Direct clone of X-Com that frankly feels more like a good mod to X-Com than a new game. Great game, though. Great potential.
But goddamn RNG. Game is so unbalanced it physically hurts. Acid artillery Chirons with the kill-everyone-with-a-single-unlucky-shot, double grenades from Arthrons at 10 health with all body parts disabled but that fucking left arm, invisible Tritons with sniper rifles and Quick Aim… On the other hand the Rage Burst madness with a sniper or a cannon (the only reason why not all your soldiers should be specced into assault for Dash)…
Most of all, you can play till 20% oneiric and still not get a single Haven defense from the faction you need. Or not even find a haven of that faction. And when you do finally get that defense, all civilians can be rng-ed and lined up for execution on the other side of the map effectively draining all your Willpower. I don’t know how good you gotta be to play with no restarts. I played with restarts, and after a while some battles feel more like rng puzzles - make all the right moves and hope for all the right rolls or no pass.
thats the weakness of turn based combat games that rely on percentages to calculate hit or miss with absolute results (either hit or miss, no reduced damage when rng fails).
resulting in situation such as a stunned/crippled/unconscious enemies can completely dodge your 95% hit chance attacks in several turns (this is extremely exaggerated situation, but it can happen in games like these…)
i remember once in 2k’s original xcom enemy unknown, my only surviving squad member get panicked randomly when facing sectoids, then suddenly after panicking, he calmly turned to the back, raised his rifle, and 100% 360* CRIT HEADSHOT THE CIVILIAN HE WAS SUPPOSED TO PROTECT.
i quit xcom series after that. xcom fans might yell THATS XCOM, BABY! to me forever, but i want play games with fair ratio between skill and luck, not calculator or casino machines disguised as games.
hey, i just realized a good idea for new gd gameplay mechanics! what if crate make some special enemies able to confuse our character, which results in our character autoattacking themselves for a second? that’ll be a very xcom-y experience! (please don’t do this, crate…)
Actually, you got no chance to hit like in X-Com. Instead, you got manual aim camera with two circles one inside the other. 50% of your bullets go to the inner circle and 50% go to the outer one. So some shots are 100% (except the buggy cover) as long as your accuracy is high enough and the circle small enough.
Also, in PP cover does not decrease hit chance (because there is none). It just… provides cover. From the circles.
The problem with RNG in PP is that the mechanics are extremely offense oriented. That plus random enemy selection and placement make some battles nigh-unbeatable regardless of your progress. In the world map, aliens level up quite quickly and your progress depends very much on RNG, too, so it’s very easy to get bottlenecked.
so it seems phoenix point tries to upgrade the % chance to hit mechanics in turn based combat genre. sounds good. maybe in a few more patches the cover bug will be fixed.
random enemy selection and placement, and aliens leveling up quickly… that seems like a recipe for rng ragequits. is the aliens’ level always scale to your progress? is there any option to go to easier levels for farming?
Afaik aliens level up according to how many times you fight them but also to a small extent how you fight them. For example if you always shoot one kind in the head they’ll develop armor there sooner then on the other parts of their bodies. Also, they seem to scale linearly in story missions. And also they’re own level of progress matters - there’s this red mist that covers the planet slowly inside which they build bases. Whether you see them and can attack or not - is mostly RNG.
You can fight humans. There are three factions you get technology from either by getting reputation, raiding their research centers or researching their gear. Interactions with the aliens contribute much less to technology.