Phantom Doctrine

About Phantom Doctrine I learned in December after reading the review and acquaintance with screenshots. I fell in love with the visual style at first sight. In order to feel the gameplay it was enough to complete the several missions. Although some solutions at first looks strange, but in general they all work to the benefit of the game. We have amazing mix from JA2, Gorky-17, Commandos 2 and XCOM. Manually created missions pleased with the thoughtfulness and elegance of possible tactics. High agents customization, delicious random and infinity progress allowed to me spend time with nice emotions in companies KGB and CIA for many hours! Especially pleasant that the game was lucky with really great music! So in this post I express my rapture to the authors and look forward to news about any addons or sequels. Thanks

Like another thing I had once looked forward to that also had Phantom in the title, it started out promisingly enough but went horribly wrong from there. My last mission was pretty typical. First, I got the recon done, giving me the chance to use a disguise. Luckily, one of my senior agents had the Actor perk, which makes sure that his disguise can't be detected. I sent him and another senior agent in, with the non-disguised guy moving around outside and carefully not trespassing yet. The idea was to get the lay of the land before committing myself to any action. Except that someone saw through my detection-proof disguise, which meant that the agent I had peacefully minding his own business outside was detected as well. I got to watch two enemies on the other side of the map use submachine guns to do 50+ damage a burst to the guy loitering outside. Funny thing is that he was in partial cover, so I can only assume that the damage would have been significantly worse had he been in the open. Not that it mattered; two bursts were more than enough. And as others have noted, there is no missing in this game. The tutorial mentions that awareness can help agents dodge, but I'm only 30 hours into the game and haven't seen it happen yet. The guy inside fared slightly better. One enemy popped out, doing the requisite 53 damage burst. I returned fire, almost point blank with large caliber, fully automatic fire and did... drumroll please... 23 damage. At that point I began to suspect that I wasn't going to make it. I didn't. There's a lot to love in this game but sadly this scenario, with some variations, happens on about half of the missions I go on. After awhile you start to get frustrated. There's a lot the devs get right, and this game has a LOT of potential, but when things go wrong they tend to go all the way wrong. Hopefully the future brings a little more balance to things.

Phantom Doctrine has a lot going for it. It's in a similar vein to other "AP" style games like Shadowrun, but is more specefically a strategy game like Battletech or Achthung Cthulhu Tactics. Phantom Doctrine has a character building and leveling system that is a lot like the above mentioned games. I really really love the variety of agents one can create. And the voice acting is done really well. And combining the missions with the more top down base defense part of the game is a cool aspect. It makes the game feel very nuanced and complete. The music is well written and sounds good! I definitely reccomend this game for people who like the more contemporary RPG / Strategy blends, like Battletech or Cthulhu Tactics or Shadowrun.

I really like this game. The battles are hard, but you can avoid them most of the time. I also like the fact that you can have supporting agents, that act as observers and other roles in the tactical missions. Beside the tactical missions there are many interresting things to do in the base and on the strategic world map.

Core gameplay on the tactical level is very similar to the newer XCOMs, with a variety of operation types on randomised levels and environments, and a smattering of special missions. Unfortunately the sheer number of standard operations that have to be carried out quickly causes tedium to set in causing the game to become a bit of a grind. This was not helped by the extremely repetitive soundtrack - some games have small soundtracks that just fade into background and that's fine but somehow this one was irritatingly noticeable. The strategic layer was a bit more involved and interesting than XCOM, but the progression system was very opaque and it wasn't really clear to me whether acquiring new tech was just completely random or dependent in some way on my actions. From hints given in abilities I'm guessing I never got to use a load of interesting poison and trap mechanics which is a shame but I had no idea when or how to unlock these! I thought this led to a dodgy diffculty curve where early fights are to be avoided at all costs because you have no gear and no abilities, and then later fights became essentially a tiring massacre of waves of enemies. The story is very low-key and doesn't have enough impetus to pull you forwards and so I ultimately gave up - I felt like I was ploughing in loads of hours and not really getting anywhere with the story. I can see that there were some good ideas baked into Phatom Doctrine but the bloated number of randomised operations and lack of sense of progress was a killer. I genuinely hope the devs make a sequel or similar game in another setting that is more streamlined because this had promise and just fell short of being enjoyable. (As an example of less being more - Shadow Tactics was only 12 "operations" and had me gripped right to the end)