Yep, the best kind of recommendation:
• It is not worth your HDD space
• Everything is bad
• Launch product is worse than Beta
• Step backwards from Xcom
How about we wait for the people putting some effort into playing the actual game and writing a critique/review material instead of listening to the demagogue.
I mean, he played it repeatedly over the backer builds and gave it another long stream shot with the release copy he had.
At the end of the day the devs never solved the issue he had with it, and what I'm having with it, which is that the game just kinda flat out sucks at actually informing you what your options are, or otherwise really felt like a very unique way of doing a thing was the Correct (tm) thing to do even when you step back and realize it creates a lot of issues.
I wasn't expecting a carbon copy of Firaxis's games, but a really neat thing about Firaxis's games is that there's a lot of slick design choices designed to make sure you actually understand what you can do with your given tools at a rapid pace.
Meanwhile Phoenix Point honestly just has a bunch of issues that seem to be the result of the only testers being people already experienced with the game:
1) The game doesn't tell you how much damage bashing with a particular item does, so the only way you're gonna find out that it is wildly different depending on item with your Strength only changing it up a bit is when you actually try it out for the first time and hear *DINK* of 0 damage. It was dumb when LW2 had a bunch of stuff that you could only find out via squad wipe, it's still dumb when Phoenix Point does it.
2) The LOS indicator lies incredibly badly at times.
- I've come to the realization that it seems to assume the soldier is using a rifle even if they're a Heavy currently wielding their cannon. This is a bit of a problem when some types of cover can end up blocking a Heavy from using a cannon shot at their current position.
- It also seems to be far more lenient with how it assumes a soldier will be able to step out from cover in order to take a shot. Again, bit of a problem when it turns out the cover you chose to move to does not allow a soldier to step out from cover in order to take a shot.
3) I'm still confused what the free aiming system as designed is supposed to bring to the table.
- It's not great for demolishing cover enemies are using because you have to 100% eyeball it when you do so: better hope everybody's using unique cover and you're not the kind of person who can lose track of things if you're trying to look for one specific piece of scrap metal cover that's big enough to cover up even the heaviest enemies.
- It still feels like something you have to do instead of something you can do because the fact that everybody aims at center mass by default kinda sucks when the game is in that zone where letting enemies live longer than they need to is a very bad idea.
- And sometimes it doesn't even stop the situation that the whole system is supposed to solve in the first place.
4) The fact that your ability to recruit additional people is 100% dependent on RNG because it depends on havens is complete BS with how the battlescape is designed.
- To be clear: the way the game works is that you need to be able to build up your relationship with havens so you can recruit people from them for soldier replacements.
- You can only do this with havens you have a high enough relationship with, and if they actually have the facilities required to produce recruits.
- It is 100% RNG on how many of those kind of havens will spawn. Now, this wouldn't be that bad of an game mechanic if it was like nuCOM where you have highly capable supersoldiers that you want to keep alive as much as possible.
- By all accounts though, especially from looking at the relatively boring perk trees and how easy they level up, this is supposed to be a game ala oldCOM where the equipment you gave them matters a lot more than the meat inside, and the game's willing to throw sudden walls of difficulty at you to introduce new threats.
- In oldCOM, this worked just fine because the Geoscape there was 100% setup to allow meat grinder situations if needed.
- In Phoenix Point however, especially at higher difficulties, this will very well end at a squad wipe if you're not careful or if it's your first encounter with how return fire works in the game on enemies because return fire is a completely broken skill with how it interacts with the game's mechanics.
- Because of this, it is quite possible, through no fault of your own, to be unable to actually recover from a squad wipe because the game will simply never give you the option to even attempt to do so.
5) Actually no I'm going make Return Fire it's own separate bullet point, because it is just completely not fun to fight against:
- The way it works is that it gives reaction fire to enemies after someone takes a hostile action against a unit on your team. (or the AI's team if you're fighting them).
- See, the thing is, it gives reaction fire that kicks in while the enemy is still in its firing animation. Which is basically a copy of how nuCOM's animations work, exposing their body a lot.
- In nuCOM, this is fine, because XCOM's animations are just visual flair: everything damage wise is working on its own seperate system that doesn't care how the animations are trying to visualize what it's doing.
- In Phoenix Point, however, this means that any reaction fire shots from Return Fire occurs while the person being shot at is most exposed. Meaning that once you're up against return fire enemies, the best thing to do is not take any offensive actions because you will just get your soldier lighted up if you don't have perfect cover to use.
- This is compounded by the fact that return fire is a very silly implementation of the reaction fire rules of oldCOM, because it removes element sfrom what was required in oldCOM.
- Specifically, in oldCOM, a unit's ability to use reaction fire was greatly influenced by how much Time Units they had remaining: if a unit expended all its time units, it could never reaction fire at all. This meant that you could get an intuitive idea of how likely your unit could get shot in the face if you knew how much a specific unit had acted during a turn, and be able to gauge whether you could risk it or not. In addition, it was also dependent on the reactions stat of a particular unit: so some units may have been ace crackshots, others were more bad surprises every once in a while.
- This element is removed from Return Fire in Phoenix Point, and reduced to just the LOS check and the remaining ammo check. There's not even an element of "can only happen once per turn/per enemy/etc" to at least try mollifying how often it can happen, so instead we're left with "return fire enemies are basically automatic response turrets until they finally kick the bucket or lose their weapons".
Like I really wanted to like this game, and I'm willing to put up with a bunch of jank (shoot, I liked Phantom Doctrine for all its warts), but this game just has so many flaws that aren't just jank: like a good chunk of this needs serious work on it still or honestly just a rework entirely because I do not see how some of these things are supposed to be fun.
Shoot, I do like the non-combat parts of the game: I think they nail the aesthetic they're going for and the general XCOM-apocalypse inspired direction of the Geoscape in terms of having to deal with three factions that 100% actually despise each other instead of just not liking each other even as the actual alien apocalypse is approaching, but it's just not enough to keep this game fun for me in its current state.
