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samueldays · 9 months ago

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Part 2: Bad ideas, well implemented

In the grim darkness of the apocalyptic future, there are still gains from trade.

There are 3 main resources: food supplies, construction materials, technological components. There are 3 haven factions to do diplomacy and trade with: the Disciples of Anu (xenophile cult), New Jericho (texas faction) and Synedrion (anarcho-terraformers). Each has a competitive advantage in producing one of the resources (Anu:food, NJ:mats, Syn:tech) and selling it cheaper, and you can set up a triangle trade at a profit. What prevents this from being infinite resource generation is that the haven outposts only offer a small surplus to trade at each visit, it takes time to fly out to them, and the game is on a timer with alien invasion, so you can't afford to have your squad+plane flying back and forth between outposts all the time.

Which is why you should get a second plane ASAP, for example by stealing it from a haven. Put Rookie McExpendable on it, and set that plane to indefinite rotation between outposts for resources. :^) The factions don't like each other, but you, the neutral protagonist, can befriend them all and profit.

It's funny, Synedrion has a socialist streak and blames capitalism for the world collapsing to the Pandoravirus, and here I am getting the resources I need to save the world by being a middleman merchant, buying low and selling high, profiting off other people's comparative advantage.

Trade 8 Food to Synedrion for 2 Tech (x48 lots) trade 2 Tech to New Jericho for 12 Materials, trade 8 Materials to Anu for 12 Food, profit!

(Or: 8 Materials to Synedrion for 2 Tech, 2 Tech to Anu for 12 Food, 8 Food to New Jericho for 12 Materials.)

Phoenix Point diverges from the usual XCOM formula in that there's almost no regular income of resources. Trading, exploring, scavenging battlefields, and rewards for rescuing havens from monster attacks are important to support your operations. It's one of the parts of the game I like most.

Another good thing is that unlike previous XCOM (but like first generation X-COM) a character can carry more than two grenades! Grenades have been oddly nerfed in terms of direct damage, they're better for armor-removal than killing, but incendiary grenades are very good at crippling enemies because they deal repeated damage to each limb.

Timer-Based Design

The original X-COM:UFO had an issue of degenerate tactics: the optimal course of action in many tactical battles was to very slowly and patiently creep your way across the map with cover fire and overwatch, ensuring your soldiers were fresh and ready when you made contact with enemies. The battlemap was bounded and enemies had no option to escape or call in reinforcements if you dawdled too long. Terror missions were an exception, with civilians dying if you didn't run out there to shoot aliens faster.

The 2012 XCOM reboot tried to fix this by sprinkling timer incentives on missions. You might have to disarm a bomb before it blows up in X turns, or acquire some Meld canisters before they shut down.

Phoenix Point, IMO, overcompensates. There are timer incentives in tactical battles, and the enemy does get reinforcements entering from map edge if you dawdle, and the enemy has tower installations that spray steadily larger areas with monster mist until destroyed, and enemies can also escape and leave the battlefield, and there's doodads to protect, and soldiers to rescue before they get killed. (Incidentally very convenient that monsters are exactly the right distance away from rescuables when a battle starts, no matter how long you've waited to start that battle!)

Also the maps are smaller and more cramped, and there's more stuff going on, and there's some enemies who spawn smaller enemies, and there's stealth-sniper enemies who will break contact after a shot if you don't chase them down, and almost every map now feels frantic.

The strategic Geoscape also has a bunch of timers: the whole game is on a global doomclock until humanity goes extinct, you're on a softer timer until the NPC factions go to war, monsters attack your bases and allied bases more often and you have to fly to defend them before they're destroyed, monster lairs that you don't eradicate ASAP will tank your diplomacy.

The devs were probably aiming for tense gameplay, but it felt more like ADHD frustration that I was constantly being interrupted by different problems and popups demanding my attention. Tense turn-based is hard to do.

Inconsistent Realism

Some games abstract away your logistics to focus on the shooting. Some games have detailed tracking of where things are. Both of these can work fine. But Phoenix Point is not somewhere in the middle, it's both at once! Again, not exactly a bug, but the inconsistency grates on me.

On the one hand: All your bases around the globe share resources and manufacturing capacity. Items aren't made at a location, they're made and stored in the abstract Global Inventory. When your team has flown to a site and is about to deploy on a mission, there's a convenient opportunity for last-minute prep where items not only teleport between bases but teleport to the aircraft so you can equip new gear that hadn't yet been produced when the team set out. From the deploy screen, you can even craft medkits on the spot.

