In the normal difficulty setting recruits arrive fully armed, and armored, with the best gear available from their home faction. Phoenix PointвЂ™s tech tree almost immediately spoils the gameвЂ™s tension.

Playing on the normal difficulty setting, I didnвЂ™t lose a single soldier until the end game, where the difficulty spikes dramatically. Death is permanent, and troops are relatively expensive to buy, and by the end of the game I had only 12 soldiers and a single, powerful armored personnel carrier that I could deploy alongside them. The biggest departure are the raids on human havens, which require you to kill off a handful of troops and then move around an otherwise empty map for long periods of time, shooting at barrels until they explode.ДЇrom the outset I was able to to recruit troops from every faction, and use their tech on the battlefield. These tasks were almost always a matter of entering a turn-based battle at a remote location and killing all the enemies on the map. Much of the early game revolves around courting these factions by taking on simple quests to win their trust. Synedrion troops are sneaky, and fight with poisoned weapons. New Jericho troops are heavily armed and armored, while the Disciples of Anu excel at close combat. WhatвЂ™s promising about this set-up is that each of the three factions has its own distinct style of warfare. Other times the weapon fails to actually light anything on fire. Most of the time a flamethrower is an excellent area denial weapon, especially since most units just run through the flames. In my playthrough hostilities eventually stopped after a few in-game days and for no clear reason, but that burst of activity meant that by the end of the campaign I had fought many more battles against human adversaries than sea-born abominations. Eventually, the battle against the Pandorans is complicated by all-out war among the human factions, with the player tasked with building up reputation by defending one or more sides against their aggressors. Caught in the middle is Synedrion, described as an вЂњultra-democraticвЂќ collective of humans and artificial intelligence.ДЄs the game progresses, players will need to side with one or more factions in order to move the plot along. Meanwhile, the Disciples of Anu worship the virus and embrace its potential to remake people in its image. Hyper-militaristic New Jericho wants to push the Pandorans, as theyвЂ™re called, into the sea and thereby protect the purity of the human race. Like that gameвЂ™s sequel, X-COM: Apocalypse, society has fractured into competing factions. Just as in the original X-Com: UFO Defense, gameplay is split between a real-time world map called the Geoscape and discrete turn-based battles between small groups of soldiers. To its credit, Phoenix Point does include a lot of high-quality voiceover work. The campaignвЂ™s storyline is told through a handful of lightly animated slideshows. ItвЂ™s up to the troops of the Phoenix Initiative to turn the tide, lighting up long-lost bases hidden on the world map and using them as launching points to further explore the globe for answers. Inland, societies break down, resulting in a new dark age. The resulting biomass then mixes with indigenous sea life, crawls ashore, and attacks the survivors. Humanity has been overrun by a global pandemic called the Pandora Virus, which takes over peopleвЂ™s minds and forces them to march into the sea. Players take control of a multinational paramilitary group that has fallen on hard times.

In its place is a roughly 20-hour narrative campaign that vacillates between onerous and dull. The final product feels unbalanced, and tends to neuter the tense tactical gameplay of the 1994 classic. Phoenix Point, the turn-based game from X-Com co-creator Julian Gollop, is a bit of a disappointment.

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