You've earned the right to mess with the XCOM formula when
you're the person chiefly responsible for it. Julian Gollop was the
co-lead designer on the original XCOM: UFO Defense in 1994, and Phoenix Point,
from Gollop's new studio Snapshot Games, is a self-described spiritual
successor to XCOM. At first it feels all too familiar: You play the
eponymous private military organisation defending Earth from an alien
threat, patching holes in the sinking ship via tactical combat and
strategic upgrades. But Phoenix Point reinvents the formula in both big
and small ways, sending changes rippling across the strategic map and
tinkering with the nuts and bolts of close combat. Not every new idea is
equally successful, though many of them are welcome, and in sum deliver
a refresh that points the genre in an exciting new direction.
As with the first XCOM sequel, Terror from the Deep,
the threat here comes from the ocean. A mysterious mist is creeping at
the coast, luring people into the sea and returning them as Lovecraftian
fish monsters--all scaly-skinned, newly betentacled, and packing
crustaceous heat, an army of soldier crabs. Phoenix Point is joined in
defending the planet by three ideologically distinct factions: New
Jericho want to destroy the aliens, the Synedrion want to coexist with
them, and the Disciples of Anu want to synthesize human and alien life.
Many of the missions you undertake will inevitably involve offending at
least one of the factions and so, no matter how impartial you to try to
remain, eventually you're going to have to choose sides. It's a
depressing, relevant example of humanity's failure to come together in
the face of existential catastrophe.
On
the world map, presented here as it was in the original XCOM as the
Geoscape, a rotatable globe pockmarked with scouted points of interest,
the mist is a red miasma slowing enveloping the planet, a Doomsday Clock
ticking closer to midnight one continent at a time. This strategic
layer runs in real time as your Phoenix squads fly from one flashpoint
to the next, while you work on increasing base capacity, manufacturing
new arms, and researching new military solutions. All the while the red
mist spreads, escalating the danger as new nests appear and strangling
your ability to fight back as faction outposts fall. It's the perfect
visual representation of the odds you're facing and the seeming
inevitability of defeat. Despite the abstraction, it's genuinely painful
to see the mist consume a settlement you had heroically rescued only
days earlier.
At a strategic level, Phoenix Point wants
to let you pick your own path. The Geoscape is at the start shrouded in
the fog of war. Through scanning nearby areas and aerial exploration it
soon becomes a sprawling, cluttered morass of multi-coloured icons
describing your own bases, factional havens, key quest destinations,
potential scavenging sites, neutral colonies, alien nests, and other
unidentified locations. You have considerable freedom in navigating your
own route across this world. You can basically travel wherever you like
and, when you arrive, you can usually decide whether or not to take on
the mission you've encountered. Want to save this low-threat scavenging
mission for some new recruits further down the line? Just hit abort and
fly your veteran squad into more dangerous territory.
It's
liberating, at least early on, as you jet around, scouting the map,
picking and choosing your next mission. Yet by the time you have
multiple squads traversing the globe, and you're juggling a handful of
different flight paths across a Geoscape that has exploded into a galaxy
of competing icons, that liberation is swamped by confusion. It's not
that it's hard to tell what you could do next--important story missions
and factional quests are highlighted--it's more that there are so many
things to do that it's easy to lose yourself in endless distractions or
worse, drown under an overwhelming wave of map markers.
Indeed,
the chaotic, confounding clutter of the Geoscape is emblematic of some
wider interface issues. The research screen throws every possible tech
into a long list with scant attention given to how useful it might or
where it might lead. There's a research order function, but you can only
send one tech to the front of the queue, not adjust the order further
down. Inventory management is a mess when it comes to comparing
different weapons to equip and deciding which new gear to manufacture.
The
the freeform structure of the Geoscape guarantees no two campaigns will
play out alike. What those campaigns have in common, however, is a
mentally exhausted player. You're pulled in so many directions. Two
colonies are under attack in India but an alien nest needs eradicating
in Malaysia. New Jericho wants to assist its research in China but the
Synedrion wants you to sabotage Jericho's research lab in Australia. And
all the while there are dozens of unexplored spots in Africa that you
haven't even visited yet. But it’s worth battling through the stress and
clutter to get to the combat.
What typically awaits at a
destination is a bout of small-scale, turn-based combat. Occasionally
you will stumble upon a simple narrative event that will give you a
decision to make and readjust your resources or factional reputation in
response, but for the most part, you will find yourself engaged in a
firefight.
At a combat level, Phoenix Point is all about
tactical flexibility. There are four primary classes--heavy, assault,
sniper, and melee--but perk trees are semi-randomly rolled for each
soldier, and you can also allow them to multi-class. This means no two
soldiers have to be the same, and you have a lot of room to tailor each
six-person squad to suit your preferred style of play. My first heavy
was the typical tank character, lots of health and a big cannon, but
later adopted a secondary class and would jet pack onto a roof and
launch a few grenades to destroy the enemy's cover before switching to a
sniper rifle to finish them off.
