A game so good I bought it 4 fucking times. One of the only times this mid franchise has a story with good characters, a decent plot, and doesn't have forced emo shit in it. A fantastic dub as well, and an incredible soundtrack to boot. By far, this is one of the best single player games I have played. What makes this one a 9/10 and what makes the original release such a mid as fuck game, is the level system. This game forces you to pick classes, making you not some bland overpowered "I can do everything" monster that ruined the original game's feel for me. The gambit system effectively letting you code your own AI partners so they won't do stupid shit unless you make them is so kino. Just a nice, turn my brain off, comfortable, but kino and real as FUCK game. Good. Shit.

If you somewhat liked XCOM, either the originals or the reboots, but didn't like the combat or the geoscape, you might like this game I guess. If you're like me and you just wanted more XCOM after the thousands of hours you've sunk into the franchise, just stick to playing XCOM.

The game's setting is neat and interesting for a while, but it quickly devolves into something that's in the end trying to be a "unique spin" on a zombie formula while attempting to constantly flash in front of your face "we're like XCOM we promise" with vague similarities here and there. The faction system seems at first fleshed out, but it's super barebones, basic, linear, and not engaging at all. It is on-par with just clicking yes or no on various pop-ups throughout the game, and in return you get some weapon upgrades that won't matter for a long time, and even when they do you can usually just use brute force + good placements that you've probably built up if you've played any good XCOM games for a good amount of time. The Geoscape is 90% filler, fluff, and unimportant locations you keep going to in the desperate attempt to find anything engaging or find resources. Mission structures and mission types are somehow more lacking than vanilla XCOM 2. Difficulty? The "difficulty" is non-existent until the game forces it to be there. Slow, monotonous, and boring placement as the enemy "not-aliens-and-not-zombies" slowly creep up to you and you blast them with Overwatches set up. Boom. Now, reinforcements show up en masse and you cannot handle them as is without taking casualties. Did you take damage or lose units because you placed yourself badly? No. You played perfectly and the angry GM didn't like that, so they force you to get swarmed so you DO take damage. Don't even get me started on any mission involving human enemies, this game cannot do them right at all. The developers of this game clearly should have focused on just Pandorans as enemies that could pop up, and make any human enemy faction related when you gain enough negative relations with them (which would take time to do unless you bum-rushed aggression at them for some reason). For too long in the game, they have too much armor, too much health, too many numbers, have multiple medkits, are already by default in good spread-out placements at the start of the mission, have some knowledge where you are, and are kitted with ways to destroy your cover and just destroy you. Then you upgrade some stuff in the mid-game and they're a joke and you don't want to even bother with them. You can either ram your head into them early and take losses to do so, or you can force yourself to play the game as intended TM and have no engaging fun. Tactics almost never matter, and whenever you do them well enough you are just forced by the game to endure a wave of reinforcements or to just take a hit because you have to so the tactics get undone and you're back to playing scrappy.

I casually speedrun UFO Defense now and then, and I've played countless times on the harder difficulties in XCOM 2 with added difficulty mods on top of all the nonsense that game can have. I can play those games drunk as a skunk and still do missions flawlessly, and I'm not saying this to just toot my own horn, I genuinely know what I'm talking about and I bring this up to help elaborate on that point. This isn't just some "oh he's a scrub ignore him" take I see all the time, and this game has had criticism leveled at it that absolutely are those types of takes. But, no, this one? Not one bit.

XCOM is a game that prides itself on kicking your ass if you can't figure out how to play it. You make close calls, lose soldiers, take risks, and in the end you try your best to return the favor in incredible scraps and wonderful set-pieces. But, if you're skilled and tactical about things, you can usually destroy missions without taking a single loss or even a single hit. Phoenix Point seems to ignore that last sentence, and thinks that because the majority of casual players only experienced or remember the first two sentences, that THAT is the essence of XCOM by itself and forces the game to feel that way no matter what.

I've played this game back when it came out in the EGS and it sucked massive balls back then. It's improved since then but still keeps the big main issues I've explained in this review, but nonetheless is improved than its original conception. All the DLC also sucks beyond reason, and I am very against anyone thinking this game is worth trying from also purchasing the DLC, because even fans of this game think the DLC all sucks. And I really mean ALL the DLC. I'm currently going to see the rest of this game through on a vanilla playthrough to see if anything changes this review but I doubt it. I am however interested in the mods for this game now that modding support is officially implemented, and will edit this review to reflect my thoughts on the game modded. But the vanilla Steam experience, while better than the EGS version at launch, kinda sucks still!

At the very least, this game runs. It sure does.

UPDATE: Yeah.... no I can't do it. This game is too tedious and repetitive while being incredibly boring at the same time. Don't purchase.

just c+p'ing my steam review AHEM...

I decided to write a pretty moderately thought out review at 2am due to seeing some really lenient reviews as well as some scrub-take reviews so, here's my 2 cents. I'd give this a middle thumb, but that doesn't exist so pretend the thumbs up is a middle thumb.

