#Phoenix point gameplay series#

When they emerge, they’re crab people with machine guns. A strange mist begins to cover the earth, and a voice calls people into the ocean. This virus is called the Pandoravirus, and causes shit to go from fine to end-times in a heartbeat. That apocalypse in this timeline comes in the mutant pandemic variety. You play as the Phoenix Project, a nearly dismantled secret organization tasked with saving the world from generalized apocalypses. On the surface, Phoenix Point will be immediately recognizable to anyone that is familiar with X-COM. This didn’t fit anywhere else in the review, but Phoenix Point has giant mutant attack dogs you can make. Did Phoenix Point succeed as was prophecized? Eh… kinda? So when creator Julian Gollop announced that Snapshot Games would be creating a spiritual successor to his original X-COM series, fans regarded it as a returning of the chosen one to cast out the pretenders and reclaim the throne of tactical alien-fighting goodness.

#Phoenix point gameplay series#

Graphics are the least important part of a tactics game, and if your revival of a series is just, “same thing but prettier,” it won’t really matter to fans of the original.

I wouldn’t say I entirely agree with this standpoint, but I can see where they are coming from. Many felt that the games were too easy, and simply a rehashing of concepts that were already done 20 years ago. While universally praised by critics and casual audiences, the newest X-COM games were actually received relatively poorly by hardcore fans. It’s hard to understand the enormity of this shift without an intimate understanding of the X-COM community.

With Phoenix Point, original X-COM creator Julian Gollop is attempting something big: to change up and evolve the core gameplay mechanics of the genre, while still maintaining the spirit of the originals. With X-COM 2‘s release in 2016 (technically X-COM 5), the game is still about setting up all your troops so you have the best chance of the dice rolling in your favor, but easier and with some extra bells and whistles. When it started in 1994, X-COM was a game about carefully setting up your troops so that you have the best chance of all your dice rolling in your favor. For no series is this on better display than X-COM. And for tactics games, you roll dice and pray. For 4X games, you pick which path you want to focus on before rushing the tech that will get you there the fastest.

For RTS games, unit blobs will slam into other unit blobs with the most optimized unit blob coming out on top. While visuals and optimization improve, the fundamental mechanics of the genre rarely change. But Sid Meier has basically been making the same game for 28 years, and there’s no fundamental difference between Starcraft 1 and 2 other than prettier graphics. Don’t get me wrong, I love myself some Starcraft and Civilization. I’m of the camp that believes that the strategy genre needs to evolve. PHOENIX POINT Review – Two Steps Forward, One Step Back