Phoenix Point

Phoenix Point is a 2019 strategy game from Snapshot Games, the studio founded by Julian Gollop, who designed the original X-COM. A virus released from melting ice has turned sea life into monsters and pushed humanity into a few havens. You lead Phoenix Point, a secret organisation that revives to fight back, while three rival human factions, each with its own ideas about the future, compete with you.

The tactical battles are turn-based. Soldiers can aim freely at individual body parts, disabling an arm that holds a weapon or legs that carry the enemy forward. The monsters evolve during the campaign in response to the tactics you use against them. On the strategic map you explore, trade, and choose your stance towards each faction.

It is the most direct attempt to rebuild both layers of X-COM from scratch, by the person who designed the original. Aiming at body parts makes shooting a decision rather than a dice roll, and the factions give the campaign politics the reboot never had.

Its release was messy. It launched as a one-year exclusive on the Epic Games Store in December 2019 after crowdfunding, which angered some backers, and reached Steam in December 2020 in a Year One Edition. The campaign is long and can grind in its middle.

Phoenix Point keeps all of X-COM and adds to it: freer aiming, enemies that adapt, and human politics. It is the game to play if you want to know what X-COM's designer thinks X-COM should be today, and it is closer in spirit to X-COM: Apocalypse than to the Firaxis games.