6/28/2023 0 Comments Phoenix point reviewsYet 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 liberating, at least early on, as you jet around, scouting the map, picking and choosing your next mission. 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. 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. You have considerable freedom in navigating your own route across this world. 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. The Geoscape is at the start shrouded in the fog of war. Despite the abstraction, it's genuinely painful to see the mist consume a settlement you had heroically rescued only days earlier.Īt a strategic level, Phoenix Point wants to let you pick your own path. It's the perfect visual representation of the odds you're facing and the seeming inevitability of defeat. 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. 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. 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. It's a depressing, relevant example of humanity's failure to come together in the face of existential catastrophe. 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. 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. 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. 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.Īs with the first XCOM sequel, Terror from the Deep, the threat here comes from the ocean. 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. 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. 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. You've earned the right to mess with the XCOM formula when you're the person chiefly responsible for it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |