Page 64 - PC Gamer - UK (February 2020)

RE VIE W

Phoenix Point

VEXCOM

XCOM-like PHOENIX POINT brings great ideas to the

formula, but tries for too much. By Jonathan Bolding

terrible disease has overtaken mankind. The Pandoravirus, your capabilities – as well as caches
an alien threat that’s mutating and twisting our world into NEED TO KNOW of supplies and missions to do. As you
one controlled by swarms of hybrid creatures emerging WHAT IS IT? stretch out you encounter factions of
from the seas. Society has collapsed and new social Turn-based tactics people divided into Havens, fortified
A movements have risen. A few rogue military operatives seek against a tide of settlements of a few thousand.
to revive an old initiative dedicated to securing the future. It will not be fishmen You quickly realise that over 99
easy, as Phoenix Point chooses strategic complexity over tactical simplicity. EXPECT TO PAY per cent of Earth’s human population
£36 is gone. Now mists are rising from
In this Phoenix Point is very much a taking you next – and it goes to some DEVELOPER the oceans to claim the rest.
successor to the original X-COM wonderfully weird places. Snapshot Games To save them you’ll have to pick
– unsurprisingly, as it’s designed by The sound design and music, on PUBLISHER sides. A few neutral Havens aside, the
series creator Julian Gollop. In terms the other hand, are bad. They actively In-house three human factions generally hate
of core design, turn-based tactics undercut everything the graphics each other. New Jericho’s billionaire
REVIEWED ON
games don’t get much better than accomplish. Some of the voice lines Intel Core i5-3330, leader wants to cleanse the world
Phoenix Point. To my sound like they were GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, with fire. The Disciples of Anu
chagrin, they also don’t recorded inside a tin 8GB RAM worship mutation and want to leave
get much better than in As youstretch can. The biggest, humanity behind. Synedrion can’t

terms of copious bugs out you meanest alien beastie MULTIPLAYER decide if they’re an autonomous
No
and poor AI. encounter sounds like a 12-year- LINK collective or an anarcho-syndicalist
It’s still heavily old imitating a phoenixpoint.info commune. Each group has novel
influenced by recent factions of tyrannosaurus rex. The ways of fighting the enemy, so allying
turn-based games. The people music behind it all with one over another earns you
design language of the alternates between unique technology, but alienates the
interface will be very annoyingly shrill and others. Despite the extinction-level
familiar to anyone who played a simply forgettable. threat, the factions are in fact so petty
game released since Firaxis’ XCOM But most of the time I didn’t care as to dislike that you’ve saved a few
or XCOM 2. Otherwise, Phoenix Point at all. Phoenix Point’s campaign does thousand of the others.
strikes off on its own path. It’s a fascinating things, centring core That’s probably fine, because the
world of weird fiction monsters, tensions you can never easily solve. tension on the strategic level is
heroic sci-fi soldiers, and the body Beginning with an aircraft and a absolutely electric. You’re always
horror they share. It has some handful of soldiers at a single remote strapped for resources, deciding
wonderful visual design and base, you uncover the landscape of whether to send out an exploration
well-established, consistent aesthetics the ruined world and take on its team or hold them back to defend
throughout for a creepy and problems. Exploring is key, as you threatened Havens. It’s a series of
atmospheric ride. It’s never quite need to quickly find and reactivate ever-more-vicious choices where
clear where the worldbuilding is old Phoenix Project bases to expand expanding your own capabilities in
the long term means deciding that
Havens will fall in the short term.
Eventually you’re fielding dozens of
A LEGACY OF WEIRD The weird fiction and sci-fi soldiers across several teams, but
influences that give us Phoenix Point you’ve expanded the scope of your
operations to cover the globe, and it
is never enough.

SLOG DAYS
Despite this frantic action, the overall
path of the campaign is meandering.
Figuring out how to progress takes a
THE SHADOW THE THING CLI-FI XC OM: TERROR
OVER (1982) Novels like the FROM THE DEEP lot of swinging in the dark hoping
INNSMOUTH Twisted mutant MaddAddam trilogy Fishy aliens some strategy lands. That’s a slog in
H.P. Lovecraft’s heads and insidious portray a world colonise the depths the mid-section of the campaign as
cosmic tale brings gestalt organisms ruined first by of the ocean, then you grind through missions looking
hybrid fishmen and all make climate change, start blowing for direction. It feels bad to need to
an invasion up from appearances in then by human things up. Strikingly
the depths. Phoenix Point. genetic tampering. similar, this one. play a campaign to understand how
to play the campaign.

64 FEBRUARY 2020