PROS:
-Great gameplay: Probably the most important part of any review is to talk about how fun it is. When this game works.... it works well. The general gameplay loop is you manage a small army while upgrading your mobile base, establishing world contacts, and managing resources all while random events and missions pop up with the urgency to complete them. In the actual missions, it's exactly what you'd expect from a XCOM game. There's some slight balance issue where certain classes are clearly better than others, and some classes are just flat out unusable in most cases/situations. Overall though, it's not exactly a broken mess with the said balance. You can pretty much play any way you want to and it will for the most part work, which is all I could really ask for from a tactical game like this.
-High replay value: Sometimes you will flat out miss out on some items, weapons, upgrades, characters, or facilities due to the time limit the game puts on you with the Avatar Project, especially on a blind run. In a way, knowing that there was something you missed out on or could have improved on gives you a reason to run through the game again sometime just to experience it. It accomplishes this by giving you a pretty good time the first time around, so naturally you start wondering just how fun or interesting alternatives could also be.
-Mod support: This is always a big plus. Sometimes games almost need mods to be fixed, fleshed out, or polished due to either development hell or incompetency from a developer/publisher. I don't think this game is one of those cases, where both on console and on PC I felt as if I didn't NEED mods to make the game enjoyable.
-Actual challenges: The game comes with multiple difficulty adjusters to make the game easier..... or if you're not a game journo you can make the game much harder. This is separate from the difficulty selection as well, so you can really customize how hard you want this game to actually be. The enemy variety is already decent and the WotC expansion adds even more to that as well.
-Pacing: As mentioned earlier in the review, the game constantly keeps you moving and will eventually force you to make decisions that can make or break your playthrough. It's not breakneck and it doesn't push you to fast to move on, but it won't let you sit there and grind everything to max before you start your first raid. It has plenty of things it wants you to do, and it will make sure you do it all but still allow you to enjoy doing it.

CONS:
-Stability: This one is not nearly as big as an issue as it is on console. To make a long story short, on consoles this game crashing is 100% guaranteed to happen a few times due to the way it loads things, and console can't handle it as well. It's notoriously difficult to play through the game on consoles due to the terrible stability and occasional softlocking to go along with the threat of a game restart. PC thankfully has MUCH less issues but that is not the same as none of the issues. Snapped cameras not going back to neutral, loads taking too long, turns being ruined because a unit didn't actually move where you wanted it to, reloading a save moving units across the map instead of where they were last, etc. This game when it runs, runs very well. But that's only when it DOES run.
-2K's idea of mod support: For some unknown reason, 2K decided to turn the XCOM 2 launcher into an advertisement for Chimera Squad and Civ 6. How does this affect mods? This launcher broke mods entirely. XCOM 2 has this thing where you get annoying alerts and sometimes broken save games when mods that were active on a save file get loaded when said mods are not active. The devs complained and had 2K try and reverse this and presto, mods are working again... not really. Mods that worked with both base game and the WotC expansion do not work still, unless of course they are updated to do so. The main issue here is a lot of the best mods in the game's existence are dual-compatible mods. Well this is an older game with an issue that was created in June 2020. Most of these amazing mods? 90% of them right now are no longer being supported or haven't had an update in years. So, unless you use fanmade launchers like AML you just can't use a majority of the best mods this game has. That being said, AML is a great launcher that even shows compatibility issues with mods and is worth downloading in order to get the best current XCOM 2 experience. But this doesn't excuse the fact that what you are paying for was tampered by the publisher just to run an ad, and might one day update the game again to break AML for no reason.
-Price: This game is years old, has a $40 expansion so good that it pretty much makes the base game look like a joke, and has multiple DLCs for both the base and WotC expansion. Yet... despite the DLCs being priced more than a full game in total....... the base game needed for all these expansions is still normally $60. This game is well over 100 buckaroos for the full experience. The fact that you HAVE to wait for a sale to be able to experience this amazing game at a FAIR price (not even discounted, imo the sale price should be the NORMAL price) is not just a negative, but a hefty one at that.
-The Lost: This complaint is only really for the WotC expansion, but in all honesty you should be playing WotC over the base game anyways so I'm including that here. Fucking awful. Literal zombies that ruin the flow of the game and are just there to be annoying. I once had a standard 8 enemy early game mission take 2 hours due to the sheer amount of Lost added to the level, and it turned an 8 enemy mission into a 93 enemy mission. They can't even really hurt you and you get free turns when you kill 1 of them. They are a waste of time, they are unfun to fight against, and they have no tactical aspects to them. They feel so out of place. This game already had zombie-like enemies, so I fail to see how LITERAL zombies add anything to this game. In fact I'd say they subtract from the experience. Thankfully there exists a mod that quite literally removes them from the game, and that unironically made my WotC experience instantly better.
-Various QoL improvements that haven't been added: And, they wont ever be. Faster menus, faster overwatches, less nagging from npcs on the radio, better civilian AI, etc. There are a ton of QoL improvements just begging to be made that won't make the game any easier or harder, yet they won't ever come. Thank the lord for mods, absolutely look into QoL mods when playing XCOM 2.

All in all, an objectively good game. There's plenty to criticize and I probably did not get it all in this quick review. Most of the criticism seems to stem from either the launcher being absolutely terrible now (which is 100% justified) and the Lost in its entirety, or its more @scrubquotesx material where somehow having lots of content to revisit makes the game bad somehow or not being able to breeze through the game quickly due to the Tired feature making the game longer than 10 hours as I saw someone complain years ago. Again if lots of content and longer than a day's worth of gameplay bother you then dear lord stay away from most games, XCOM 2 included. Go play some unmodded Skyrim and maybe a pinch of SWSH if you got a Switch. That being said, the ACTUAL cons are real. Stability, poor mod support from 2K, QoL features lacking, and the price can seriously ruin the game to a lot of people, and those are the real issues that should be talked about imo. But dang man, game is longer than 10 hours get the pitchforks people.