Recently I played Phoenix Point, an X-Com successor led by the creator of the original. A Lovecraftian mist has covered the land, billions have walked into the sea, they have returned as horrible crabmen, centipedewomen, etc., and the apocalypse is well underway. You lead the Phoenix Project which is militantly opposed to this state of affairs.

It would be amazing if it wasn't so flawed. The key new thing it does is have free aiming for bursts of fire with individual rounds simulated. So you take your guy's POV and have circles indicating your aiming cone. There's location based damage. When it works it's great. Where "flanking" in new XCOM is a board-game-like matter of the relative positions of the two units and the cover on a grid, "flanking" in Phoenix Point means actually getting a good angle to bypass cover or hit a weaker spot.

But it doesn't always work. There's a "quick aim" you should be able to use for dead easy shots, but it's too risky since it does something stupid too often. I had a guy up on a roof behind a low parapet, and aimed down at a horrid crabman. The crabman filled my reticle, a sure shot by all indications, but when I fired my guy simply unloaded his machine gun into the wall in front of him. I had a guy standing adjacent to a stationary target I needed to destroy, so I risked the quick aim. Miss. I used the manual aim. Miss. I figured out that the tip of my guy's barrel was inside the target, so the hits weren't registering. There's a risk of friendly fire, generally cool, but I also once stood two snipers next to each other overwatching a downrange choke point and had one shoot the other directly in the back.

But the most incomprehensible decision with the aiming i that they made the units' idle animations significant to gameplay. They keep moving while you aim, just slowed down. For the typical unit with slow idle animations, this means sometimes you're zooming in and out of the manual aim to advance it to a point where you have a good angle on the head or whatever. Some units have more spastic idle animations, so they're still going pretty fast when it slows down, and then you have a little bit of shitty FPS in your X-Com.

The strategic pacing seemed off to me - I only saw one of the biggest non-boss monstrosity, in the last mission, and of the second biggest enemy, an artillery crab, I only saw a weak harassment version until the penultimate mission. And they were great enemies. I had my guys in a 4 story building defending a moon launch and the full-power artillery crab just knocked down half the building.

It's a shame, there are a lot of good ideas in this game.