Phantom Doctrine

As many others pointed out, core elemenths of a solid tactics game are there, but nothing ties them together. Game with so many possible actions on a mission feels limited and repeating, pacing is not very well thought out, tedious base segments and unnecessary hard action sections. Visuals would be forgettable if not for constant rain, night and idiotic post effects. Strongest points of the game seem to be the story and the clue minigame, where you have to navigate through documents and photos and tie the edidence together via strings. Sadly, eveything else is not as near as interesting. Reminds me of alpha protocol, but in defense of this game i can say that at least this one is playable and deserves a try on big discount.

Well-designed game with singleplayer hampered by extremely slow progression. Once you unlock your options for stealth and support and double agents and all the assorted gimmick weapons tactical engagements are quite deep and fun, and sneaking around invisibly activating sleepers and grabbing secret documents behind guards' backs is great, but that's dozens of hours into the game and until that point it just plays like a very simplified XCom/Silent Storm. The core of the game is short, randomly generated tactical assaults where you eliminate an enemy agent/plant a bomb/grab somebody to sneak off to your secret lair and bail out as soon as anyone notices you skulking around, and you will be doing A LOT of them through the course of a campaign. While there's a good variety of maps it seems like the game only regularly uses maybe a third to half of them - you'll see a huge elaborate-looking scenario you've never seen before once, in a very short 'extract the lone agent before he dies in four turns' scenario, and then go back to raiding the same damn drug lab four times in a row. May be a better buy for the multiplayer, if you have a couple friends who are into violent noir hide-and-seek, though naturally pulling off the stealth parts is much harder against a human.

I'm having some issues with the controls sometimes I can't position or get the character to move and had to restart the checkpoint maybe a reinstall will help but other than that a great game so far interesting spy story of the cold war what I like is, that you can take sides at the very beginning (KGB is a must - it brings back memories of that time when growing up) the game is not realistic of cause but like a Spy Thriller TV Series great character designs I got it on discount

The core of Phantom Doctrine is turn-based, stealth-focused tactical battles. You have multiple skills and weapons, as well as interface features, to help you finish missions with minimal exposure to hostiles. Once you can go loud, there are other skills and many more weapons to help you with that. However, that's a last resort, as after several turns, increasing enemy reinforcements will eventually kill you if you don't pull out. Overlayed on top of the tactical battles is an agent management sim where you send your group of agents to different cities in the world to scout out enemy activity, protect informants, and frequently interrupt enemy activity at the strategic level, preventing a tactical battle altogether. Your agents gain experience both in tactical battles and strategic activities. When they level up, you can give them both permanent or changeable traits. The changeable ones can be retrained with time and some money. Both kinds give you different skills and proficiency with different weapons. In a interesting twist, an agent who speaks the language of the city where a tactical mission takes place can distract enemies in that mission, but agents who do not speak that language cannot. That is basically the game. There is very little personal connection to the characters since everyone except your character and your handler, maybe the main bad guy (I haven't gotten that far), are randomized. Although you know a conspiracy is happening, you don't get much plot-relevant information in most missions, which are randomized. The intelligence sorting mini-game, where you connect different pieces of intelligence with key words on a tackboard, are almost entirely devoid of meaningful information. So there is really no analyzing aspect of intelligence work, just the wetwork. If that is your thing, this game is great. It offers a lot of options with good production value. If you want more intrigue, especially more lore or analysis, you'll likely be disappointed.

Great game mechanix. Fun to achieve goals different ways.