I’m finding this pretty engrossing so far! It’s a little rough around the edges & the palette is a little brown heavy. But it also brings back some of the indie quirkiness and fun details that Firaxis XCom might have sanded away in its earnestness to be more modern & streamlined. Of course YMMV if you hate micro-management and prefer the extra polish of the modern titles.
It could for certain use bug fixes, though! I spent two hours playing on my Mac laptop earlier only to realize that there’s a bug somewhere between the game and Epic client that crashes the game on exit and keeps it from ever uploading saves to the cloud. So now my save is trapped on that machine with no way to play on my main living room game PC. I could (and did) start another game there, but then the stupid Mac Epic client fails to synchronize that save. Thanks Epic!
That really funny, I made that association as well last night! Played 2 hours last night before i crashed too tired to play more. Still some of the annoying bugs from beta is my biggest complaint.
I have only played a few hours. I hope there is some kind of resource income stream you can get, because doing those scavenging missions over and over and over will become quite tedious. There is also another feature I would like these games to include. I want to be able to set default color schemes for certain classes. IE: Heavies are yellow, assault is red, etc…
Just had a chance to watch Tom’s stream posted above. Very enjoyable.
In my several hours so far, I’d say some of the comments of ‘rough edges’ and the like are fair. I’m freaking loving this, though. Really hope it continues to receive polish and content.
Shows the difficulty in making these games. It’s not enough to have a cool tactical novelty. The hard part is making it so playing 100 tactical battles doesn’t get boring.
Good grief. That Polygon article @TurinTur linked is like all my biggest fears and concerns writ large on a single html page. “They are negative” is quite the understatement. They even used the word “onerous” at one point! That’s the kiss of death, right there.
This quote from the Polygon review pretty much kills my interest in the game:
Phoenix Point ’s tech tree almost immediately spoils the game’s tension. In the normal difficulty setting recruits arrive fully armed, and armored, with the best gear available from their home faction. I had collected all of the high-end weaponry in the game within the first few hours of playing. From there, it was just a question of testing it all out on the battlefield to determine which items I wanted to reverse engineer and produce in quantity.
I think it’s worth noting that Polygon seems to have been playing at very low difficulty and acknowledged that at least the tech problem won’t happen at higher levels.
I noted, fwiw, on Christopher Odd’s preview the difficulty seemed to be Easy, Normal, Hard, Legendary. It seems strange that on Normal you’d get all sorts of free gear when you recruit guys, imo. But definitely something easy to address in a patch, if enough people wanted it.
I don’t think the gear is the issue. The impression I get is that this is a phenomenal game to play for about 4-5 tactical battles. Once you’ve done that, the wow factor of free aiming wears off, and now what matters is the difficulty progression, interesting locations, new enemies, the new tactics and abilities you get over time and how they impact the decisions you make etc. From 30,000 feet, the small changes they made to the combat don’t matter if overall the game makes a lesser impact than XCOM 1 or 2.
