I'm saving the world again, much like I've saved it a dozen times before. I've taken command of yet another team of ragtag soldiers and scientists, and returned once more to frantically scampering back and forth across a terrified planet, responding to panicked reports of strange creatures unleashing horrifying attacks. I've been scavenging their weapons, analysing their biology and reverse-engineering their technology. The fate of humanity itself rests on the shoulders of fewer soldiers than would fill a classroom and the invisible, intangible people who presumably exist behind them, fixing their weapons, tending their wounds and laundering their blood-stained undershirts at the conclusion of every suburban skirmish.
Even if a wider network exists around this handful of heroes (perhaps including whoever it is who does tech support for their radar, compiles their budget breakdowns and patches calls through to admin and HR), there can't be more than a hundred people who support the human race's last, best hope against a threat as cryptic as it is colossal. Phoenix Point, true to the X-COM and XCOM lineage to which it is so close a cousin, is fundamentally about guerilla tactics once again. Small squads of scrappy soldiers subvert a larger, slower force, turning its tools and equipment against it, before eventually finding and slicing off its head. And the key to this dynamic, the key to these guerilla tactics, is momentum. How it's paced and how it progresses.
It's really all about the journey, not the destination, and the friends you made along the way. In this case, those friends can include much bigger weapons, furious firefights and exciting revelations. I don't remember how I completed any game in the X-COM series, but I remember so many examples of the first time I met a particular alien, uncovered critical information or turned the tide of a hectic battle. Phoenix Point brings back all those furiously exciting feelings, giving a gentle seasoning to some very familiar flavours. I've been thrilled by its surprises, intrigued by its developments and also a little bored by another scavenging mission where I wait for the last enemy to blunder into view.
0 comments:
Post a Comment