YMMV / Phoenix Point

• Creepy Awesome:
  • All of the alien designs are both utterly nightmarish, and utterly badass. The developers really wanted to emphasise both the utter alieness, and horrific nature of the Pandora Mutants, and it really shows.
  • For the non-alien villain, there's Subject 24, for having a cool design and Evil Is Hammy tendencies of punctuating emotional lines.
• Demonic Spiders: The basic Arthron crab people, of all things. They are supposed to be the easiest grunts in the game, but due to a combination of inevitably developing heavy armor very early on, having three different weapons (making disarming them hard) and the mechanic where they get free counter attacks each time they are hit, no one would blame you for thinking they are this game's Mutons. Worse yet, in the mid-late game they tend to come in groups of three or more, and if one of the gets hit, every single one of them gets a counter-attack, meaning they tend to be more dangerous to engage than some of the elite enemies.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: New Jericho is becoming the most popular faction by far, with the cool design of their weapons and armor and highly militarized approach to the Pandoravirus appealing to a lot of players, particularly since there really isn't any other way for the Phoenix Project to interact with them anyways. Their allied project is even armor-piercing weapons, which evens the fight mid to late game.
• Evil Is Cool: The Pandoravirus is getting this reaction, for its legions of badass alien troopers, and Lovecraftian theme.
• Friendly Fandoms: With the newer XCOM titles. The lead designer of XCOM Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, Jake Solomon, is a good friend of Julian, and was in fact a Fig investor of Phoenix Point. Unsurprising, since many fans of Phoenix Project were interested due to the games connections and similarity to the XCOM games in the first place.
• Fan Nickname: Having several Assault soldiers use Onslaught to give a whole mess of AP to another soldier (ex, to let someone throw a backpack's worth of hand grenades in one turn) is called "cheerleading."
• Funny Moments: As dark as the game is, it has some occasional moments of humor.
  • One of the possible reactions to finding a bunch of decapitated soldier heads on spikes is "Cool! Free helmets!".
  • The fact that any technology you steal from a rival haven is still listed as a "shared" technology in your research menu. Well they did share it alright, just not exactly voluntarily...
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Heavy class's level 7 ability "Rage Burst". The willpower point cost is relatively high but the payoff is that you unload an entire magazine of ammunition into your chosen target. If you cross-train classes that have high damage weapons like a sniper rifle or a cannon with a secondary Heavy specialty and take Rage Burst, then assassinating high hit point and armor enemies like Scylla and enemy objective structures is possible in one to two turns. This turns completing Haven and Pandoran Lair/Citadel raids into a trivial matter of lining up your soldier with the objective you need to destroy and completely unloading on it while ignoring everything else on the map.
  • At lower levels, the Heavy's "War Cry" depletes the Action Points of nearby enemies to only 2 on their next turn - since this only accounts for horizontal range, this can be devastating if they can be placed out of harm's way when delivering it.
  • As of early 2021, the "Marked For Death" Sniper ability. Unlike what the description says, it gives a 50% bonus to damage. Stackable indefinitely and compounding.
  • If you have an Infiltrator with the Thief passive ability and equip them in full Infiltrator gear, they basically cannot be detected by the enemy unless they get within 5 tiles of them (which is the minimum detection range) or unless they walk into Mist. Combined with the Infiltrator's other perks, this can allow players to create some extremely powerful assassins who the enemy will never locate as they pick them apart. Even if they get spotted, they can use the Vanish ability to break enemy line of sight, making this approach incredibly safe as well as deadly.
  • The Ancient weapons introduced with the Legacy of the Ancients DLC are very difficult to acquire, but they're so powerful that they're well worth the effort. They all deal much more damage than any other model in their respective class, they tend to outright ignore most armor ratings, and they don't require ammo (yes, not even the grenade launcher).
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: On a surface level, the game draws criticisms of this compared to modern XCOM games, especially XCOM 2 (at first glace, they even look very similar). However, similarities stop at the surface level, and anyone who's played both games can attest to the myriad differences between them.
• Paranoia Fuel: Unlike XCOM, the enemies do not spawn or trigger in groups, moving individually instead. What this means is that you have no idea where a crabman may be, in what building, in what corner.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Enemy armor spikes in the mid-to-late-game to such a degree that it can actually completely brick a campaign, as the player may find themselves in a situation where their weapons no longer scratch even the basic enemies. Armor works by subtracting the value from each individual bullet hitting the armored body part. When enemy armor values reach 30, they make them practically impervious to assault rifles, PDWs and most shotguns, because their individual bullets deal sub-30 damage, and thus get deflected. Because of this, the players are borderline forced into taking multiple snipers, whose high damage output and accuracy can be used to pierce armor and destroy key weapons and limbs, to every encounter. Acid, poison and armor piercing weapons partially counter this, but in order to get them, the player needs to dedicate a lot of time and resources, and taking full squads of snipers is simply easier, cheaper and more reliable even in the end game.
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: One of the most direct observations (and criticisms) is the game's visual similarity to XCOM 2. Past the visual level, however, this game is essentially "X-COM: Terror from the Deep given a modern makeover and fought over the surface."
• Spiritual Successor: Phoenix Point is, essentially, a more direct transliteration of classic X-COM to the modern format than, say, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which was more of a reimagining and vastly overhauled the gameplay. While Phoenix Point does adapt some of the modern conveniences and gameplay elements, the core gameplay is much closer to the source material than its bigger brothers. In particular Phoenix Point is especially this trope in regards to X-COM: Terror from the Deep, with a very similar atmosphere and primary antagonist faction to that game.
• Tainted by the Preview: Many fans felt this way after the EGS exclusivity announcement. Throughout the game's Kickstarter campaign, it was announced as multi-PC platform, with Steam and GOG (the latter of which is completely DRM free), only for Julian Gollup to personally announce the year long timed exclusivity. The Youtube video making the annoucement faced so much backlash, that comments and likes were disabled, and even the entire video was made unlisted to avoid showing up in search results. Between the announcement, and a community manager for Snapshot Games announcing that Epic's cash infusion would allow 100% backer refunds with the game remaining in the black. This only added to the ill-will the project had already gotten.
  • In an attempt to make up for the Epic Games Store temporal exclusivity the incident, the developers announced that those who activated the game in Epic's store would get all the DLC at no additional cost. But only on the Epic Game Store.
  • This was later resolved, as backers were able to unlock the "Year One Edition" on the platform of their choice, which includes all previously-released and future DLC for that platform.
• That One Attack: Viral Damage. Viral Damage reduces your Will Points, and if a soldier runs out while still taking Viral Damage they panic, preventing them from taking any actions except recover (which restores half of a units total will points) and potentially causing them to run to an disadvantageous position. Problem is Viral Damage only reduces by 1 every turn, potentially stun-locking a unit for turns on end and preventing you from extracting.

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