Recent reviews by Arthon

As a x-com like games fan, I wanted to give a shot at this game. Although it has potential, it felt like a copy of a copy of a copy. namely lamplighters league copy, which is xcom copy, which is ufo: enemy unknown copy. I believe this game is not released as complete, I always had the feel they introduce something but only as a poc/mvp but never fully implemented it. let's get into it:
Strategy map: I was pretty disappointed in this. there is really not much you can do here. after every mission, you listen to some dialogue between characters to get in game bonus (?!), then change loadout if you got some better rewards and improve characters with gained xp. lastly you choose tasks and a mission.
Tasks:
for me the tasks or only money sink, seemed to be there only to prevent you from getting the best gear. one of the most frustrating parts is you can only do 1 at a time. so you can't heal 2 of your injured (emotionally or physically) squad members at the same time. you have to do it 1 by 1. It also takes by default more time then a mission to heal one, so do the math, you need to get less then 1 character wounded/broken each mission. same with FFI, so you can't stack them. so you have to use instead repair region, each of these punish you without any reward. I would have expected here some Gear modification task which lets you add mods to your gear, which seemed like a natural thing to do, having all these different modded items, but no, not possible.
Loadout:
Another frustration for me. you are limited to pre-scripted gear you get from missions and pre-scripted items from faction stores. no randomness, no luck, your gear progress is railroaded. of course once tasks start punishing you, using the store becomes impossible, because you can't earn money by selling old gear or by any other means than doing pre-scripted/fix amount missions. so no grinding to get perfect gear, which some of us completionists expect. I understand the countdown to DDay and the theme of limited time etc, but this is not an excuse.
Characters:
your characters are from a fixed pool. they are all named and they CAN'T DIE. This is similar to lamplighters league and phoenix to have special characters but at least there they CAN die. another, weird thing is, you have a couple of choice missions where you decide whom to take additional to your starting 4. not sure how they get selected, but for me, I didn't get any snipers, no americans and only one female, which causes issues on loadout because your "armor" is only wearable by a specific gender and country citizen. I had literally 10 american hats, for just 1 guy. It wouldn't be much of a problem if I could just SELL them. but no, you're stuck with them, knowing you can never use them.
Missions:
A couple of things that bug me on missions. in the beginning there were a couple stealth missions but I think last 80% of the game there were 0 stealth missions. why? noone knows. it's 80% ambush and 20% assault. so you don't really have much of a choice of going silent and stealthy really. apart from that there are usual AI issues, they go around doing nothing. get scared of your overwatch and stay put etc. I also noticed most missions you can't skip, you have to do all of them unless they tell you it's one or the other type of mission, which really takes away the surprise/luck factor, you are railroaded into which missions to do, which gear to use and which characters to choose. too much control and you feel it.

I'm already tired complaining but last thing is character development, they as usual have classes, each character has 1 unique talent, rest you select. BUT each class has maybe 10% unique talents, rest is common among all classes. so much for diversity among character abilities.

I finally finished the game today with "minor victory" even though i did all the missions perfectly, had only once reprisal, and prevented the rest. not sure how you can get better. but oh well, at least i didn't loose assuming that's even possible with immortal characters.

This game had so much potential, such a great story, wasted in countless bugs that prevent you from playing properly. i had to constantly restart the game, miss important text and decisions, and regularly stuck just to see the ending (I am a completionist after all)
Also the stock of the stores have weird replenish frequency, they do not gradually improve, instead it felt like a small bump and then a big bump giving you the almost every end weapons/spells in the beginning part of the game, taking away the fun out of checking the store after every mission.
I also felt no need to take any other character to missions, somehow starting characters were enough. which is a shame.

This game is definitely not a clone of crusader kings. It's both good and bad in this sense. You won't find even most simple character interactions you expect from a dynasty management game.

You can marry, but you can't divorce (till death do us apart, literally) you can't assassinate anybody, no execution, everyone dies naturally. no imprisonment or torture as well.

procreation is also weird. it happens randomly, not depending on age or fertility. your family members are your "agents" basically. the more you have the better. no family feuds, alliances etc. you can just marry and hope to win the mini game to get the character inducted to your house

there are limited number of baronies, counties and duchies, there is no way to mess with those structures. you can't have multiple titles of different rank. you just go up in rank until duchy and that's the end game. the map is also extremely small compared to CK

intrigue is very basic, you have set of options but all of them seem useless and very difficult to succeed. you can't get claim outside war, you can't incite rebellion, you can't kidnap, kill or harm anyone. you can just increase/decrease your relations with rumors and attack trade caravans.

BUT this game is actually not about any of those. this game is about medieval economy. 90% of my time is spent keeping the economy afloat. your main power comes from population and increasing population is VERY HARD (when you win a war, you can get 1 pop for 1 year as war goal). you need to constantly find trading partners, because you won't be able to produce everything yourself with limited number of pop's. I haven't managed to increase my pop permanently yet. you need to spend second tier wages on your pop to make them happy, counter the unhappy and only then you will contribute to pop increase counter. spending second tier wages on your pop is extreme luxury in the beginning. I could only start doing that once I realized I was abusing a bug (yeah when you have 1 pop producing a raw material and 3 pops using that to make second tier materials, raw material never drops to zero and you can use infinite amount of raw mats)

Either this is a very hard game or I'm stupid enough (I play all paradox grand strategy games like a pro though)

One last aspect of the game is the conflict mini games, basically it's exactly the same when 2 armies fight, or 2 diplomats negotiate. it seems fun at first, but you get bored pretty quickly and auto-resolve everything, so it's not worth mentioning it. the game could've done without it and nothing would've changed.

