Full and half-cover, a movement grid, action points that determine how far you can travel or how many times you can shoot… You have Assault, Heavy and Sniper class soldiers (to begin with), and you can equip them all with grenades, spray-on medkits and ammo packs. The similarities are stark and completely unflinching. Sooner or later you’ll start to lose soldiers you’ve invested in.Ĭombat is turn-based, and if you played either of Firaxis’ games you’ll be instantly at home here. Like in XCOM you can customise, name and nickname every soldier under you, forming bonds that make it all the more painful when one of them is cut down because of a mistake you made. There you’ll manufacture gear, train your soldiers and work tirelessly to come up with new ways to survive. Your base, initially at Phoenix Point, serves as your barracks, hangar, lab and workshop. The stronger your alliances with the other factions, the more of their research and resources will become available to you, too. As you face off against Pandorans you’ll acquire new mysteries to research as you fly from site to site investigating anomalies you’ll uncover forgotten secrets, lost technology, and abandoned ideologies, all of which you can spend time and resources developing into weapons and tactics to further your cause. Often you’ll find yourself backed into a corner by one of them, and forced to make a difficult decision there and then which can have dire consequences down the line. It’s much more involved than just having some anonymous committee overseeing your every move. They’ll look to you for protection, trade, research, and occasional political favours. How you deal with each of them will directly affect your relationships with the other two. With resources unsurprisingly scarce, all three will inevitably turn to the Project for something. They each have their own goals, their own alliances, and they shift and flow like a changing sea. ![]() Three other factions exist in the world: the Disciples of Anu, who use the Pandoravirus to deliberately mutate themselves Synedrion, a highly advanced faction intent on creating a new human civilization, and New Jericho, a militaristic dictatorship ruled by a former billionaire. One of the biggest differences to XCOM is the 4X element. Striking out from the titular Phoenix Point, the Project uses guerllia tactics and scavenged technology to fight back against the cloud of red mist that slowly covers the world with more and more Pandorans. The Phoenix Project, a coalition of scientists, soldiers, philanthropists and philosophers, is Earth’s last hope. In this grim future humanity has been decimated by the prehistoric Pandoravirus, a global epidemic that mutates human and animal alike into grotesque, Lovecraftian abominations that pour from an infected sea. Initially crowdfunded by an army of backers, Phoenix Point is a tactical turn-based squad shooter that has so much in common with Firaxis’ games that if it had shipped as XCOM 3, no one would have noticed – and yet, there are new ideas and enough of an evolution here that it remains worthy of its own merit. It comes as no surprise then, that Snapshot’s first big release is a spiritual successor to XCOM: Enemy Within and XCOM 2. UFO: Enemy Unknown spawned a genre of its own, to be succeeded by the XCOM series some time later. While the name Gollop might not be instantly familiar, his creations certainly will be. ![]() Bulgarian outfit Snapshot Games was founded in 2013 by Julian Gollop and David Kaye.
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