On the other hand: personnel have strictly tracked locations, either at a base or in an aircraft. Personnel need an aircraft to deploy to a mission site. Personnel also need an aircraft to move from one base to another, and player intervention on both ends. Aircraft are limited in number, and have specific locations. If you want to move Sniper Alice from one base to another, you have to 0) Free up an aircraft from other tasks, 1) send aircraft to first base, 2) assign Alice to aircraft, 3) send aircraft to second base, 4) wait through travel time during which an event will probably interrupt you and you might forget what this aircraft was doing, 5) assign Alice to second base.

Back on the first hand: if you capture a live alien on a mission, that doesn't need to be flown home or have its location tracked, it teleports to the abstract Global Containment Facility and can be interrogated and vivisected and researched on-base before the personnel fly home. 🙄 What clown came up with this?

Clown Design, various

Phoenix Point is excellent at the strictly technical side of the game like "not crashing", and pretty good at the usability features of showing relevant information to the player, like indicating LOS before you move, or this mouseover which displays the range-sphere of a Terror Sentinel. Also its stats.

But it strikes me as being often really good at implementing really dumb ideas, like peekaboo-shooting, abusing the AP system, being a fantasy CRPG, having weapon proficiencies like it's D&D, having critical fumbles like it's the urban legend version of D&D, and various systems that don't talk to each other and operate at different scales. My congratulations to the testing and bugfix teams; the design team should go join the circus.

In particular, whatever complete clown decided that Tobias West, allied hero unit and resistance leader, should carry a weapon that he's not proficient in.

Clowns have also gotten to the diplomacy system. If two of the haven factions are fighting, here screenshot showing Synedrion attacking a New Jericho outpost, I can intervene to defend it to get +10 relations with NJ and -9 relations with Synedrion, so far so good.

This defense also gets me -9 relations with Disciples of Anu, which is bullshit. Defending a human outpost from human destruction is overall negative on human diplomacy. (The fourth attitude change is "local outpost governor", not a faction.)

Broken shield icon: New Jericho. Outlined T-dot: Anu. Circle-S: Synedrion.

This feels designed to force hard choices on the player - do you worsen your relations with other factions, or protect outposts from destruction? but the choice makes no sense, Anu should not be equally pissed as Synedrion that I stopped a Synedrion kill-team.

It feels absurd that these kill-teams exist at all. Look, it's the apocalypse. WW3 happened, and starvation, and plague. Masses of people walked into the sea and died under the influence of virus-mindcontrol-mist. Some of them came back wrong as crab-zombies. The devs may have thought original X-COM had a wonky sense of scale. I feel Phoenix Point is trying to sell me on a vision of a world where my team of tactical operators is a significant part of humanity's remaining combat power, and can reasonably make a difference to the fate of the world. Given a context where known human population is seven digits and dropping...

There's me and three NPC factions who have gathered some survivors to fight back against the monster apocalypse. The NPC factions disagreeing bitterly and hating each other for conflicting visions of the future, fine. If they occasionally raided each other, OK. The NPC factions, all three of them, taking time and personnel away from fighting monster apocalypses to send invading armies across hundreds of kilometers, not to conquer a fellow human haven but to burn it to the ground, destroying all civilian infrastructure, is shockingly stupid both IC and OOC. Evidently the scriptwriter needed a conflict so the factions will hurr durr murder each other in the midgame, and scripted them to fight each other in the Clown War.

In addition to being pants-on-head retarded, it should be logistically impossible. The game's narrative tells me that Haven outposts are fortified structures holding off monster attacks, populated by thousands or ten-thousands of people, with a high degree of irregular militia and combat experience as a result of living through the monster apocalypse. The defender being already in place, highly motivated to defend, having placed walls and turrets, should have a major advantage over the attacker. Where the fuck is an attacker pulling guys from to get an army big enough to crack open and raze another Haven?

And how is this army being transported? The game insists that logistics is hard for me, the ground is monster-infested, soldiers need aircraft to move between locations, aircraft are slow and carry few people. (I'll get back to that later.) The game also tells me that the NPC factions use the same aircraft I do.

