First impressions and suggestions

Phoenix Point
1

HI Snapshot games and fellow Phoenix Commanders. :slight_smile:

I would like first to point out that I am one of those who did not like the Epic Games switch and still have my doubts about it. But that is a subject for another topic.

Playing the tutorial and some, I expected to be playing a beta and that is the general feeling I got. It has a lot of potential and is still pretty raw. Let us start with some of the missing features and functionality :

  • no F1 menu for enemies. Unless I have missed it, seeing a Triton for the first got me wondering what it can do. Also it might help for such menu to include the body parts and what their status disable effects are. If there is, it needs to be pointed out during the tutorial and made more obvious during battle, like when you click on F to shoot it needs to have a button in the menu which you can click to get more information about the target.
  • I have yet to encounter environmental objects like explosives cars/barrels/doors etc. Please feel free to correct if there any included.
  • the Soldier info screen during battle is sparse on tooltips . You can not mouseover on any of the body of the body parts, skills or attributes to get more info about them.
  • there is no Previous Soldier button, neither in Battlescape, nor Geoscape. In XCOM they have SHIFT + TAB to navigate and it works great with a controller as well (if you are a console player).
  • music is the same for the whole battle, there are no battle tunes. Compared to XCOM, Phoenix Point sounds more like the wasteland in Fallout 2 than to a battlefield.
  • On salvage missions you can not try and save the crates with your soldiers and evacuate them from the battlefield. Feels kind like a hidden timer, XCOM design used to allow you to save Meld and crates during the mission itself.
  • Quick save and Load are not pointed out in the Key bindings, they still work on PC. I guess that is a console afterthought, since most probably you wonā€™t have quick save for them.
  • Speaking of bindings, you can not modify them. XCOM 2012 had this on launch day, including secondary bindings for the same action. Please consider adding this as soon as possible.

Soldiers and customization :

  • I did not expect wonders from this to be honest. The choice of heads is big on African and Asian types for some reason, that said it is not something to write home about. Armour parts and the like can not be modified, patterns are barely visible. I need to play more with this, but from what I see you can only colour your armour and change the head of your soldier.
  • Icons in Soldier menus and in general need a complete update. It will help a lot to have an icon next to each attribute and item icons (like the Ares Rifle) can be a lot more clearer. The Ares rifle looked like a glove to me at the start. The resources icons also look pretty basic, I would also think it will be better to find more interesting names for them, depending what the writing team deams suitable.

Geoscape -

  • Research fells like an afterthought. There is barely any description, the effects are as vague as possible and when completed there is description/flavour/report. It also do with better presentation. It is also a bit arcane who does the research and how much each lab contributes to it.
  • Base management areas look like they have placeholder icons. I am not expecting fully animated base like in XCOM but even XCOM 1994 had a better representation of the layout of a base.
  • Tech, Materials and Food are pretty generic resource names. I would prefer something more in tune with the lore of the game. They do work as intended from what I saw.
  • When manufacturing the single use items need to be clearly labelled as such. I know a magazine or a grenade should be pretty obvious that is one use only, but when making more supplies for your team some players forget that.
  • Ammo types have already been suggested, should be pretty obvious and hopefully easy to implement. Same goes for rockets and ordinance (like cannon shells/rockets for your vehicles).
  • There should be a secondary way of hiring soldiers, like a black market for example. XCOM 2 had 3 different ways actually - mission rewards, black market and regular recruiting. Give the player more options.

Thank you for reading this far and I will keep testing the 1.0 build. No bugs to speak of for the time being. :slight_smile:

2

You can access aliens info screen same way you can access your soldiersā€™.

There are doors, but they are weird - they open automatically, when you are close. I wish they would have done it similarly as XCOMs did.

There are explosives, though I am at a loss at what explodes and what not. There were containers I was confident would explore only for them not to, while other times and alien I was shooting at was revealed to be standing by something flammable and got killed by explosion. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

3

left click on enemy and select ā€˜Infoā€™

there are. Even in first scavenge mission during tutorial.

but it works the same here

depends on the map

all items produced instantly are one time use

not in this post-apocalyptic world

4

Shift is not working for me to switch back to previous soldier and is not listed in the keybindings. Is there a different key for this ?

About the items, it will just be nice to point it out to the player - just a single line under the name of the item ā€œSingle useā€.

F1 menu is different then the Info menu in concept. F1 menu is accessible from everywhere, including the targeting interface. Currently you can not click on INFO when targeting someone.

You have to right click, right click again to revert to the map, then select the target, click on INFO. That makes it four clicks and 5 seconds. In XCOM you simply click on F1 when targeting and the Info screen pops up.

XCOM is a lot more user-friendly in that regard.

P.S.
I can almost feel it that one of the first mods will be a soldier recruitment one. :wink:

5

Hey, in BB5, one soldier cost like a weekā€™s resources or something. I played tonight and recruited four, within a couple of (IRL) hours. I think itā€™s safe to say that this issue has been sorted.

6

My biggest criticism is that the game doesnā€™t have a killcount. And when you mutate your soldiers feels kinda blunt, like ā€œso iā€™m a monster nowā€¦ā€ no cutscene, no text window or anything itā€™s just weird.