TLDR: It’s a successor to the often imitated 1994 XCOM: UFO Defense. Directed by the original designer of the 1994 game, Julian Gollop, it is itself heavily inspired by the 2012 remake: XCOM: Enemy Unknown. If you want a really polished game, stick with the 2012 remake and the great 2016 Sequel: XCOM 2. If you want something truer to the ‘94 original, a bit weird and challenging give this one a whirl. There was a major balance pass at the end of 2025, the “Firebird” update which has apparently sorted the difficulty spikes out a lot as well.
Disclaimer: I backed the game in the crowdfunding “kickstarter” in 2018, but never actually played it until 2026.
And as of 2026, Phoenix Point is in a pretty good state. It’s a much less polished game than the 2012 remake and the 2016 Sequel: XCOM 2. However, it is truer to the original game in some important regards and not in others. For example, this game makes use of an action point and cover system that is similar to the 2012 system, but discards the percentage hit chance of those for an “each shot modelled” system, like the 1994 games. This becomes fairly elegant, no longer do your soldiers miss point blank attacks. Each unit has a “Speed” statistic that determines how far they move with an action point. Melee attacks always hit. Strikes go to a hit location, left arm, right leg, 6th tentacle, and each location has an armour value. You can opt to take the shots of your units in a first person view, which is awesome, but also leads to two of the few drawbacks of the game. Firstly, it’s almost required that you check every shot from the FPS view. Your units fire their weapons from the way they hold them, rifles at shoulder height, heavy weapons at waist height. This can lead to issues, normally with the heavy weapons, where if a soldier is behind a small wall or barrier they will just fire directly into the cover. Also, and this is a bit weird, and I didn’t realise until a long way into the game, units actually pop in and out of cover during your turn. They like, stick their heads out and look around, so if you wait in the FPS view for them to pop out to look around, you can actually get a much higher chance to hit. The second issue this causes, the UI will show you which enemies your soldier will have line of sight to before you move to a location, however, if there is actually a random stop sign or fence that will block 99.9% of their shots, you won’t know until you check the FPS view. The enemies are however VERY aware of these blocking obstacles, and will not place themselves suboptimally in this way. Your soldier's aim is presented as a circle within a circle, the size of which is determined by the range of the weapon they have, and their personal accuracy stat. Each shot has a 50% of landing in either the inner or outer circle. This does tend to mean that long range weapons excel at all ranges, while short range ones are only good at short range, but sniper rifles kinda rule for another reason.
Armour, also is very straight forward, if your soldier has a helmet that gives 30 armour, every attack that hits his head is reduced by 30, and can be reduced to 0. This makes your soldiers much tougher than in any of the previous games, and you can straight out of the gate build and equip them with heavy armour that makes them almost immune to pistols and rifles. Over the course of the campaign, the alien units become more and more armoured, and you can see where this is going. Eventually it kinda descends into a squad of snipers vs a squad of snipers. Any melee unit will get picked off before getting close, and shotguns and rifles just bounce off everyone. Enemy snipers are terrifying because they can one or two shot your soldiers from a mile away, and everything else can be easily managed. The game does try to balance around this by adding in armour piercing weapons in the late game, but snipers really ruled the map, at least in my play through.
The tech-tree is very different to ANY of the previous games, whereas in any earlier XCOM style game, it’s a desperate race to develop better weapons and armour before the alien hordes overwhelm you, in this one you actually start with perfectly ok tech. There are other human factions, (There’s 4 total - The Phoenix Foundation (the player), Synedrion, New Jericho and the Disciples of Anu). Who all have slightly different tech, but not always better. And you have to ally with these other humans, or steal from them to gain access to their tech. Interestingly, you don’t have to go it alone, you can pick an ally and support them through to the end, or even switch back and forth. Each faction has a different approach and plan to deal with the alien invasion.
Research is less about material advantages, and more about advancing Team Phoenix’s understanding of the world and the alien threat. You also don’t hire individual scientists or engineers, you just build Labs and Factories, you only have to worry about hiring and feeding your soldiers.
Classes are a thing, Assault, Heavy, and Sniper to start, with 4 extra you can discover. These function as you would pretty much expect, each soldier gets a list of class abilities they can learn as they level up, plus a random selection of a few other abilities they can learn that are specific to them. This does lead to some interesting combos and at level 4 the soldier can “multi” into a second class, which opens up a lot of options.
Your soldiers are reasonably hardy and can take a few hits, especially in the early game, I didn’t suffer any losses until the aliens got sniper rifles, as a single med kit can fully heal a soldier. Soldiers can carry quite a bit of stuff, (like in the 1994 game), and it’s a good idea for each one to have a med kit, a grenade or two, and extra ammo. Snipers can also use pistols, the other starting classes need a learned ability to use pistols, (An idea copied from XCOM 2, a lot of people don’t like this and there are mods to let anyone use a pistol). So a backup pistol also makes sense for soldiers that can use them, as well as a melee weapon for soldiers that learn how to use those. So it is possible to have a soldier that switches back and forth from a shotgun to a sniper rifle to an axe depending on the situation.
You can also get ground vehicles, which are very useful in the early game, as their armour makes them largely immune to the early aliens, and they can carry a ton of gear. This makes vehicles a lifesaver on the "scavenging" missions, where your soldiers have to grab supplies and run, as you can drive to each supply crate, dump the contents into the vehicle and then drive to the next. A soldier can exit the tank, take a shot and then jump back in each turn to stay protected, but the vehicle weapons, although powerful, typically have very limited ammo and I don’t think can be reloaded in mission.
Aircraft are very important, as you need these to both explore the map, find new locations and deploy your troops on missions. You get one for free at the start, and others can be stolen or researched and built. One thing I never realised was that you can actually send multiple aircraft to a location to deploy extra troops for a mission, so although the starting Manticore aircraft only carries 6 soldiers, you can actually deploy up to 8 from 2 Manticores and 9 on some. This is probably a must on the higher difficulties, and I certainly could have used more than 6 soldiers in the final mission even on Veteran, (the Normal difficulty setting), as my game ended with 1 lone soldier, the heroic sole survivor of my team.
I would also like to say that I think people that backed the game in the original crowdfunding campaign have been pretty well treated by this Developer, as we got gifted all the extra DLC for free at some point, which is a pretty nice thing to do, (unlike Owlcat!), although I’m aware the whole “one year exclusive to the EPIC store” back in 2019 did upset a lot of folks.