But the clown crown might go to the ballistics system. Previous XCOM games were mostly tile-based. Phoenix Point has a much more granular firing system that simulates where on the character model the bullets are coming from, and how they veer off to hit something else. There's even an option to spray-fire a weapon in an arc.

Since a sniper rifle and a sidearm pistol are located at different points on a sniper character model, I experienced a monster ceasing to be a valid target (no LOS) when swapping from pistol to rifle, and getting LOS back when swapping back to pistol.

Machineguns are held lower than most other weapons, making low cover more effective against them, and resulting in this bit of clownery:

That gun is being held at exactly the wrong height so that the bullets can hit the railing, and the four-inch beam adjacent to the soldier will provide the ten-foot monster with angular cover, as demonstrated if I switch to the muzzle-POV targeting mode:

(The way the targeting reticle works is that each bullet has a 50% chance to land somewhere in inner ring and a 50% chance to land in outer ring. The muzzle-POV reticle is a nice QOL feature, this whole setup is a very finely polished dumb idea.)

Sandbagging

A well made movie gives the impression of depicting something as you might have seen it; a poorly made movie may have wires and rollers and cameramen visible in such a way that the movie-ness is visible on screen and shouldn't be. There's something like "seeing the wires" for Phoenix Point where it is clear that it's a game, inside the game, that I don't know the name for. It's not breaking the fourth wall, the monsters don't talk to the player. It's that the monsters sometimes drop the pretense of trying to kill your characters, and show that they are game-pieces being moved by an opponent who is sandbagging to not overwhelm you.

Phoenix Point will deploy variants of a house-sized boss monster, the Scylla, which superficially looks very tough and intimidating. Scylla is too slow to chase down a running human. Scylla is easily locked down with my War Cry, which is absurdly powerful no-save crowd control. I killed my first Scylla with 0 damage taken and no savescumming. Nor was it a fluke, I took 0 damage from every Scylla in the rest of the campaign. Scylla spawns lesser monsters, but it is very polite about a) spawning only one monster a turn, b) spawning monsters only after it rolls for initiative.

Scylla is probably meant to make players feel accomplished that their 250hp soldiers took down a 6000hp monster, but I felt only contempt for the 6000hp punching bag. It wasn't threatening me, it was waving claws in the air and 'pretending' to threaten me. It could have killed a soldier who tried to melee it, but the melee weapons in this game are realistically useless and I wasn't stupid enough to have gun-carrying soldiers move into melee with a house-sized monster and its man-sized claws.

A Series of Choices

To Sid Meier is attributed the remark that "a game is a series of choices", and clown game designers have interpreted "choices" to mean something like mutually exclusive options, that cannot be strictly ranked, competing for the same role. This leads to what I think is one of the dumbest parts of Phoenix Point: unlike XCOM where you would usually upgrade to Plasma weapons because they were best, there's a hundred weapons in PP and almost none of them are ever upgrades because that wouldn't be a "choice" to use the better weapon, they're sidegrades and tactical alternatives and far too many fiddly options that I'm not enjoying because the micromanagement is not worth my time. I bought this game expecting a strategic-tactical mix of economy and combat, not a sub-tactical layer of deciding between seven models of assault rifle, six shotguns, ten sniper rifles, nine sidearm pistols, five golden rings, four calling birds, three silenced crossbows, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.

I want back the other "choice" of when do I spend resources, and how much do I spend, on equipping soldiers with objectively superior weapons, removing the "choice" of scrolling through a too-long weapons list. But no, Phoenix Point has put most of the game progression into character levels not gear upgrades. (RPG vibes!)

Aircraft suffer the same problem of being hamfistedly balanced into "no best option" through absurd tradeoffs where the game's mechanical design protrudes through the immersion layer in order to ensure that all options have a competitive niche.

In less fancy words: The 6-soldier aircraft is twice as fast as the 8-soldier aircraft. This enforces a choice, a very specific kind of choice, whether you want to take the tactical advantage of bringing more dudes to a fight, or the strategic advantage of getting to a fight faster. (Remember: the strategic view has a doom-clock, the game is on a timer.)

There's something I find deeply absurd about having the usual xcom-ish hyperspeed research&development progression where I can build an aircraft in mere days with a skeleton crew of polymath protagonists; but no amount of money and technology and factories will allow me to build an aircraft that is both fast and carries 8 people!

