PHOENIX POINT
It’s life, but not as we know it
COME INTO PHOENIX POINT unprepared, and you may accuse its devs of playing a lot of XCOM. This is almost certainly true, but beside the point. Snapshot Games has played a lot of X-COM, too, having been co-founded by Julian Gollop, one of the designers of the original X-COM:
UFODefense from 1994. As a result, XCOM veterans will find PhoenixPoint familiar to the point of feeling like an expansion pack, but different enough to be thrilling. Anyone new to the series will find it a convenient place to get on, even if it doesn’t quite hit the heights XCOM2 did.
This time, rather than arriving in flying saucers, the threat comes from the sea. Mutated creatures mixing human, seafood, and unknown DNA are wreaking havoc on the last bastions of humanity, and it’s up to your rag-tag bunch of soldiers to blast them back into the water.
If you think you’ve seen that all before, check out the Geoscape, a draggable world map on which the locations of your bases, allies, and missions are marked. You transit this globe in your dropship, exploring, scavenging, and fighting. Kill some bad guys, and you can pick up their weapons, research them, and make your own. The bodies you recover can be autopsied for an increased understanding of your foe. There are bases to build, secrets to uncover, and alliances to broker, all while battling the undersea menace as it increases its incursions on to land.
Having a game that’s so familiar means any changes stand out, so while Phoenix
Point may be recognizable enough to play without tutorials, it can still catch you out. Manual aiming is top of the list: Gone are the XCOM percentages that would see your shotgun be 99 percent certain to kill an alien yet miss, in favor of two circles; 100 percent of your shots land in the larger circle, with 50 percent of them in the smaller, central one. Every shot is a simulated projectile rather than a probability, so if it looks like it will hit, it usually does. There are still chances to miss completely, such as your trooper fumbling his gun or a negative status effect throwing you off, but manual aiming makes things more certain.
Leaving shooting to your soldier means they target the enemy’s center of mass rather than its discrete hit locations, and the value of being able to shoot the arms off a foe or cut its legs from underneath it means you’ll be manual aiming almost all the time. This changes the game enormously, so you’re more likely to take shots you’d shy away from in XCOM2. It cuts both ways, though, with your soldiers just as likely to have their heads disabled by well-aimed enemy fire. Medikits heal hitpoints but don’t fix disabled limbs— these are fixed when the mission ends, but hitpoints aren’t, so you need to wait before the next mission or risk taking an under-strength team. It adds to the feeling of it being a massive balancing act.
It’s not flawless—every time we fired up the game there was a clash between our latest local save and the one in the cloud, and it often opened a save with the map upside down, or focused on the other side of the world from our dropship. Annoyances aside, though, this is a strong game of strategy, tactics, and alienshooting, and deserves to be more than “just another” XCOM.
Phoenix Point
BETTER Classic tactical gameplay with strategic layer.
WETTER Glitches can frustrate; graphics not that spectacular.
RECOMMENDED SPECS Core i5 3GHz/AMD FX series 3.2GHz; 16GB RAM; GeForce GTX 1060/Radeon R9 390X.
$40, http://phoenixpoint.info, ESRB: Not rated