Phoenix Point is a turn-based tactics game from Julian Gollop’s studio Snapshot Games, about grotesque alien lifeforms invading our little rock. I wonder what comparison I am going to draw on here? The guy is the mind behind easily one of the best turn-based tactics franchises of all time, X-COM or XCOM, depending on which version of the title you want. Furthermore, this was his third attempt at getting a successor going following his early 2000s effort, followed by a multiplayer example that had quite a low budget.

Phoenix Point is X-COM, there is no skirting around it. You control a collection of makeshift military types taking on the horde of green men from Mars, or in this case, the next Pokémon evolution of the Mirelurks from Fallout and other malformed creatures from the sea. It would be a bit unfair to say it is only X-COM, as it adds in a couple of factions to complain at you, the Phoenix Point leader, about their bickering with each other while Spongebob Squarepants has a go at your Granny’s kneecaps. Am I possibly being a little hard on that aspect of the game? Yes, maybe.

To say there have been a few ideas glued on, more so out of desire than necessity, would be an understatement. Of course, you still have resource management and base building, alongside crafting, research, and an encyclopedia of world-building to fill out throughout the many hours of the Phoenix Point campaign and its DLCs. However, sitting on top of that is the pending global threat of the space jellyfish decimating the world population to irrevocable points. Sometimes, as in-flight entertainment for your A-team, you’ll have to fight the Enemy Unknown horde’s UFO in an odd semi real-time/turn-based mini-game that is altogether a bit messy.

None of that should suggest I dislike Phoenix Point for this reason alone, it is hardly the most annoying aspect of a collectively sound idea. Where the annoyances come in is the console port and the overall quality of it. Depending on your experience with games that are typically PC-centric being ported, it can alter your perception of the game. For example, let’s get into controls. Moving between multiple floors of a multi-layered level within the game, my intuition says to use the direction buttons because logic would suggest that as simple. In-game, however, up and down on your directional buttons zooms the camera in and out, while up and down on the right analog stick moves floor as right and left continue to be camera controls as normal.

This brings me to the options because you can’t remap or invert controls for love nor money. There practically aren’t any options at all. You can toggle things like backer names, hints appearing, volume, and camera speed. One option is animation speed, which is fine, but I’d have also liked an option to allow for skipping enemy animations just to speed up the situation. I know, turn-based games aren’t often about speed, though I am an impatient man that gets bored far too easily. Sometimes the game will freeze up for a second trying to work out what moves it can make with the enemies within and outside of the fog-of-war effect.

The performance overall is a little patchy in my experience, a phrase that brings the cacophony of fans leaping to defend it saying it is turn-based and framerates don’t matter as much. I’d have agreed if that was the issue, but I’m speaking more so of the load times of upwards of 30-seconds, a minute, or the worst of all, infinite load screens of death/a hard crash to “desktop.” The infinite load screen happened on a save-file of a mission that I was having the worst of luck on. Luckily someone had some sense and allowed you to have a near-infinite number of saves to use whenever and wherever you like. It seems the luck I was having surrounding that mission was reserved to the foresight of bugs and saving right outside of it.

Though in some areas, I’ve seen Phoenix Point try to chug along at less than pleasing framerates, coughing like a particularly wheezy steam locomotive. In equal measure, I’ve seen the game entirely break from simple actions. A few examples include all but three buttons responding on the controller, attempting to end a turn and being caught in a loop that wouldn’t allow me to continue, and typical minor things such as weapons not appearing in hands for a moment. These were nothing a save and reload couldn’t fix. Nonetheless, with the aforementioned lengthy load times, it can build up frustration having to do so.

As for the story, it is trying to make me care, but much like the second Independence Day film it is a little clunky and throwing too much onto the chessboard for me to care who was last introduced. The factions are your usual sci-fi fare when it comes to humanity on the brink of change: Plutocratic warmongers, a limp wristed attempt at some sort of Federation from Star Trek, and those that watch anime and can’t wait for their own tentacles. None of them are really sympathetic and as things go on, bandit groups that are offshoots from the big three start taking up space in the already cluttered “Phoenixpedia.” As a side note, for any game with an encyclopedia, I’d like a clear all notifications button, thank you!

I can’t say with a straight face that anyone that has hated turn-based games such as X-COM or its cousins in the Advanced Wars series will be excited by Phoenix Point: Behemoth Edition‘s console release. If you are a fan of big, bombastic sci-fi games in a turn-based realm, Phoenix Point excellently captures what you want from the genre. It is needlessly complex, it allows you to put as many holes in the grotesque bodies of the anime fans as you like, and it has that ever-present annoyance of modern video games, procedural generation. The latter going by the other name of “I’ve been on this map two or three times in the last hour, why am I here again?”

Ultimately, yes, I can’t help but love it despite its flaws. However, for someone that doesn’t want to take the idle walk around the place to get to the X-COM-ness, it might be a bit more irritating to try and work with. I keep coming back to it, but those bugs and load times will probably be prevalent for a while after launch until a substantial patch is sent out. Though some may still hold issues with the console port itself and most prominently, the clunky control scheme at times.

An Xbox One copy of Phoenix Point: Behemoth Edition was provided by Snapshot Games for the purposes of this review.

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Phoenix Point: Behemoth Edition

$39.99 USD

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Nothing left on earth excepting fishes (and X-COM).
• Great big stupid bombastic sci-fi nonsense.
• Futuristic-Lovecraftian horror monsters.

Cons

• Who thought camera controls on two-thumbs was a good idea?
• Clunky controls.
• Dull sci-fi factions that are bickering.
• Procedural generation.
• Performance/crashing issues.