Phoenix Hope

This game is abandoned.

The dev abandons us like the king abandoning his people in a game.

TLDR - It's like Kingdom but more complex. You have freedom to build anywhere and you manage each resource individually (wood, wheat, stone, iron, souls). The world looks, feels and sounds incredible. Gorgeous pixel art, nice dynamic weather system with a day/night cycle and great sound design. This is an awesome game but it has a sharp learning curve. It is quite solid for an Early Access game. There is a good amount of content with very few (if any) bugs. It is a must have for Kingdom fans and I highly recommend it. Can't wait for some new content. NOTE - This game is unforgiving (but well worth the learning curve). One screw up and you may need to restart from day 1. With that in mind here is how I cruised to day 53. STRATEGY FOR NEWER PLAYERS: DON'T BUILD OUTSIDE THE HOPE ZONE - This probably the single most frustrating thing about the game. My advice to new players: just build inside your Hope Zone. If you expand too fast and portals spawn inside your defenses it can be hard to recover. You don't need every building all at once. Stay inside the Hope zone: you will enjoy this game a lot more, the nights will be a breeze and the enemies will rarely even touch your walls. RESEARCH IS THE KEY - After being getting thoroughly frustrated during my first 5 attempts and reading some of the discussion in the community posts I tried my 6th attempt. This time I never built "permanent" buildings outside the Hope zone. I focused on making sure I had enough food and shelter each night to increase the Hope zone. To do this you need to prioritize RESEARCH (mainly stronghold, house and lumbermill upgrades). This is the key. Then you can increase population (and with it defense and resources) without building outside the Hope zone. TEMPORARY "POP-UP" STRUCTURES - Because I didn't want to build outside the Hope zone, I never built a permanent barracks or arena. You don't need them. I only built a permanent archery range inside my base. If you need swordsmen or lancer units, just build a temporary arena or barracks outside your base first thing in the morning, train your units and then deconstruct it (to get your resources back) before nightfall. Once you have your economy and research going, you only need 2 lancers on each side of your base and then just add archers until you reach your population limit of 99. SCOUT SHELTER - Also get the scout shelter for a monster free night every 3rd night as soon as possible. While growing my base I usually did my main expansion every 3rd or 4th night when I have a monster free night. So I had 2 full days and 1 full night to expand and get my new defensive line setup before the next attack. This made the game 1000% more fun! If you expand too fast you get portals spawning inside your defenses and it becomes a micro pause/unpause nightmare. Currently on day 53 I have 26 archers on each side with 3 lancers and nothing even reaches my walls. WHERE PHOENIX HOPE SHINES: 1. Freedom to build anywhere - One thing I really enjoy about Phoenix Hope is you can build whatever you want wherever you want. 10/10 here 2. The world looks, feels and sounds incredible - Phoenix Hope has gorgeous pixel art with a nice dynamic weather system (plus day night cycle) and great sound design with some awesome background music. 10/10 here 3. Mining - I love this idea. Adds a certain "depth" (hehe) to the game. 4. Scouting Missions - Another unique and great concept (although this needs a rebalance for the "Trapped" and "Village Under Siege" missions - currently they are just never worth it IMO). 5. Research tree - Love this. 6. Resource Management - Once you learn the different resource requirements and you can work within this system it adds a lot of depth to this game that doesn't exist in the Kingdom games. FOR THE DEVS: 1. Dismissing Units - If I have 3 scientists (2 working and 1 idle at my stronghold) and I dismiss one of them it will prioritize dismissing the working units. I think it should prioritize dismissing the ones which are idle and standing at my stronghold. 2. Auto-repair toggle for every building - after every night I need to click "Repair" on each net trap and each spike trap on each side of the base. Every building should have an toggleable auto-repair button. 3. AI - Currently worker AI prioritizes based on a list (i.e. 1st action, 2nd action, 3rd action and so on). This often means your workers are running from one side of the map to the other and then back again. I think changing this to proximity prioritization would help a lot here (i.e. perform 1st closest action, followed by 2nd closest action etc..) 4. Auto mine - the miners should automatically mine just like the lumberjacks automatically find and chop trees. 5. Healing - The banner system is a bit tedious specifically when you are trying to split wounded units from the group to try and heal them. I think adding a "Heal Wounded" button to the healer would help here. Or just allow the healer to pull wounded units without having to first release them from their banner. 6. Rebalance the Scouting Missions - The "Trapped" and "Village Under Siege" scouting missions are not worth the unit/resource commitment. These should be rebalanced. 7. "Go back in Time" option - I think adding the option to spend some soul to "go back in time" a few days and make different choices would be great (similar to how you can use the scout shelter to "hide" your base from the monsters for 1 night). 8. UI - I think a little more clarification on how some of the game systems work and maybe some tool tips with a bit more info when you hover over things would help newer players. 9. Portal indicators - sometimes the flashing warning indicating a portal is about to appear doesn't trigger. If you're building outside the Hope zone this can be devastating. COMPARISON TO KINGDOM: I absolutely loved the Kingdom games, so I had to try Phoenix Hope. It's impossible to play Phoenix Hope without drawing parallels to the Kingdom games as that is clearly where a large inspiration for this game comes from. The resource management in Kingdom is streamlined with coins and it works well (hunt a rabbit, get a coin, cut down a tree, get a coin, harvest crops, get coins and so on). It's simple and easy to learn. Want to make a basic combat unit/hunter? Toss a coin to your bow vendor and boom, you have a hunter. Again, simple and easy to learn. In Phoenix Hope you need to manage each resource individually (wood, stone, wheat, iron, souls and population). This definitely adds some depth, but it also adds to the learning curve. For example: You want to hire a basic soldier unit in Phoenix Hope? Well you'll need a barracks to train them, an armory to make chainmail (plus the armorer to operate it), a weapons smith to make them a weapon (plus the blacksmith to operate it), a farm to make wheat so you can train them (plus the farmer to operate it), a lumber mill because almost every building needs wood and it is a component in almost everything in some way (plus lumberjack to operate it), a mine for stone because stone is a component in almost everything in some way and iron for weapon and chainmail (plus a miner to operate the mine) and a house so you have population to hire them. All the buildings require resources to build, resources to staff and resources to use. I played 3 separate campaigns to figure all of this out because if you don't prioritize the build order of everything I mentioned above just right, you'll quickly get stuck in a "repair loop" where you just manage to harvest enough during the day to repair your walls at night and repeat. You only really have a few days to get your defense and economy going before you start to get in trouble. You need to make sure you know what order to build in right from the beginning so you can defend properly and build your economy (I'm not playing on "Easy Mode").

It's been years since an update, there isn't any hope anymore. Please save your wallet.

Feels pretty abandonded. Been almost 2 years and no update. lol

This game has been abandoned.

ABANDONED, DO NOT BUY

Seems to be abandoned by the developer the last update was in 2023 as far as it seems Fun Game but once you are at the end of the content theres really nothing else to do so i hope they hop back on this project and release the full game in the future