Phoenix Point

Brings great ideas to the formula, but tries for too much.

Aterrible disease 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 and new social movements have risen. A few rogue military operatives seek to revive an old initiative dedicated to securing the future. It will not be easy, as Phoenix Point chooses strategic complexity over tactical simplicity.

In this Phoenix Point is very much a successor to the original X-COM – unsurprisingly, as it’s designed by series creator Julian Gollop. In terms of core design, turn-based tactics games don’t get much better than Phoenix Point. To my chagrin, they also don’t get much better than in terms of 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 well-established, consistent aesthetics throughout 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 voice lines sound like they were recorded inside a tin can.

But most of the time I didn’t care at all. Phoenix Point’s campaign does fascinating things, centring 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 caches of supplies and missions to do. As you stretch out you encounter factions of people divided into Havens, fortified settlements of a few thousand.

You quickly realise that over 99 per cent 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 anarchosyndicalist commune.

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 evermore-vicious choices where expanding your own capabilities in the long term means deciding that Havens will fall in the short term.

SLOG DAYS

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 lands. That’s a slog in the midsection of the campaign as you grind through missions looking for direction.

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 stats: 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.

Your soldiers’ precious action points are a resource spent in miserly increments. The semi-realistic ballistic physics model 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, but it really won me over.

SIRENS’ CALL

A real highlight are the minibosses, Sirens, who are both heavily armoured 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 directly away from you or into a wall. 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 then never resumed.

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.

Despite shortcomings, Phoenix Point won me over. 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. JONATHAN BOLDING