I'm not going to not recommend, because I still have hope that I'm stupid and couldn't figure out half of the game yet (happened to me in CK)

The only game where you have fun loosing, and eventually make a comeback against all odds!

Winning in the first run is almost impossible. If you play like in any other strategy game, you will be squashed immediately. This game is like fighting automated drones and nuclear weapons with sticks and stones. This game is not balanced, it's not meant to be balanced. You're weak, paralysed, unable to do anything while the enemy is slowly devouring you. if you disturb the mouth that is eating you, it will chew faster. if you don't... well you are eaten.
It's about finding the right balance of protecting yourself only when it's essential and watching your enemy have most of the victories, only to let them believe you are not a threat, until you are ready to overcome them.
I highly recommend reading in the forums, what actions makes the aliens angry, because this knowledge is essential before starting (and not even hinted in the tutorial). otherwise, you will realise too late, you already lost, without understanding how you can even win.

Big disappointment. The game has all the ingredients for a successful tactical combat, but they used it so badly, you feel like you're playing a simple dice game, where AI feels like cheating. your most aggressive unit can't take rats while, their rats take your dragons. it is very frustrating.
TBH I have no idea, what gave them the terrible idea to let every creature, including your "wizard", which you loose the fight if it dies, die in one hit. this kind of poor design, makes weird strategies viable, like sending one flying crappy unit and let it hit the opponent mage once, or cast one ranged spell against the opponent and boom you won. same can happen to you too and there is NO WAY to defend against this, except maybe cornering yourself and spamming summons and hope your summons have enough luck to reach the enemy, before they reach you. you have no control over your deck, it's just random cards. so you may have 0 protection against flying creatures or other 1 shot 1 kill spells.
it's pure luck what your opponent gets, what you get, it's pure luck if you opponents crappy unit kills your giant, it's pure luck your 90% chance spell fizzles twice in a row. it's pure luck if your opponent gets a ranged damage spell and just kills you with it, there is no clever strategies, only chaos.
Another frustrating "feature" is, when you loose a fight, that you were supposed to win with "story" mercenaries, they do not appear anymore, so you just have to retry, against impossible odds and hope chaos favors you in one of the 10 retries.
There is no tutorial, there is no way to tell what is Law mode what is Chaos mode, which you have to choose at the beginning. there is no mention of why you can't use talisman you just bought. the only information you get in the beginning about being chaos/neutral/law turns out to be plain wrong. there is absolutely no difference between those guys. you don't get more chaos spells because you are chaos. you may have a full hand with law spells, although you wanted to be chaos.
The only upside is I bought it at a bargain so I didn't waste a lot of money to be disappointed.

As someone who is obsessed with ufo-like games and having completed all games I could find, I find myself in the position to review phoenix point.
Pros:
Copied fallout's targeting system, which works surprisingly well. it gives single shot weapons the edge over armor, and assault/heavy weapons and edge over light armored enemies
Copied Ufo: Afterlight's faction system. which works well with the ability to share faction research and specialized areas for each faction
Nice distribution of different enemies, from small suicidal worms, to building sized queen
Challenging resource scarcity
Gradual increase in difficulty with evolution of enemies

Cons
- Resource scarcity leads to inability to hire soldiers, equip them let alone build aircraft to carry them. You will have to accept the fact you will not be able to do all missions
- If you loose a single soldier, it will have significant affect on your resources to replace them. which forces you to play very defensively (or save/load a LOT)
- Due to random placement of story/side/diplo missions, you can for a VERY long time, can't progress those because you just can't reach with any of your planes there. stupid, right? but it happens.
- weapons/equipment you research have very marginal difference. you could finish the game with beginner equipment, it makes the whole "Research" somewhat useless, especially faction tech. just an example beginner sniper rifle deals 110 damage, the best sniper outside ancient tech (which is not worth it) deals 130 damage 50 piercing.
- Whole ancient tech is broken. by the time i started finding excavation sites, i was already almost finished with the game. my first excavation mission never finished (outstanding bug about ancients spawning under floor) which killed the buzz immediately for me. which was also pretty waste of time to do all the missions and researches which in the end were not used at all, because you need special material which you can't get due to buggy maps.
- frequency of havens and bases to protect increases when you explore more regions of the world. but you can't build airplanes and teams with the same frequency. the game makes sure of that.
- doing a mission has a cost, this cost increases if you don't have a superior team, which you can't have due to above reasons. so most of the game you are broke
- there is no income. no seriously, you have to WAIT for enemy to attack your allies so you can protect them be the hero and beg for some rewards, because apparently building factories or labs were never possible. you find a way to harvest mutant organs for food though. of course you wouldn't do mundane stuff like farms...

Other bugs:
- when you load previous turn, most of the time, enemies don't play and you play 2 turns one after the other. this happens almost always. although i didn't want to abuse it whenever i load, i can't stop this bug from happening.
- when you click fire, 30% or so of the time it double clicks which results in shooting the first target in torso, which sucks, because usually that's not what you want to hit.

Overall, the game gets frustrating with no sense of improvements with new equipment or research and the lack of resources to even use them on mass scale and open bugs which are very frequent. but it is worth a try if you're into ufo-like games like me.

No single player campaign for a standalone game? really?