The overwatch feature seems nice at the beginning, then you realize that even your veteran soldiers will happily shoot their comrades in overwatch, because you didn't set up the reaction cone in a pixel-perfect way. Just imagine that in the original X-Com you couldn't sell your Interceptors, Skyrangers, tanks and no, you can't manufacture stuff here to sell with profit (hello Laser Rifles from the original X-Com) to mitigate the dent on your budget. Then you suddenly realize that the game fucks you over in many aspects. Talking about resources, it's super-essential here how you manage them. Which aforementioned DLCs either bring frustation or (and) represent a serious sink of resources with barely any or minimal return. Then you suddenly start to realize that some of the essential gameplay stuff is locked behind DLCs (I'm talking about you, hibernation pods).
PHOENIX POINT CHARACTER CUSTOMIZATION SERIES
Which is manageable (larger teams, you learn the ins and outs of the game), but makes the long series of fights a tedious grind and takes away the joy of the original X-Coms of sending your troops in battle with new gear almost constantly.
PHOENIX POINT CHARACTER CUSTOMIZATION UPGRADE
For example there is a single tier of armor upgrade and that's it. The enemies scale up pretty fast and while your equipment improves, nowhere near to the enemies' capability. On the surface looks and plays amazing, huge and wide range of customization, along with a vast sandbox world to play with. In it's core, it's really a modern X-Com, seems and feels that Gollop tried to pack everything in a neat package he ever wanted. Not major ones, but for the love of god, this stuff is on the market LITERALLY FOR YEARS.
And last, but not least, there are still glitches and bugs in the game. The quality of life is fucking abysmal in this game. too ambivalent on so many levels.Įvery amazing feature comes with a huge blowback. So why is the negative rating? As much as I enjoy it, I can't really recommend it. And this really and truly feels like the spiritual of successor of those games in many areas.
I am pretty torn about this game (disclaimer: I'm an avid fan of Gollop's original X-Coms, the first one I literally played it for many summers during my childhood).