Phantom Doctrine

being loud is tedious but you can get pretty nasty with stealth

Good turn-based game. Takes a little time to work out the oddities, so maybe an hour to try it and then restart fresh it necessary. Cool concept and fun to play.

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I'm going to say recommended, but don't draw too many conclusions. The game is pretty flawed. It's clear they didn't quite get to make what they had in mind, and so basically every aspect of the game is left short. But, the game has some interesting systems. Wish someone made a better version of this idea. Also, the game is nowhere near worth 40€. Get it for maybe 10 and you won't feel ripped off. Basic flow is like this: Open world map, pass time, get notification of some event, send people, discover enemy activity, start mission, get intel, play a word-matching minigame to solve intel. The missions are solved non-combat first and foremost. You are meant to stealth your way. You can take out enemies in melee silently. If you trigger combat, you get infinite reinforcements for most missions. The missions are fun for a while, but they quickly get very repetitive. The game really doesn't want you to take your time. Instead, you should simply try to rush through the campaign as quickly as possible to prevent the grind from settling in. The opposition has their own agents, and the game tries to present the oppositions as some sort of organic organization and that taking out their agents is a good thing for you. I didn't see any difference. In the beginning I tried taking out the enemies, later I couldn't care less anymore, and there was just no change at all. The AI simply sprouts their agents up from nowhere. The game tells you the AI needs time to train their agents; yet, enemy agents still matched my levels always, and never outmatched me either. Same goes for enemy bases. You take out one, another is almost immediately spawned. Sometimes as mission rewards you get locations for enemy bases that didn't even exist before you got the reward. You get a facility to interrogate and brainwash enemy agents. You can make them turn to your side if met on missions, make them destroy enemy bases when they get there etc., but there's no point. The bases they destroy are ones on the other side of the world you didn't even know exist and that had no effect on you at all, and as mentioned, a new base is simply created immediately anyway. I kind of feel like the bases in actuality don't even exist. The practical effect of enemy bases is losing money. Either they directly make you lose money, or they generate "danger" which forces you to eventually relocate your base, which costs money. This can be annoying, as money is not abundant, and a good way of making money is doing those repetitive missions. As mentioned, you solve secret files in a word-matching minigame. You get documents with parts redacted and codenames for people and places, and need to match codenames to real identities. It's fun. You read the lore and try to figure out what's what, until... You realize none of it matters at all. The outcome of solving something has nothing to do with what will happen after. The documents are mostly generated: pre-written and codenames replaced, so they don't form any coherent whole either. This is where the game lost it the most, in my opinion. It would've been cool if you had one giant corkboard where you piece together the conspiracy little by little. Instead, the core theme-aligned mechanic is completely pointless. The best way to finish missions is by stealth, and this is what you'll be doing, until the game decides you've had enough stealth and forces you into combat. One of these, and in fact the most difficult mission in the game, comes quite early in the game. Luckily, though, losing a mission doesn't really have any consequences. Mostly your people come back to you, or you might have to get them from enemy bases. The downside is supposed to be that they might be enemy spies. Apparently this might mean they turn on you on missions once combat starts, or they might generate danger. I frankly did not see either of these happening a single time. Also, it won't be long before you get that brainwashing facility of yours, and you can brainwash your people to forget about their bad thoughts. You can get new facilities for you base, but none of them really make any difference. The only ones you want are things that make money and things that can get more HP for you agents. HP is the most important stat, because if your HP matches the enemy's, you can do the melee KO attack which doesn't force you into combat. All in all, it a fun game for a while, with a lot of systems that seem completely pointless on a practical game-mechanics level, and eventually you start feeling like they are there only for busy-work.