Short and sweet: player needs pixel perfect jumping and tolerance for BS, if you have those, this might be for you (I hate pixel perfect jumping myself, and have limited tolerance for BS). SPOILER WARNING Basic gameplay is great, but... ... then you enter these sudden pixel perfect jumping sequences (e.g. the game requires you getting maximum height from jump-airjump-walljump-airdash-walljump sequence several times), unfair fights with bosses that deal third of your health in one hit in 3 hit combo (yes, that's instakill), jumping sequences where you can't see where your next platform is before you're already in air, really inaccurate aiming with analog stick while still demanding almost pinpoint accuracy (bubbles), buggy wall edges that behave inconsistently (I'm as likely to fall off them as jump up as I am to get my double jump off to get as high as the game wants me to). I am also not fan of the elemental matching where you either need to memorize the elements, or keep an item on you that reveals them. Spoilers incoming.... Major FUs in the game: - The wall ledges you need to climb, they just are broken, you succeed at using them by luck. - Royal Scorpion - The steam room fight. - Lava chase Currently I've given up on the the game because of the lava chase, the jumping is just too finicky for me to deal with and my thumb started bruising from the shit the game's been requiring of me. I can forgive the game for the piglet usage, I keep missing them, but that's just me not being observant enough. They're neat, and fortunately not overused. Part of the problem may be that I have old x360 gamepad, but this works great in all other games I've played, so I can't really fault it. I really can't recommend it, and I really doubt these will be changed in patches, so... go as you will.
The basic gameplay is better than the XCOM reboot, tho I still prefer the original X-COM over this, and Hard West is underappreciated with the quality of life things it brought the genre. Biggest flaws with Phoenix Point are pretty much game balance, especially later on with super powerful enemy units, and weird feeling of segregation the factions prompt. I love the manual aim thing (tho it's a bit weird version of targeting limbs), and I love how bullets actually hit where they look like they hit like they did in the original X-COM (and unlike how they do in the XCOM reboot). I also somehow feel some of the world building is somehow... hollow? I'm not sure how to describe it. It feels like it lacks the stuff inbetween, you have your aliens there, Jericho there, Anu there, etc. but there's no overlap that one would expect, or "normal people". The game is also extremely brutal in terms of losing soldiers. Once they go down, they go down. There's no bleedout, no emergency medical, they're Dead. But I am sort of fine with this. It was startling to find out originally, but that was assumption brought over from XCOM, this is not that game. I also kind of felt that I wanted to have more different actions to perform with my soldiers, meaningful actions. And more things to do in geoscape. I also wish there was just some kind of cheap cannon fodder enemies, some of them almost are that, but are far too tough for it. It's hard to say what I like about the game specifically tho. It's just... kinda overall improvement over the XCOM reboot. I also do not like what the dev did with EGS, but I honestly can't care too much about that.
It's kinda like Farcry Primal but with robots and guns. At start. And then it kinda starts going more and more into just scifi with swords ("spear", but you swing it like a sword like a dummy). I've enjoyed it thus far. It's not amazing, but enjoyable nonetheless.
The scifi horror mood is amazing in this top-down roguelike survival(?) shooter. It's barely a roguelike, but it's there. It does what it is here for really well tho. Don't expect super deep mechanics like some roguelike classics, but far more than some roguelites around. No mandatory metaprogression!
