Phantom Doctrine

I held off on this game for a long time, mostly because of it's mediocre reviews and my weak hardware. Now that it's on sale I finally gave it a chance and quite honestly, I think it's great. I love all the little details, for example agent backgrounds (KGB,CIA,Mossad, SB and so on), or the different passports seen when you change your agent's identity. Sure, it's nothing special, but in this game it just clicks and contributes to atmosphere. I like the combat system, it's definitely different than most of it's peers, though I do find it annoying when you have a low health agent, behind cover, no enemy in sight and suddenly, an enemy pops up right at the edge of your LOS. Then you know your agent is pretty much dead. Overall presentation is also very solid, music is very fitting, graphics are fine (I'm playing on medium though). Objectively, it does get a little boring (not for me though, this is one of my favorite genre), but that's the story with pretty much every other turn based tactics game. I'd say this one has more going for it than for example X-COM. The arsenal available is passable, it's not gun porn like Jagged Alliance 1.13 or Silent Storm games, which I would very much like it to be, lacks some variety, overall, could've been better, but definitely not bad. Models are quite nice, have way more details than X-Com 2 guns. I didn't like two things really ( didn't finish the game yet though), the animations and lack of destructible enviroment. Animations are pretty stiff and not very plentiful. And on a final note, a word on optimization, it runs considerably better than X-Com 2, even though it's min requirements are higher. Personally, I have very high hopes for the sequel.

So far I've played through the game as KGB. This alone is many hours of gameplay. I love the graphics and music, they're solid. There's a good mumber of different maps, but for general missions some maps are used more than once. I'm ok with that, it's not too excessive. A bit more loction diversity would be good though, to make different parts of the world feel distinctive. The agent customisation is interesting and allows for creating agents that serve specific tasks, for example I've made snipers, diguise agents, etc. by combining various skills, equipment and weapons. I like the strategy and planning. I wish that the tactical recon would give more information before planning the team, like a dossier with floorplans and stuff. Then I could design a team that's focused on the map. It's a long game which takes many hours, and it a lot of the interesting technology and weapons don't show up until much later in the game. Some of them I think too late as many I never ended up using. I'll try to explore them more if I play again. A new mission does unlock after playing through to the end, so I'd like to do that one day. Some reviews are saying that the game discourages combat, but even with care I find it can break out unexpectedly at any moment. You also don't have to be stealthy, you can create attack teams with heavy armoured and high powered weapons - but you'll have to get in, do the task and get out fast this way It's the kind of game where it's easy to fall in to just grinding it out. You can acheive all the goals without being tidy or efficient. To keep if fun and interesting you need to focus on the strategy and planning. The game could do better at envouraging this. For example limiting the number of turns for a mission, or a reward for being fast. Anyway, I enjoyed it and expect I'll play again in the future

It's a great game managing your "cabal" of spies as they investigate a huge conspiracy. There's a lot of disguising, assasinating, planting and disarming bombs and if everything goes badly, running from enemy helicopters. The one gripe I have with it is that it needs more varied types of assault missions. It can get a bit repetitive flying your spies all over the World and karate chopping enemy agents from behind. But honestly, how many good Cold War games are there? The Cold War theme is quite strong in this game and I like that a lot. And yes, you can play stealthily, but sometimes you don't have enough time, so you have to go heavy armor and machine guns. Also, different from the old XCOM style, you almost never have a problem hitting a target, it's a matter of how many of your bullets hit and how much damage you do. So apart from the somewhat grindy assault missions, it's a solid Cold War TBS. If they ever make an improved version, with more varied assault mission types, I'll get it 100%. I wish the devs the best.

It's a weird one. Spy game with tactical and strategic layer. In strategic layer you keep an eye on world map, dispatch agents, find&target enemy cells and seek&destroy their operations. You also manage and upgrade your base, solve investigation board minigame etc. In tactical layer, you manually control a team of agents to accomplish some objective(typically 'go and use X thing' or 'neutralise Y targets'). You start in infiltration mode, and if you break it by for example getting seen in secured area or enemy discovering a body, you get into combat mode with constant enemy reinforcements(so you are incentivized to finish missions stealth'ely, but as long as you can complete the objective it doesnt really matter if you triggered the alarm). Its a weird game because if you choose, you can play it in extremly boring and frustrating fashion, and if you do you will probably die from boredom and uninstall it after few hours. Thats how i felt anyway, but thankfully i did some research before i completly gave up. A lot of very cool stuff is hidden in plain sight. Interrogation facility unlocked in early-mid game being the most obvious one, but combining breach with silenced guns for fast and stealthy room/corridor clears is not quite so obvious. And that bio engineering facility that you unlock early on, and feels useless then? Yeah in mid-end game, with right usage you can basically create super-humans that WILL breeze through any mission with ease. Early on, you are encouraged to full-clear maps for every piece of intel and equipment(and it takes FOREVERR) but its really only necesary at the start, the further you get the less important those extra goodies are and once i realised it felt refreshing to just do a quick 'get in, complete objective, get out' without worrying about searching every locker on the map. tl;dr: Great game but you NEED to play smart and use/abuse game systems or it will feel like a chore.

This game does a lot of things and non of them good. Stealth gameplay? you don't have enough tools or information to be stealthy. Your "spies" start the game with LMG under their coats. Silencer? meeeeh it's for late game. Let's just murder tons of people gun blazing and then go back to pretending civilians. Enemies doesn't react to sounds like breaking windows, running, opening and closing doors. Vision cones are somehow weird... Combat? Oh god... There is no RNG right? WRONG. Again you are not given enough information. You have no idea how many awareness enemies have so you can kill enemy or just graze him. Cool. For proper spy stealth tactical gameplay choose Invisible Inc. For combat games you have like 100 better games then this so just roll a dice and pick whatever.