Phantom Doctrine

I see a surprising amount of "this is not XCom" reviews for Phantom Doctrine. Which is correct: Phantom Doctrine is not XCom. It's a completely different game. In XCom, you start every encounter in the middle of a fight and the aim is to conclude said fight as quickly as possible. In Phantom Doctrine, you start every encounter concealed and the aim is to prolong your non-discovery, even going so far as to avoid fighting altogether. Because you're not fighting aliens. Because you're a spy. Because it's not XCom, see? Honestly, if you pay attention to the tutorial at the beginning and realize that PD has very different mechanics there's a lot to love here. The plot's a little B-movie, sure, and the non-scripted missions can be repetitive, but the random events with your agents, amount of agent customization, the analytics mini-game and getting to plant tracking beacons in enemy agents' butts (the game doesn't specify that's where they go but, honestly, where else would they?) more than evens things out. If you like XCom's game-play but prefer cold war intrigue to alien invasions, give this a go. Just don't expect plasma cannons and jet packs. Because that's XCom. Not Phantom Doctrine.

It's got a compelling 'world conspiracy' story woven into historical events. The idea of it seems similar to Silent Storm, but fleshed out better, with a time period more people are likely to identify with. I personally feel hooked by the game's story and want to play more to see where it goes. The game favours stealth over combat, but rewards both approaches. Stealth with less time in hospital, more opportunities to get loot and intel, while combat nets your characters more XP. On the whole, you will find the rewards of stealthy play to be better than deliberately starting combat. Combat used to be extremely punishing but as of patch 1.0.5, combat is more predictable and consistent. The visual cues are better, sight ranges tweaked and weapon ranges tweaked to more playable values. Playing your agents properly by taking cover and having overlapping fields of overwatch is key. Shooting does not use RNG. Bullets always find their way to the target, but target defense comes from cover and Awareness. Shooting a max awareness enemy will always guarantee the shot will be dodged, even when flanked, so it's always best to find ways to remove awareness, before attempting a kill shot. Or just attack them point blank. The overall UI employs a few questionable design choices which frustrate the player. It's not obvious you can buy and sell items and there's one menu for guns, one menu for equippables, one menu for support items. Why not make everything available in just one menu? Why can I not see what body enhancements are already on my agents? Why can't I see my base stats once I've selected a compound? Why can't I unselect a compound without having to go to another agent? The tutorial is horribly inadequate for what you need to know. It teaches you only about 5% of the game's features. The game has lots of potential and I'm enjoying myself, but only after watching many blind, stumbling mistakes by brave youtubers.

...The bad is still there, constantly reminding you the wasted potential of the game. It's a cool setting. The atmosphere is great. There's a LOT of really cool details, the amount of control you have on your secret organisation is insane: Move your base across the globe, brainwash agent, put moles in enemy organisation, dope your agents. Unlock a huge variety of guns, use cool abilities... ...all of this to realize the balance is all over the place and that the game philosophy does not goes well with the tons of little toys they gave you. You get cool weapons, cool grenade, but the game heavily punish firefight and constantly urge and reward you to use stealth. Using weapons without silencer will lead to a lot of trouble and even if you get out alive, you're still in trouble; Identities of your secret agent may be comprised (and forging new fake ID cost money), the danger level therefore increase, forcing you to relocate base (and this cost A LOT of money) an overall, it's a very bad move. The problem is that you also realize that gunfight balance is all over the place. Enemy LOS are still kind of messed up even post-patch, most of your gadget are useless (Flashbang and noise grenade are utterly pointless, for instance: their radius is ridiculously small and even if you hit, enemies act like nothing happens and still shoot at you anyway), while a few of them are OP. The gameplay itself is ok, although the promised "NO RNG" through the awereness mechanism just introduce equally weird situation were you shoot at people and they just dodge bullet after bullet like it's nothing. Stealth is also poorly balanced: Two agent with high range of movement, with desguise and the "actor" trait will clear any mission, especially since enemies don't react to broken windows, noise, or people crashing through glass roof. But don't let my rant discourage you: Despite these flaws, it sill a game worth its price and I happily sank 80 hours in it without any regret.

The overall ambiance of the game makes it worth it, especially if you like 80's style espionnage. The games progress interestingly. There is a major flaw though, tactical/combat part are way to repetitive: the nature and objectives of the mission are really too similar all the time (unlike in recent XCOMs), it is just a matter of how many persons you need to eliminate or not. Plus the interesting ability to disguise makes it easy in many case to stay in infiltration mode (no combat, hostiles havent detected your activity as such), so it is a bit easy. Finally, the tactictal user interface reminds me of the release of Skyrim: it needs to be patched, in many cases you are requiring to click many times, just to put a unit in overwatch for instance. So the game is fine but the tactical part should clearly be patched and improved.