Upon finishing the tutorial, things retain a familiar feel as you’re introduced to the game’s base building and resource management mechanics.
The only differences are minor tweaks, like the ability to manually aim and target specific parts of enemies, which have different armour ratings and weaknesses, and take down whole structures across the procedurally generated maps, granting an advantage over enemies if you blow through terrain and open up an essential avenue of fire. Once spent the enemies then get their turn and the cycle begins again. Each soldier has a certain number of action and willpower points that you can spend to move them, shoot enemies, throw grenades and use special abilities – which are pretty cool and involve things like jetpack jumps and custom war cries. From here you take control of a group of soldiers, which are grouped into the Standard, Assault, Heavy and Sniper classes you’ll find in pretty much every turn-based strategy game, and be tasked to go toe-to-toe with a bunch of Pandoravirus mutants.Ĭombat and movement is all suitably intuitive and matches the tropes of the genre. This familiarity continues when you jump into the game tutorial. Sound familiar? It should, if you swapped Phoenix Project for XCOM and Pandoravirus for Aliens the plot would be identical to Enemy Unknown. You take the reins just after it has reactivated to take on a new threat, the Pandoravirus – a weird pathogen that can mutate any life form it touches into hostile alien life forms – which has already decimated civilisation as we know it.
You’re taking control of the Phoenix Project, a clandestine military force that was founded after the Second World War to protect humanity. Click the new game button and you’ll see a cutscene that’s pretty much scene-for-scene identical to the openings of past XCOM games, and for good reason. Powering up the game, everything will feel immediately familiar to XCOM fans. Phoenix Point is distinctly XCOM to start
Make no mistake, if you like XCOM then you’re going to love Phoenix Point, even though its current state is buggier than an ant hill. Having finally gotten my hands on the game, and played/failed my way through three story campaign attempts, I can safely say that this is a modest description of the game. If you’re a fan of the iconic XCOM franchise, Phoenix Point has likely been top of your games or Christmas wish list for quite some time.ĭeveloped by a team at Snapshot Studios with Julian Gollop – the father of the original XCOM games – as lead designer, Phoenix Point has been described and marketed as the “spiritual successor” to XCOM and generated quite a lot of hype over the last year.
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