sure it's not satire. How can anyone be so fucking stupid?

Anyways, this isn't about those asshats and their half-assed piece of shit "review" that serves as nothing but rage-bait for clicks as they slowly drown to death in an industry that no longer wants them. It's about Phoenix Point, which looks fucking terrible compared to X-Piratez or XcomFiles, but miles better than the abortion that is Nu-com.

 

[PhantasmaNL]

Not able to rebind keys...smh
maybe it is a DLC feature

 

[thesheeep]

Not able to rebind keys...smh
maybe it is a DLC feature

Does it also not allow to speed up turns?
In that case, they'd have kind of fulfilled every entry on the "unforgivable game development sins" checklist...