Phoenix Point: Complete Edition

I like the theme: Less Roswell, but more consistent crab, millipede and bug monsters, and humanoid friends and enemies. The enemies come in numerous variations with different weapons and abilities; lots of variety and tactical depth - not mere palette swaps. The free-aiming feature is a great addition and one I'm sure I'll miss whenever I play another tactical game: Targeted attacks disable specific abilities or weapons, which is essential for dealing with powerful enemies. Why focus everyone on killing a spawner, when you can just disable its spawning ability? Why punch through a heavy shield, when you can just disable the arm holding it? Balancing is weird, though. Some tiny creatures can ruin you, while giant monsters may lumber around uselessly. The DLCs are a mixed bag, adding more variety, but also more balancing problems. Defending human havens against attacks have random response times: These can be very long or ridiculously short (leading to the haven's immediate destruction). Can't save everyone, I guess, but it doesn't feel like I did anything wrong, there simply was no chance to intervene. Map themes and set piece variety are nice, but the campaign is very long and you will certainly run into repeating scenery. The factions were interesting, if a bit cartoonish in the extreme positions they represent. Interaction with them is limited, though: They're more like progress bars for quests and research than fully realized allies or rivals. Also, while you can get them all to like you just fine, they're bound to hate each other and you can only neuter them - stop them from killing each other - but not get them to work together. I noticed some small bugs, including one that made attacking an enemy base impossible (fixable via console); the cursor dragging the entire screen around; not being able to interact with markers on the Geoscape until you moved the globe around some. Nothing game breaking. Overall, a cool tactics game with slight annoyances.

This game can be best summed up as “two steps forward, two steps backwards”. It looks very pretty. There is a lot of player agency. You can mutate or mechanically augment your soldiers, and there is a leveling system for each class. There is a “free aim” system which allows you to aim at specific enemy parts. And a lot of other cool stuff. The DLC that introduces air warfare is so poorly thought that it’s like it had no QA for balancing. There is a bug that makes opponents skip their turns in some instances when you load a tactical map from a save. Upgrades are not really upgrades, but they are more like “sidegrades”; which makes research very underwhelming most of the time. On maximum difficulty, the more successful you are, the game is designed to keep increasing the number of enemies on the tactical maps until the point you will become overwhelmed, which is an incredibly poorly thought mechanic. I hope mods will “fix” it and do another run in the future. https://pixelloot.com

After all this time I finally got to play the game, and this seems like the version the creators intended at last. I had one bug with a character refusing to go into standby, but thankfully ending my turn fixed the problem. The graphics look good, the game runs smooth, I quite liked the blending of alien lore with a viral threat and a surprising nautical theme. Phoenix Point almost feels like a very extensive mod of XCom Enemy Unknown, playing on similar themes, giving you the geoscape with missions, a base to manage, a picked team of customizable soldiers to fly to troubled hot spots, you research enemies and build equipment...etc. BUT The additions are where things get new and exciting. No more RNG! You can take physical aim at anything you can see. No more whiffs at close range. If you miss a shot chances are good something got in the way. There's a faction system now which is fun and packed with story, allowing you to finagle resources for favors and get in good standing by making the enemies of your allies your own foes. Maps are vertical: climb a roof and get a vantage. Maps are destructible: blast the room your foe is standing in until he's exposed. People say the loop can be repetitive, but that's not going to be an issue very quickly as there's lots of different missions in different locations. You can buy vehicles and drive them into combat. There's multiple endings. It's an excellent game! Might have taken awhile to get there but this stands toe-to-toe with Enemy Unknown now, and I prefer hitting what I can see.

If you're looking to save the humankind from cataclysmic threat, look elsewhere. Nearly a year after the release of Year One Edition, Phoenix Point is still a bug-ridden mess plagued by questionable design choices and poorly optimized code. The newly released Completion Edition isn't much better, either. Spiritual successor to the original XCOM: UFO DEFENSE? I think not.