The last clown of this particular car is that aircraft improvement technology does exist in the game - but it improves a tertiary stat that I don't care about: Range. The globe is dotted with refueling stations.

I can hotfix the DNA of an organic jet-blimp, but I can't enlarge an aircraft design to fit 2 more people? What the fucking fuckety fuck?

Closing Remarks

In general, Phoenix Point seems to have a bad dev habit of pouring on too much competing Stuff everywhere. Too many weapons, too many armors, too many skills, too many stats, too many character classes, too many aircraft, too many within-category stat-trade-offs on the aircraft, nothing like the X-COM Avenger which is plain good at stats but its drawback is instead costing a lot of money.

Do you like lots of Stuff? This game has a lot of cool Stuff to choose between. It even has customizable soldier and armor appearances so you can play dress-up dolls with your soldiers if you like. I think that will be my verdict on the game: very good for the Stuff Likers. Not so good at what I consider the 'core' of an xcom genre game, the Stuff gets distracting and the interface for scrolling through it sucks. The interface has very big buttons that are newbie-friendly and veteran-unfriendly.

If for example I want to make AP Sniper Rifle, I go to the manufacturing tab, the gear sub-tab, filter for sniper gear, and get this:

This is not ordered alphabetically, it's not ordered by item type (Hera and Hephaestus are both sidearm pistols, Pythagoras is a sniper rifle), it's not ordered by anything that I can recognize. The "Zeus" EMP Grenade is not next to the "Odin" Frag Grenade when I scroll down. At least weapons are listed adjacent to their ammo, but that's a low bar.

X-COM:UFO came out in 1994. Phoenix Point came out in 2019, twenty-five years later. This production interface capable of showing a whole seven options on screen at one time does not strike me as the result of twenty-five years improvement. Ironic that a game of not getting better equipment has not gotten a better interface, merely a sidegrade.

I beat the game. The last mission was reasonably interesting. It was also an exercise in cheesing the AP system: a giant Scylla and 15 retinue monsters show up together, and your 9 soldiers have to figure out how not to be overwhelmed. (Heavy WarCry the Scylla, chain combo the mooks with Rapid Clearance Assault.) The very definitely final boss has some interesting mechanics, and you get to drop a nuke on it. :D

Finally, the subtitles for the victory slides had a typo.

And that petty complaint, in a way, sums up my experience. I had won, I thought I was done, and the game finds a new way to beclown itself at the very last second. 🙄 Very much a $10 game. Doesn't crash, but does have lots of ill-considered parts and petty nuisances. Was comparable entertainment to $10 ticket for a mid movie.

Sam Reviews: Phoenix Point, part 1

Phoenix Point is down to ten bucks on GOG, DLC included!

I bought it, figuring even a half-decent XCOM clone is worth it for ten bucks. So far it feels like a $10 game indeed. I'm probably not going to finish it before the sale ends, I have a job, so here's my initial impressions for those interested and I'll come back with part 2 later.

Tutorial missions, fine. First regular mission against crab monsters, fine. Second regular mission pits me against gun-happy human bandits, and I am unpleasantly surprised that they return fire whenever they're shot at, getting 4 counter-attacks in a turn if 4 people shoot at them, they even "return fire" upon having a grenade thrown at them.

Solution: run up and bash them in the head with the butt of a gun repeatedly, they don't get to return fire from that. I grumbled about that, and the game feels like 'that' repeatedly.

I didn't like the puzzle boss nature of infinite return fire. One return fire per turn would have been cool, and enabled tactical counterplay options. Unlimited return fire breaks the action economy, breaks my immersion for the game abstraction of "action points", and makes me feel this is going to be a game about cheesing AP limits and ruleslawyer combos. Also, the infinite return fire ability was on multiple nameless minions in that mission, not even reserved for a boss. Bash bash bash bash!

I didn't like the lack of game hints in this context. I had Hints turned on for a first run at low difficulty. The Hints make suggestions for what to research, how game mechanics work, and provide informative popups the first time a new strain of crab monster appears. But there was no Hint popup about the first encounter with an enemy having the Return Fire ability, no tooltip on mouseover of enemy, nor was there any indication of what actions trigger Return Fire, despite this being significantly more impactful than "this crab monster regenerates".

