#PHOENIX POINT REVIEWS FULL#

It’s virtually impossible to avoid damage like you can in XCOM, which took some getting used to.

#PHOENIX POINT REVIEWS FULL#

It also means cover doesn’t work how an XCOM player expects: even though it uses the familiar half and full-shield icons in to indicate how good your cover is, even in full cover you’ll probably take some hits when an enemy sprays you with machine gun fire. Another weird thing is that low-slung weapons like heavy machine guns and cannons are often blocked by your own cover, which means the UI will sometimes tell you you’ll have a clear line of fire if you move to a location but when you get there there’s no shot. How much of an enemy is exposed is even frustratingly affected by their idle animations, which is odd because time is supposedly stopped. That’s great, except when things literally get in the way, which they pretty frequently do (and it’s sometimes hard to tell without zooming in on every shot). Phoenix Point goes to the extreme other direction: every shot is modeled realistically, including individual bullets in an assault rifle’s spray. “It’s an interesting approach because one of the common frustrations with XCOM is that the graphical light show that accompanies firing weapons is just window dressing for the dice rolls that determine the results, which leads to some instances where it looks like you’ve hit a target but you haven’t. If you’re trying to blow off a specific alien limb that’s sticking out, it’s going to be a lot harder to score a hit than aiming center mass and filling your entire scope with alien mass. When you take aim at a target, there’s a circle representing the range of possibilities where your shot might land based on your weapon accuracy and your soldier’s skills, which gives you a pretty good visual representation of your odds instead of the cold hard number we’re used to. Some of those are fun, flexible ideas that produce more memorable moments than they do busywork – like being able to shoot the gun out of an enemy’s hand before they can kill you with it – but more complex doesn’t always mean deeper gameplay. There are too many differences to list, but the trend is toward more complexity in everything from bringing back time units for soldier actions to body part-specific targeting and bullet physics to battlefield inventory management. But while the basic ideas are similar, it takes a significantly different approach to nearly every mechanic. Basic grunts are an ugly jumble of crab-like parts and organic guns but some of the limited variety of more elaborate enemies have genuinely weird and creepy animations.Ģ4 Images Phoenix Point’s look and feel is very clearly visually inspired by Firaxis’ XCOM reboot, though without quite as much visual polish or customization variety in how you deck out your soldiers (and really, can we ever have enough hats for our squads?). Many of those ideas aren’t all that refined, though, and some wild balance swings and general bugginess make turning the tide against the invaders more of an uphill battle than usual.Here, the unwelcome guests humanity is fighting are a combination of people and sea life that’ve been melded together by an alien virus unleashed by melting ice caps, which explains why many of the mutated enemies look like the revenge of the Red Lobster buffet. Phoenix Point has the distinction of being designed by the original creator of that formula, Julian Gollop, and it has some clever ideas that seem to respond to the acclaimed Firaxis-developed XCOM games that streamlined his original concept by reviving some of its famous complexity. As far as I’m concerned, the more takes on the classic X-COM formula of battling alien invasions on both a tactical and global scale the merrier.

Phoenix point reviews