Thread by @Aron_dc

"Short" opinion on #PhoenixPoint : I played it for about 15 hours now and while it has a nice promise and some refreshing gameplay techniques it lacks on many little details that are important to make this a "good" and "enjoyable" game.

(I backed it in 2017)

After a very promising intro that sets up the scenario of a virus that was released from the arctic ice due to global warming you're thrown into a very basic tutorial that explains just the basic basics.

On the geosphere you start with your first base and your first VOTL.

The main thing you're doing here is sending your Team from "?" to "?" to discover either random encounters (ambushes or supplies), havens (cities of one of the three factions) or short scenarios (dialogues that may have good/bad outcomes - resources, faction popularity)

Later on you also send your team to already found enemy bases or to support attacked havens and very few (in the first 15 hours) special missions (basically combat missions with some special task). While it's designed nicely, the handling of these activities is boring.

Discovering unknown sites leaves no feeling of actually doing something (besides getting thrown into combats every once in a while), all the other stuff feels like some nicely formatted excel macros.

This wouldn't be bad if the game would (gently) help you making progress.

Because nothing you do feels important, me as the player doesn't know what IS important. While there is a "Phoenixpedia" describing some gameplay mechanics and having some lore, it always feels like tooltips in the right spot could have helped a lot better.

Lorewise the Phoenixpedia lacks of content (I know there are plenty of articles about person XYZ) about the bigger picture, goals, backgrounds for equipment/vehicles/even aliens. Most of the things I saw were describes in 1-2 short sentences. The things that ARE fleshed out...

... are often things me, as the player, doesn't interact that much with it (e.g. leaders of the factions, yeah they exist and they seem to have personality and so on, but knowing their clichés makes background unimportant for them).

Research is pretty straight forward. You're given all options that you're currently able to do research on and the time it will take to finish it. Then you just put them all in a list and wait. (again research doesn't give very much lore wise)

Not everything on the geosphere level is bad (and there are certainly good things I forget to mention here), as the design is neat, the growing areas of "virus" mist clearly communicate the growing danger and havens interacting with each other is ...

... also interesting, although very hidden from the player.

Being a bit lost in the geosphere level (lack of a clear goal to progress; lack of actual things to do) the combat layer is a lot better (but still has its weaknesses).

On the combat layer you lead your deployed...

team through a combat scenario against the "aliens" or (if you're working against one of the havens) human enemies. This is mostly in industrial or city environments seldom (in case of destroying an alien base) in some organic alien like surrounding.

Most of these levels seem to be randomly put together by some lego like system (building A, parking lot B, Street A,...) and are actually nice to watch. Gameplaywise some of these "bricks" are a bit too hard to navigate through (yes I mean you reactor building F! ^^).

All of these are fully destructible, so if your enemies would be wise enough to barricade themselfs into a room with just one entrance you can easily add one or two additional ones. The destruction looks a bit weird because all building blocks just fall apart in big chunks. ...

That may not be visually nice but it's okay. You can use your surroundings to get cover and your solders will (most of the time) correctly take a sidestep out of it to fire. Firing exists in two modes automatic (firing basically at the enemy) and ...

manual aim (where you can target for limbs or the weapons of the enemies to disable their ability to fire or to use certain special abilities). Manual is often the preferred way as it's always worthwile to shoot for less protected body parts or knock out mind control abilities...

Unfortunately it's hard to predict from where you can hit what parts of an enemy, so moving and then firing is often a question of luck, as the movement indicator only hints to "some" free line of sight to enemies. It would be helpful to have a "simulate movement" option.

As I learned the hard way combats get hard very fast (even in the easy mode i chose to play in - story player here *waves to the crowd*) and only seems to be doable by heavily abusing the games willpower mechanics (special abilities of your soldiers use up willpower points, ...

while killing enemies partly replenishes them). This shouldn't be a thing on easy mode to my mind (It would be fine if this was needed in normal or hard mode). In some missions you have to protect buildings or containers from alien attacks but ...

it's often impossible to even safe half of them as they have laughably less life and aliens concentrating their attacks on them even when put under fire by your team. While it's a nice idea, the player lacks in possibilities to actually protect them properly here.

The soundtrack is at best unremarkable. I couldn't remember only one song in the game if I had to(not even one that plays multiple times), while the "team loadout screen and deployment" music from the newer XCOM titles is still in my head (my last session was in June!)

Is Phoenix Point still a good game? Yes, if you like meta gaming a lot and your focus is on tactical combats with adapting aliens (they change their loadouts depending on your last tactics). I can't say that much about the story but besides the base scenario...

it wasn't much of it present in the first few hours (when a game normally should pull you in story AND gameplaywise). Doing special missions get's you short story sequences but again they lack their placement in the bigger picture (-> no real feeling of progress besides videos).

Let's hope that Snapshot Games patches some of the bigger issues out of the game and maybe giving more time for the development, before pushing out their already announced DLC, still make this a good game. Titles like No Mans Sky showed that there is redemption for such games.

In the current state I'd rather chose to play XCOM2 (when it comes to graphics and overall presentation), Xenonauts (Lore, base building, management) or ,if you're retro enough, the old XCom titles and wait for the further development of Phoenix Point.

@threadreaderapp unroll this please

(And I didn't even get started on the, to my mind, nonsensical behaviour of the three factions at the brink of extinction)