| Title | 7th best game of 2019: Phoenix Point |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Game reviews |
| When | January 18, 2020 |
You can play X-com for the first time exactly once. And what a precious time that once. All the mystery and uncertainty, the danger, the discovery, the horror of what those weird little aliens were doing to our cows..
Cool, I watched a few streams of this and blew it off as another XCOM clone, maybe I’ll give it a shot myself.
Too much jankiness in this one for me when I tried it on Xbox GamePass PC prior to the recent nerf.
Outside of a few people here, everything I have heard about this game is wait a bit before getting it. Sounds like it needs a lot of work still even if the raw game shows promise.
Considering I can play it for - well, not free exactly, but nearly free on Game Pass, I’m not as scared of a few bugs as I might otherwise be. But I guess I am also not in a huge rush to start either, so we’ll see what shakes out.
It can definitely use some QoL improvements.
Ah, the Junkyard game. Every map I’ve seen streamed seems like piles of rust and junk.
I’m a little puzzled that folks would call it janky. I guess janky can mean any number of things, but I found it pretty polished. Which can also mean any number of things…
But I uninstalled it after finishing this write-up, mainly because I’m waiting for the visibility system to either be implemented or scrapped. I’m not that concerned with whatever balance adjustments they’re making, because I’m nowhere near the level of min/maxxing it would take to suss out any balance issues. That’s the cool thing about single-player games: you can opt out of the conversations among people who’ve got thousands of playthroughs amassed (reddit, for instance). Snapshot might have to deal with whatever meta they’ve unveiled, but I don’t.
It’s a post-apocalypse, so there will be some of that. But there are at least six distinct tilesets/biomes: the junkyards you mentioned, your own bases, supersleek sexy sci-fi cities, concrete fortresses/bunkers, Cthulhu temples, and freaky alien dungeons.
-Tom
I thought this was pretty good too, I was surprised I was the only person to vote for it in the Quarterlies.
There will be more votes for it in 2020 when it gets a genuine release on better platforms and storefronts.
They seem to have a lot of balance adjustments ahead of them. This is really a very premature 2020 release.
Gosh I wonder where terminator and revenant will fall into this list…
Wait when did they ditch randomness in aiming?
There are no “random numbers”, but there is a bit of randomness.
I asked that question to Tom in another thread, and here was his reply.
So to me, this system creates two distinctions: it makes targeting much more sensible than those tricky % numbers that have made players rage because of lacking to understand their concept. It also means you cannot miss unmissable shots, because of some raw numbers and the weird application of additions and substractions to percentage numbers found in many, many games, like a farcical “You are 3 feet away, you got a 200% hit chance, -30% weapon recoil or whatever, -80% enemy dodge skill = 90% in-game hit chance”. It could be 50%/50% for that matter, it would give the player a better sense of the two extreme outcomes (killing the target, or missing it completely) that may happen.
Just like in Valkyrie Chronicles, you still can totally miss in some unlucky streak though, but I remember in that game I hardly ever blamed the game for making me miss a sniper shot, while that’s my daily raging routine in XCOM.
Can you stop?
Correction:
“a knack for weaving together gameplay system[s] with clarity and intent”
The Epic butthurt -is- petty and grating. By “better” he must mean… Stadia and Linux? This, from me, petty hater of Microsoft’s attempts.
Can I stop what?
Speaking of other (superior) platforms, any word on a console port?
You know exactly what.
