Phantom Doctrine - Released and first Reviews

Story is rudimentary so far, you advance it via "special missions". Although game doesn't let you play "detailed" story on the first play-through. May be "detailed" story-line has more details, i don't know.

Shooting through walls is not really "through". It's just combat system doesn't care about obstacles. If shooter has line of sight, shot connects. It looks weird on animations, but that just it. It's irrelevant 90% of the time.

General game-play is like this.

1. Disable cameras.
2. Knock out annoying roamers in key locations (limit 2-3 per mission before AI starts looking for you).
3. loot the place (having disguise on one of the agents helps tremendously to cut on tediousness of this).
4. Position your team so you can kill key personnel on the same turn (suppressed pistols work wonders with breach action).
5. Stabilize enemy agents and carry them to extraction point.
6. Extract.

Never even go into combat. As soon as you do, game turns into clusterfuck.

Regarding why buy this now? I am bored? And playing fucking MMOs was turning me into alcoholic and Michelin man at the same time?

It's a good game overall, global layer is Good, combat is average, so overall it is 6/10. Real 6/10.

I would rate original release of fallout 4 as 6/10. Dlcs and mods made it 8/10 for me, so you can see my system of coordinates.

I can't say that sounds very enticing.

JDR13 said:

I can't say that sounds very enticing.

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I agree. It's a very flawed game, easy to exploit, but I am still enjoying it.

Playing it on IronMan though will be a totally different experience.

Two hotfix patches have been released and they outlined two larger ones in the works.

Link - https://steamcommunity.com/games/559100/announcements/detail/1689300456297308735

Due to the balance implications, we're conducting additional tests of the Line of Sight system improvements. They also require modifications to the animation tree. Because of that, we'll publish the improvements in two stages. First the disabling of sidesteps for targets not in full cover (free sidesteps), then additional clarifications of LOS / LOF situations.

The first of the patches is expected during the weekend and should address a majority of the most confusing LOS situations. The second patch will require more work to bring it to the quality and stability we require so we expect it on Wednesday. Below is a preliminary set of patch notes for the two updates. We will incorporate as many as we can into the weekend patch, the rest and further improvements will be released with the Wednesday update.

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I hate a bit the dev to not have released it on Mac, but if I remember well Hard West wasn't released on Mac too at first.

Anyway I have a lot of fun with the game. It has flaws, but for now it's very interesting:

• Follow the story is fun,
• the spy mood is fun and fairly well developed,
• for now I have a very good maps/missions diversity,
• maps/missions are fun, it's hard to have a perfect stealth progression, and then combat mode. In my opinion this game is made to mix stealth and combats, and that's how the maps/missions have the best fun, and the best diversity.
• There's sort of three phase, exploration and scouting where only some rare spies could detect you, stealth when you enter in a restricted area, combat mode when you get detected. Plus you can have long range supports that can use various items like smoke to create a visual obstacle or a cloud disturbing electronic and reducing the damages reductions or even disabling the dodging, this system use command points and support place at E/WN/S.
• It seems there's a lot of contents, like many weapons and mods, many utility items, many good design elements, and probably many maps too, many research for the base and units, many improvements for base and spies, more.
• The general gameplay layout is more sophisticated than in XCOM1&2 but it feels more like a management layout, I like this part more than in XCOM1&2. It could be more or less on par with Long War 2 that could have influence it a bit.
• The lack of RNG doesn't change much, moreover enemy spies have special perks that could surprise you. There will be sort of RNG anyway, from enemies AI, from enemies hidden or coming and not in the plan, some more. Plus there's some rules a bit complex, so at first it's like RNG lol.
• The maps have a fixed layout like in XCOM1, but they have inside a bit less RNG than in XCOM1, I suppose it's coming from the difficulty to design a good stealth gameplay. So units positioning, units types, patrols, environment, are factors much more sensible for stealth.

EDIT:
There's many ways to play the game, that is sure. Still I wouldn't advise try play it pure stealth, with load back, even less scam loading. Have combats at a very secondary level would skip a majority of the design aspects of the game. So I would suggest try different approaches, that end have maps mixing more scouting/stealth and combats (plus flee, manage evac, manage air attacks, carry fallen).

One interesting design, if spies can fall a lot, they don't die if you stop the bleeding and carry them to evac. So I had many fallen, but much less death.