I’m extremely hyped for Phoenix Point at this point. The potential of the game is just colossal.
Some of the things I really loved about the original UFO series was the massive scale. UFO’s kept dropping in, some of them were way too big to handle, and you just had to let em be until you could either throw enough interceptors at them or research better tech. The games were basically early sandbox games, but with awesome and (somewhat) linear story-arc (depending on the order in which you researched stuff).
It was a time when background lore was important, and I spent hours just reading up on all the stuff on the UFOPedia.
Some of the things I really loved were the Geoscape with an opportunity to build unique and specialized bases all over the world as well as finances that at least seemed to make sense. A soldier didn’t cost 5 dollars. No, he cost 40000 dollars to hire and was paid a wage of 20000 per month. A simple, yet effective way of providing immersion to a game.
I also loved that you could buy “tanks”, although as a kid, it took a while for me to understand that it took up 4 spaces on the Skyranger, and that it needed a lot of ammo. Just flying out there to a night mission in your Skyranger with 14 Rookies in their grey overalls and funky disco-hair, could send chills down my spine. On the first round, you’d deploy maybe half of them outside the Skyranger, kneel and get ready to hunt some aliens. And sure enough, sometimes an alien grenade landed right outside the Skyranger on turn 1 and blew up 6 of your guys, but it wasn’t the end of the game. It was a setback, and you realized that spacing wasn’t optional after all.
UFO: Enemy Unknown was probably the game of my childhood that had the biggest impact on me. It was scary, thrilling, the minimalistic battlemusic provided an amazingly eerie atmosphere, and to this day I still revisit the game on occasion just to relive the memories.
If Phoenix Point can be half of what UFO: Enemy Unknown was, it’ll easily be my new favourite.
Keep up the good work!