Many of the man-made
structures on a map can be damaged and destroyed. Grenades and other
heavy weapons can remove that pillar you were relying on for cover. Even
the humble pistol can shoot through a thin wall, hitting anything that
was on the other side and leaving them more exposed for a follow-up
shot. My jet-packing heavy nearly bit the dust one time when the roof
they'd landed on gave way in an explosion, dumping them into the room
below where a nasty crab creature lurked. Fortunately, on the next turn,
they were able to jetpack to safety out of the newly renovated ceiling.
When
you take a shot, you aren't given a percentage chance to hit while some
dice are rolled to see if you did any damage. Instead, bullet
trajectories are said to be physically simulated, meaning if you can see
something, you can hit it. There are two ways to take a shot. The
default has you aiming generally at the centre of the target's mass.
Take an aimed shot, though, and you're given a first-person view where
what you point at is what you'll shoot. You can target an enemy's limbs
or their weapon or even another object in the environment, and for the
most part you're likely to hit it. There is a degree of fuzziness
here--you'll see the crosshair surrounded by two rings, the inner one
indicating where most of the shot(s) will hit and the outer accounting
for any remainder--and the accuracy and damage of any particular shot is
still affected by the weapon's range and other stats. But it's very
satisfying to destroy an enemy's shield with one well-aimed sniper shot,
then follow it up with an assault rifle round to the now-exposed head.
The
ability to target specific limbs becomes vitally important as more
diverse enemy types start populating the battlefield--you'll very
quickly need to worry about more than those wielding shields. The sheer
variety of enemy types and behaviours issues an interesting challenge
every turn and have you constantly thinking about cover, height, range,
support, supplies, teamwork and priorities. In addition, every enemy is
susceptible to a well-aimed shot that cripples a specific limb, thus
slowing its movement, nullifying its special ability, destroying its
weapon or inhibiting its mode of attack. As a result there's so much
more to think about in combat than just methodically moving your squad
forward and shooting the enemy when they appear.
The
flexibility is heightened by the action point system that provides more
options than just moving and shooting. Every soldier has 4 APs, but
different weapons and abilities use different amounts, and the ground a
soldier can cover in 1 AP is affected by their speed stat. Two of my
assault troops worked in perfect tandem: one was a shotgun expert with
the speed to close quickly on their target and use a debuff that reduced
the APs of nearby hostiles, the other hung back a bit, offering support
with their longer-range rifle, entering overwatch every turn thanks to
its cheaper cost, and running in with a medkit if the other took damage.
Both characters started out the same, but the wildly different level-up
choices I made for them, coupled with the capacity to spend their APs
every turn on a mostly unique suite of options, meant they felt
distinct--like characters whose behaviour I had authored and who I was
personally responsible for. I'd invested in their stats, tweaking them
in parallel to become complementary, and as a result, had become
emotionally invested in them.
When
you lose a soldier it hits hard, of course. Any soldier that goes down
in a fight is permanently dead, and you have to recruit a novice to
replace them. Yet while your emotional investment can never be fully
recovered, the stat investment can be at least partially reclaimed. This
is because experience points earned from completing missions is awarded
to each individual soldier who participated and to a common pool.
You're free to dip into this pool whenever you wish--maybe you just need
a few more points to unlock that next tier perk you've had your eye
on--but my strategy was to save the pool for new recruits. Every time I
hired a new soldier I was able to level them up several times before
they had pulled a trigger. It's a clever, flexible system that means
veteran troop losses are a setback, but never a debilitating or
irredeemable one.
The tactical combat doesn’t suffer
from the clumsy interface design that plagues the strategic layer. There
are convenient overlays informing you of movement ranges, AP
consumption, and targeting possibilities, it’s easy to scroll between
different terrain heights, and everything requires deliberate selection
so you don’t end up performing an action you didn’t intend. However I
did very, very occasionally run into a problem where the overlay would
tell me I had line of sight from a certain tile if I moved there, only
to move there and discover I couldn’t actually see the enemy. And after
dozens of hours of play, I still have no idea why my soldiers would
sometimes start a new mission with their weapons needing reloading, nor
indeed how to reload them when not in a mission. But these feel like
trivial concerns in the grander scheme of what is an overall robust
combat engine.
Phoenix Point has plenty of bold new
ideas for the XCOM genre, but not all of them have the same level of
shine. It can feel a bit unwieldy at times, a bit less user-friendly
than you'd hope. But it's a game that feels more concerned with
experimentation than perfection, that's more interested in discovering
new paths to take than walking one that's already well-trodden. As a
hybrid tactical/strategy game, it's dynamic and deep with the
occasionally disorientating misfire along the way. As a contribution to
the genre XCOM first defined, it's a well-aimed shot.