I didn't like the solution, which felt like a rules loophole rather than a sensible way to approach rapid-firing enemies. Oh yeah here's a guy who can interrupt your turn to shoot multiple times per turn, you should all walk up to him and punch him and he'll politely submit to the beatings.

I really didn't like that compared to recent XCOM games, Phoenix Point added a micromanagement tracker for Weapon Durability, and bashing the return-fire-goons in the head damages your weapon! Also they brought back ammo management, so now your weapon has two stats that can run out during combat.

But I also recognize that these things aren't bugs or crashes or typos or other objectively wrong things about the game, they're design decisions that I disagree with. The game runs fine. I have a series of grumbles and no dealbreakers.

Moving on from the Return Fire-associated crap...

This is an XCOM-genre game, definitely. It has base building, squad management, research and production, capturing crab monsters for research, psychic mind control, a strategic "Geoscape" layer and numerous tactical battle missions. The one thing that's oddly missing is gear upgrades. New gear is mostly sidegrades and tactical options, on the other hand it offers far stronger character upgrades than in most XCOM games, to the point of looking partly like a CRPG with classes, levels and skill points.

The Geoscape has more content than the waiting game that was some previous xcoms. There are other factions moving on the map, there's some trade and diplomacy with them, there are unknown sites to explore, you reactivate old bases instead of building them from scratch. Sometimes this means clearing them of crab monsters.

The Phoenix Point interface inherits a lot of XCOM 2's cutscenery that I dislike. It is very beautiful, very zoomed in, and wants to make sure you see it. There's frequent waiting to watch stuff resolve, and the game insists on having the camera follow unimportant actions like the run animation of every soldier's every move, and locking the interface during this. Move orders (particularly out of sight of enemies) should not hog control, I should be able to tab to the next soldier and begin giving a new move order immediately after the previous! Each individual animation is short, but multiply it by several soldiers, on each of several turns, on each of several missions, and my frustration at an unresponsive interface accumulates.

The zoom-out is limited. Soldiers will frequently be so far away from each other that I can't see them on the same screen, and have to pan back and forth. Bleh.

The gun system is quite detailed with damage types, damage values, accuracy modifiers, weapon ranges, armor, armor-shredding weapons, body part targeting and hit location, disabled limbs, bleeding, cover, et cetera. The game then offers options to skip a lot of this gunnery where enemies get to resist, and instead go for special abilities that Just Work, like War Cry:

AOE, autohit, no save, renders most enemies unable to attack for a turn.

About that limbs stuff, Phoenix Point has tried hard to make hit locations relevant. Crab monsters have game-relevant organs and limbs that can be disabled for far less damage than it takes to kill the whole monster. It's neat, but feels a little underwhelming. I don't blame the devs much for this, balance is hard when there's hefty player optionality plus RNG, and there's a fine line between making targeting relevant and making a monster the Shootmeinthegland monster where shooting it in the gland simply becomes the new default target instead of shooting it in the head/center mass.

Guns are weak, and armor is powerful as part of making limb targeting relevant. Also, armor-shredding weapons. This feels related to the CRPG class-and-level stuff: with the smaller squad and the more personalized characters and the more important individuals, the game has to give more leeway for characters to survive being hit to avoid player frustration. We've moved a long way from X-COM:UFO where casualties were routine and replacements were cheap.

I don't know if it's good or bad that the game plays "fair" about the least relevant nameless NPCs being similarly padded, but I know one of my mutuals will hate this combination of health padding and detailed targeting:

I have caught this thief at close range (2 tiles). I am about to launch a six-round burst from my character's assault rifle into his head. The targeting reticle, the highlighted yellow outline, and the info popup all agree that these bullets will go into his head if I fire here and now. The segmented bar at the top indicates that the result of close-range burst fire to the head through the front of the face is that the thief will lose about half his hitpoints.

To underscore that I've gotten a head hit, not a glancing blow off the helmet, the game displays the thief with a bloody face and blood-splattered clothes after the shot. But he lives. Somehow.

There's also a plot to Phoenix Point. I don't play xcoms for the plot, but there's definitely been some work on the plot beyond "kill and loot aliums :)". After the second world war, blah blah secret organization, moonbase, something something precursor civilization. It looks like good lore, I'll re-read the accumulated notes when I have more notes and fewer darkly hinting clue-scraps bereft of context.

#all #vidya #sam reviews #rant #phoenix point

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