![]() ![]() Phoenix Point will then generate a number of interactable landmarks, which are hidden. When you start a Phoenix Point campaign, you’re given a handful of survivors and plopped somewhere on the globe. All of these groups are at war with the murderous Pandorans, and on the brink of war with each other. They seek to use the Pandoran DNA to mutate themselves into more perfect beings. The Disciples of Anu figure that if the world now has crab monsters, you might as well worship them. Synedrion is is a democratic group of ecologists that seek to find ways to live in harmony with the new alien ecosystem. New Jericho is a group of techno-fascists who seek to fight back the aliens with the power of bigger guns. Since the collapse, three groups have risen to try to hold humanity together. The apocalypse itself took place some time ago. It’s a pretty unique setting, part alien invasion and part Cthulhu, and distinct enough from previous games that I really got sucked into the world. Some become slimy coral toad things, others become hulking crabs mixed with sea worms, and others become mind control lobsters. Called the Pandorans, these sea creature things are as nasty as they are diverse. 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. 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 ![]()
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