Phantom Doctrine - XCOM meets spies in the Cold War

I ran across this article on Phantom Doctrine which led me to watching some gameplay on YouTube and I have to say, this looks like a lot of fun.

Set in '83 you run some sort of spy organization (think XCOM but with a strong splash of Invisible, Inc.) and contend with enemy spies, captured allies, infiltration ops, and all sorts of other missions. The details are what drew me in - stuff like being able to speak with a guard but only if your agent can speak that language, or being able to capture and indoctrinate an enemy agent so if you release them and see them in a future mission, you can drop a trigger word to flip them to your side. But also any ops or actions you can take, so can your enemies, so do you trust the previously captured agent that returned, claiming to have escaped…?

It has a fantastic aesthetic I’m really digging, you have to see it to really appreciate it, but it’s a slick looking game with a ton of promise. One to keep an eye on, I think.

It’s being made by the team that brought us Hard West, which was a fun but forgettable strategy game. They really might have something special on their hands here.

This is the video I watched to get a better sense of how it might look/feel to play.

It’s also on Steam, but the release date is simply “Available 2018” and there isn’t any price detailed.

It looks right up @justaguy2 strasse

It’s got my interest, and I think I recently got Hard West for free from GOG so I might check it out while I wait for this. I am hoping this will be more of a sandbox than XCOM, which I love but dislike how linear the story missions are on replays. Plus, if a mission goes poorly I can pretend I’m watching an episode of Archer and laugh instead swearing under my breath like with XCOM.

This looks awesome!

I have to admit, this sounds like a terrible premise to me.

XCOM: shooting and killing aliens in a turn-based arena? Great!

XCOM meets spies in the Cold War - Shooting innocent Eastern European guards and such? Doesn’t sound as appealing to me.

You a Red, boy? You talks like a Red.

This will be released on Aug. 14 for $39.99.

Aug. are packed with gaming goodness for steam: Yakuza 0, Monster hunter world, and now this one…

Trailer.

I’m pretty excited about this, I hope they can pull it off and realize it’s potential.

A new trailer has come up, and it’s white hot, imo. God dammit, this game looks so fucking juicy!

Releases on the 14th! Man, kill the horde in Battle for Azeroth or kill commies in Phantom Doctrine.

I hadn’t realized it was coming out so soon! Excited for sure. Looks like a lot of smart, fun stuff.

Is that Robert Conrad doing the narration?

XCOM + Cold War sounds right up my alley…

Please, please, please be good!

Hard West was uneven. The concept was great, but the execution IIRC of the turn-based combat and the quests/missions was pretty hit or miss. I dimly recall moments of head-scratching wonderment about some of the line of sight issues, imprecise controls, and bugs. Let us hope they have figured out what went wrong there and fixed stuff.

Oh yeah, I forgot this was those guys.

That had lots of good flavor, but I thought the game felt a little shallow and generally underwhelming. Those were exactly my fears about this, so I hope they learned some good lessons in the last few years.

Be great if it was, but honestly I don’t think his voice is that strong anymore.

Yeah, probably.

Oh man, I went looking to see if anyone was streaming this yet and lo and behold, our very own @tomchick did last night! It looks like he played quite a while as well, so I’m settling into this old chair to enjoy!

Unfortunately, I misunderstood the terms of the embargo. We were told “review coverage” was embargoed until the release, but I’d never heard that term applied to basic everyday streaming. So I had to take the videos down.

For what it’s worth, I really like what I’ve seen so far, and that’s beyond my initial fumbling in those videos.

-Tom

Man that sucks. I watched a bit of the first video but had hoped to see some management layer stuff. Alas what I saw convinces me to preorder anyway.