As a huge xcom wotc fan... This game was not fun at all.
I guess the devs realized that if they're patching thier game to be like a mod for the game.
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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I am a big fan of Xcom, the newer series and the original game (played it like 15 years after release with mods), but upon reading the reviews on release, I decided to skip Phoenix Point.
That being said, I might try it out in a few weeks once the Terror from the Void mod is updated for the latest version of the game.
Same, yep.
It's definitely worth a try. Especially if it's being improved now. Just don't expect xcom.
In the original UFO: Enemy Unknown, your rookie troops are eminently replaceable and you can send them out 14 at a time to get some experience. Sending complete rookies first in first to breach UFOs is completely viable. If they survive, they'll get some kills and level up. If not, well, bad luck. A total team kill and loss of the plane is a bit of a set back, but you're humanity's last hope and there's plenty more where that came from.
The XCom remakes have a very ungenerous deployment limit, plus the skills your troops earn cause the game to get a bit unbalanced; if you're good at not losing anyone then it gets really quite easy. Training up rookies is an ordeal, because they take up a very valuable slot and you need the skills that come with experience.
Pheonix Point is incredibly random, and getting extra troops is an unbelievable ordeal. You might as well have quicksave and quickload bound to mouse buttons, since one bad roll of the dice could be a campaign loss. Incredibly conservative and boring strategies are essential. It's not fun to play.
To your point, it seems the idea is fewer deployed troops to make the game decisions for consequential. From the way you describe it, the change was to prevent sending waves of rookies so that immersion and role playing a team had more weight. Guess the devs aren't a fan of Zap Brannigan tactics.
I think Firaxis also had a goal to streamline the missions. Outside of the major campaign set pieces, you can finish a typical mission relatively quickly.
The original XCOM missions could be time consuming. Even getting your 12 soldiers out of the dropship could take a while (that's probably why you start outside the dropship in the remakes).
Yeah. The OpenXCom makes troop movement incredibly fast, by colouring every square you can move to with whether you'll still be able to do an aimed shot / snap shot / auto shot. It makes most missions quick, a mystery why it wasn't implemented that way in the first place. Very similar in effect to XCOM's move-and-shoot or dash highlighting.
I think @ChicoSuave@lemmy.world has a very good point - the Firaxis changes do make the decisions a lot more consequential. In UFO, you'd still want to have your highly-ranked, psionic and sniper troops out on missions - just those guys get decent armour and they stay at the back, since they're too valuable to take point. Certainly too valuable to go prowling the corridors with a cattle prod in hand, and that's essential for overall victory. I do very much like the Firaxis games in general - I finished XCOM1 on classic+ironman - but the decisions are borderline 'too consequential'. It's difficult to get a decent stock of high-ranking troops, so losing any of them hurts a lot. And PP just goes much too far.
Even a 'good' mission in UFO can have as many troop casualties as an entire XCOM campaign. Good tactics help, but it's a brutal war against a terrible foe.