My thoughts after 30ish hours

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
1

Nothing is explained, the tutorial is woefully inadequate, this leads to many situations where you’re left wondering “why isn’t this working?”, “why can’t I do that?”, “what am I supposed to do now?”, “how do I do this”. It’s very frustrating.

I feel so weak, the enemies keep getting stronger and stronger and I just don’t? I’m doing a mission now and instantly there’s 3 Chiron, 1 Siren and 3 Arthron on my screen, I cannot deal with this at all. I’m only playing on the default difficulty but it feels like I’m always behind. I have completed XCOM2 on Ironman so I’m not new to the genre, but in Phoenix Point it just feels like the difficulty keeps spiking out of nowhere.

I hate the terrain, it’s so stupid that a tiny bit of terrain can stop my shots, or prevent me from even firing at all, so many times I’ve moved to somewhere where I clearly have line of sight (the game even tells me I do) but I cannot fire. In a game like this the info you’re getting needs to be accurate, and if I’m supposed to hit I bloody better well! XCOM2 was much simpler in this regard and it was a better game for it. And my God, the grenade launcher is so inaccurate, so often the blast is NOWHERE near where I’m aiming.

Progression is lacking, past a certain point I just feel like I’m stagnating. I feel a big reason for this is the rep system with other factions, you kinda just get everything in one lump sum at 75%, it should be staggered so you’re constantly getting rewards.

Ambush missions are an annoyance, with Haven’s being attacked constantly you don’t get much time on the Geoscape as it is, this just pulls you away even more.

Performance is shocking at times, I dropped down to 5FPS today when a Scylla walked through a building, that’s with a GTX 1080, 8600k @ 4.8GHz, 16GB 3200MHz, SSD. I’ve also noticed things like aiming the flame thrower and the dash buttons also drop the frame rate.

Countless bugs, there’s just too many to list and most have been posted anyway.

2

Yeah, I have had a bunch of moments where I did not know why something isn’t working, or what I am supposed to do or what does a particular icon mean. Heck, just the initial figuring out how to recruit soldiers and that the icons on the geoscape only show up at a certain zoom level. An expanded tutorial, or just more information in the Phoenixpedia could really help.

The feeling weak thing I have also encountered, but once I got research from a couple factions, that help a bunch. In addition, reading these forums I found good information on multi-classing your soldiers and speeding up training (some claim that this actually will make the game too easy, but I am skeptical).

3

I think the big problem is you seem to get most of the research in a big lump sum, so you’re weak for ages, not getting anything then BAM, you get everything so you have a big power spike and then nothing again, if it was spread out better it would feel much better.

4

I agree with most of this. After playing through the original xcoms as well as the reboots many times since their release, I have never felt so constrained by the research process. Part of it was I had no idea how to progress a lot of it without looking things up. This goes for many aspects of the game that do not feel intuitive. One article I read said it well:

“You should not have to play through an entire game in order to understand how to play the game.”

I made a lot of mistakes with multiclassing, because there isn’t enough info on what those classes offer you. You only find out AFTER you’ve chosen it what the actual skills are, so synergies are impossible to plan.

Mounted weapons? I now have a skill for it but no idea where to find them. No info available in the game.

Want to stay peaceful with a faction, but need it’s research? Too bad, you have to choose one. However, bringing the rep up is an intensely difficult grind because it’s a chicken and egg thing… You need to complete missions where your gear is underpowered to get the gear that makes it a fair fight. Half the time the only answer is cheesing and/or constant reloads.

Looking for research prerequisites? “Requirements not met” should tell you everything you need to know I guess. Sometimes there is an X/2 indicator as with gear, but other research simply shows up as intriguing but unavailable. Why? Who knows. The research item certainly doesn’t tell you.

There are so many things you need to understand that take so much grinding, online research, and guesswork that my second playthrough would likely take 1/8 the time. And that first time has all the fun sucked out of it because the learning process is so laborious. Never mind learning to play around bugs at the same time, but that at least is not an issue with gameplay foundations.