The tactical combat is still very enjoyable, but it lacks the chess-like precision of XCOM, with too many random elements and too much repetition. This does sort of happen, but it seems to be tied more to reaching certain milestones in the campaign rather than any specific actions you perform.īungie to revive Marathon with new extraction-based shooter claim sources So if you do keep blowing them up with grenades they grow extra armour to compensate. It’s implied that the explosives problem should be solved by the game itself, in that creatures are supposed to evolve and mutate depending on your actions. These activate more specialist abilities but are decreased the more stress a soldier is under, from teammates dying to the horror of witnessing some new alien monstrosity.Īll these innovations work very well, although the various explosive weapons are so powerful they can sometimes make a mockery of any sense of tactics. There’s also something called will points which increase the more experience a soldier gains (all are subject to permadeath, just as you’d expect). On top of that the maps are always impressively destructible, so you can do everything from targeting explosive objects to bringing down elevated structures filled with snipers, or simply blowing a hole through a wall to get the drop on an alien. It also lets you fire entirely manually, allowing you to aim at where you think an enemy is (given the whole mist theme there’s a thick fog of war in place) or to catch as many as possible in a large explosion. from Fallout and allows you to target specific body parts or weapons.

However, Phoenix Point’s system works more like V.A.T.S. There’s also a first person aiming system, although unexpectedly the recent Narcos: Rise Of The Cartels beat Gollop to the punch on that one. In most other respects, the strategy level global map does still work similarly to XCOM 2, although there’s no central base anymore but instead several that you can specialise as you wish – which is how things used to work back in the 90s. The sense of encroaching doom common to all XCOM games is still there, as you always feel like one bad decision away from complete failure, but having to deal with the petty stupidity of the factions in order to recruit new soldiers, and gain access to their specific technologies, leaves a sour taste in the mouth. The problem with this though, is that the way the three factions are portrayed makes them all seem deeply unlikeable and as they all busy themselves with infighting you begin to wonder whether the aliens aren’t secretly the good guys. Each has different goals and agendas, that aren’t simply ‘save the world’, and that makes diplomacy far more important than it used to be, in terms of which missions you choose to take on and how backing one side affects your standing with the other two. One faction is a group of high-tech survivalists dedicated to maintaining human genetic purity, one wants to try and co-exist with the aliens, and another worships a Lovecraftian god and has found a way to mutate people while still retaining their human mind.

But because the human race is on the edge of extinction the remaining groups have all found very extreme ways of dealing with the crisis. Although at first it doesn’t seem as if any of this is going to make much difference, given the game is still split between high level strategic decisions on a world map and tactical combat on the ground. The game begins with only a few pockets of civilisation left around the world and while linear storytelling has never been very important in XCOM it’s a little more prominent here, with some interesting twists depending on the decisions you make. The virus mutates anything it touches, The Thing style, and after getting into the oceans, thanks to melting polar icecaps, it creates a mutagenic mist on land – whose encroachment is the ticking time bomb that drives the narrative. The backstory to Phoenix Point is at least a little different to XCOM, with a more ethereal, Lovecraftian menace threatening the world after a deadly virus is released from the permafrost.

Phoenix point best faction