Hyper-militaristic New Jericho wants to push the Pandorans, as they’re called, into the sea and thereby protect the purity of the human race. Like that game’s sequel, X-COM: Apocalypse, society has fractured into competing factions. Just as in the original X-Com: UFO Defense, gameplay is split between a real-time world map called the Geoscape and discrete turn-based battles between small groups of soldiers. To its credit, Phoenix Point does include a lot of high-quality voiceover work. The campaign’s storyline is told through a handful of lightly animated slideshows. It’s up to the troops of the Phoenix Initiative to turn the tide, lighting up long-lost bases hidden on the world map and using them as launching points to further explore the globe for answers. Inland, societies break down, resulting in a new dark age. The resulting biomass then mixes with indigenous sea life, crawls ashore, and attacks the survivors. Humanity has been overrun by a global pandemic called the Pandora Virus, which takes over people’s minds and forces them to march into the sea. Players take control of a multinational paramilitary group that has fallen on hard times. In its place is a roughly 20-hour narrative campaign that vacillates between onerous and dull. The final product feels unbalanced, and tends to neuter the tense tactical gameplay of the 1994 classic. Phoenix Point, the turn-based game from X-Com co-creator Julian Gollop, is a bit of a disappointment.
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