![]() Something fishy is going on and through all of this runs the salty tang of series classic Terror From the Deep. As well as uncovering more settlements, you also discover supply caches, a smattering of plot-critical locations and plenty of relics of the past. ![]() The ongoing exploration you perform in this broken world is closer to XCOM 2 than any other game in the series, making you an ever-hungry itinerant who much push farther from home, despite the risk of overstretching yourself. ![]() It wouldn't be the apocalypse if humanity wasn't turning on itself. Any actions or opinions that are seen to favour one inevitably frustrate the others. They press you to take sides and offer their technologies. While everyone gets along at first, each sliding into your DMs with passive-aggressive complaints about the others, it's inevitable that this escalates. These factions will drop you a line to ask how you are, put in requests for you to perform tasks and offer subtle reminders of how their hot take on post-apocalyptic branding is always trending. Call in on any of these and you can trade resources, hire new personnel or even steal their lunch. Exploring an initially blank planet, your transport craft hopping between each location you discover in real time, you gradually map out a scattered network of survivors. As you emerge, blinking, into a world ravaged by both climate change and a new trend toward tentacles with everything, you encounter three substantially different takes on how to get by: through discovering religion, embracing a new kind of ecology or just making bigger guns. The world is now factional and the first of those familiar X-COM flavours is the subtle tang of X-COM: Apocalypse. You are, it seems, the last cell of what was supposed to be a powerful and protective organisation. ![]() Set after the release of a long-frozen alien virus causes mutations and madness across the globe, Phoenix Point has you trying to understand not only how to combat this apocalyptic change, but also why your Phoenix Project, a secret collective created to defend humanity from such existential threats, has completely collapsed. I've been thrilled by its surprises, intrigued by its developments and also a little bored by another scavenging mission where I wait for the last enemy to blunder into view. Phoenix Point brings back all those furiously exciting feelings, giving a gentle seasoning to some very familiar flavours. I don't remember how I completed any game in the X-COM series, but I remember so many examples of the first time I met a particular alien, uncovered critical information or turned the tide of a hectic battle. In this case, those friends can include much bigger weapons, furious firefights and exciting revelations. It's really all about the journey, not the destination, and the friends you made along the way. And the key to this dynamic, the key to these guerilla tactics, is momentum. Small squads of scrappy soldiers subvert a larger, slower force, turning its tools and equipment against it, before eventually finding and slicing off its head. Phoenix Point, true to the X-COM and XCOM lineage to which it is so close a cousin, is fundamentally about guerilla tactics once again. Phoenix PointĮven if a wider network exists around this handful of heroes (perhaps including whoever it is who does tech support for their radar, compiles their budget breakdowns and patches calls through to admin and HR), there can't be more than a hundred people who support the human race's last, best hope against a threat as cryptic as it is colossal. The fate of humanity itself rests on the shoulders of fewer soldiers than would fill a classroom and the invisible, intangible people who presumably exist behind them, fixing their weapons, tending their wounds and laundering their blood-stained undershirts at the conclusion of every suburban skirmish. I've been scavenging their weapons, analysing their biology and reverse-engineering their technology. I've taken command of yet another team of ragtag soldiers and scientists, and returned once more to frantically scampering back and forth across a terrified planet, responding to panicked reports of strange creatures unleashing horrifying attacks. I'm saving the world again, much like I've saved it a dozen times before. Phoenix Point carries Gollop's legacy forward capably, if conservatively.
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