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That said, there's no elaborate environmental destruction going on. Cover is destructible, and since you can free-aim your soldiers' weapons I found heavy cannons and machine guns very useful at times. A wall of corrugated metal won't protect you for long, but a concrete blockhouse is a fortress. It's all modeled with various kinds of hardness. There's nothing quite like the feeling of shooting off an enemy's arm so they drop their shotgun. It seems like a gimmick from the outside, but in play it really won me over. You can automate shooting or take direct control and aim it yourself. The semi-realistic ballistic physics models each shot rather than binary hit or miss attack rolls. Those few abuses aside, your soldiers' precious action points are a resource spent in miserly increments. Focus-fire strategies based around doing massive damage quickly can dominate, as can abusing action-free movement to zoom around. Unless, of course, you can find a way to spend all your willpower that leaves your enemies dead. Willpower is spent to use abilities, a frustrating impetus to not use your cool tricks lest your team collapse into a spiral of panicking soldiers. A solid strategy going into the fight will always prove better than tactics turn-by-turn… mostly. Phoenix Point's tactical combat is about simulated bullets, hundreds of hit points, hit locations, overlapping fields of fire, and careful movement.

These tradeoffs play into the strategy you develop around your forces. Conversely, new weapons and equipment are often measured tradeoffs rather than obvious upgrades. Stats and powers are simple, but spending points to advance is rife with hard decisions. Each soldier also has three statistics: Strength for HP and inventory, Speed for movement, and Willpower for morale. There are six classes, each with unique abilities and equipment.

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It feels bad to need to have played a campaign to understand how to play the campaign.īut the tactical battles only lag through pure repetition, not out of a lack of interesting toys to play with. It feels bad to need to have played a campaign to understand how to play the campaign.

That's a slog in the mid-section of the campaign as you grind through similar missions looking for direction. Figuring out how to progress takes a lot of swinging in the dark hoping some strategy you try is the one that lands. Eventually you're fielding dozens of soldiers across several teams, but you've expanded the scope of your operations to cover the globe and it's never enough.ĭespite this frantic action, the overall path of the campaign is meandering.

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It's a series of ever-more-vicious choices, where expanding your own capabilities in the long term means deciding that Havens will fall in the short term. You're always strapped for resources, deciding whether to send out an exploration team or hold them back to defend threatened Havens. That's probably fine, because the tension on the strategic level is absolutely electric. Despite the extinction-level threat, the three factions are in fact so absurdly petty as to dislike that you've saved a few thousand of the others. Each group has novel ways of fighting the enemy, so allying with one over another earns you unique technology.

Synedrion can't decide if they're an autonomous collective or an anarcho-syndicalist commune. The Disciples of Anu worship mutation and want to leave humanity behind. New Jericho's billionaire leader wants to cleanse the world with fire. A few neutral Havens aside, the three human factions generally hate each other.

Phoenix point steam release