Phantom Doctrine

A good game, but the balance is... off.
It has a lot of interesting twists on xcom. Combat is completely deterministic; attacks always hit, but units have a pool of Awareness points that are spent to mitigate or avoid damage. Henchmen die en masse while enemy agents take coordination to bring down. Weapon classes have distinct advantages and weaknesses; machineguns excel at covering fire and whittling down agent awareness, while SMGs excel at breaching rooms, etc.
The issue is that, if you're playing to win, none of that ever matters.
99% of missions can be entered with at least one agent in disguise. While disguised you can only carry small arms and no armor, but it doesn't matter. Enemies completely ignore you unless they see you attack someone or interact with an objective. Enemy agents can eventually detect you unless your agent has the Actor perk, but that's not hard to come by and it's always objectively the correct choice when available. On the recommended difficulty you can knock anyone out silently with a single punch and magically disappear their body, so a determined spy can clear an entire map without ever raising an alarm.
The's only two exceptions to this. One, a tiny handful story missions force you into combat at a certain point, usually right before you have to evac. And two, very very rarely during regular missions you'll be exposed via 'force majeure', aka the game rolled a die and broke your cover based on nothing. It came up exactly once in my playthrough and I had to google what I did to trigger it. Nothing triggered it, there's just a one in a thousand chance to screw you.
As a result, basically every mission reduces to agents leisurely walking around the map, bonking guards and clicking objectives, then leaving. You never have to do anything that will risk exposure, and the only thing that could expose you is completely out of your control and too rare to worry about.
On harder difficulties, enemy agents are harder—if not impossible—to knock out, and on the hardest you can't hide bodies. While that addresses the biggest issue, it also ramps the difficulty straight from 'kinda boring because I can't possibly lose' to 'frustrating because this randomly generated mission is nearly impossible' with nothing in between.
In a sequel I'd like to see a middle ground, with more interesting ways for missions to go wrong. Keep it so enemy agents can't normally be knocked out, but add mechanics for distracting them. Maybe make you have to stow bodies somewhere so you have to plan out your KOs, rather than a toggle between 'instant and free' or 'completely impossible'. Maybe just more missions where you have to go in hot to break up the monotony. And remove the force majeure thing; it's dumb to make everything else deterministic, but to then add extremely rare RNG to force things to go wrong anyway.

Screw all the nay-sayers - is this game the same engine/gameplay as XCom 2? Kinda. IS it XCom 2? No, so don't treat it that way. Y'all are gonna do to this game what was done to Alpha Protocol and sink spy thrillers for all of us - comparing that one to Mass Effect, or this one to XCom, because you can't be happy with something different, killed it. I bought this for $3 on sale and had never heard of it, and I'm loving it!

The gameplay is pretty decent for an isometric, turn-based game, and NOT exactly XCom 2 probably to avoid legal dispute with Firaxis; it IS that close in the game combat environment, tho. You're a spy, you're meant to sneak around and have patience in the infiltration portions. The story is coherent and adds some cool little tidbits of real-world espionage and history into the mix. You spend a lot of time making decisions instead of in all-out combat with every pop-up event - Welcome to what espionage and recon actually is. This isn't a COD free-for-all, you're meant to stay hidden and get out of a situation without combat if possible.

Nobody does these kinds of games. I really wish more did. Expect a cerebral, story-driven experience. Does it have quirks and bugs like a lot of reviews say? Yep. All games do. Are they prevalent and game-breaking? Not that I've experienced after fixing the CTD issue on startup by disabling internet access. Do the devs explain every little game mechanic prior to gameplay? Nope - that's half the realism with being a spy; being thrown into an unknown situation and figuring it out without being caught and killed. Is it AAA? Have you ever heard of Good Shepard Entertainment?... For an indie, this is phenomenal work.

Great game overall! I'll definitely be looking forward to the announced sequel!

A Game with potential, but many letdowns and missed opportunities.
I had 2 playthroughs, 1 on easy as CIA and one on Medium as Mossad . While i had a good enough time on the first playthrough to start the second, the second "extended" one was quite the dissapointment and i cannot recommend going for a second playthrough for the things you "missed"
The bones of the gameplay are solid but are hampered in many aspects. While the mechanics work pretty fine, for the first 2/3rds of the game your agents wont have enough AP/FP (Action Points and Fire Points) to actually utilise a lot of mechanics to it's potential or intention, and you need a guide for the body engineering to reach those milestones. The stealth works well enough, but become a bit tedious, the game pushes you to play loud (you get 50% xp on stealth kills, so if you focus on stealth all your agents will be underleveled) and that too works reasonably well if you adapt to the setting. "Frontal assaults" usually end up being a well setup ambush to take out half the enemies on a map, then mop the rest up on the next turn, rush to objectives and exfiltrate before reinforcements arrive.
The Enemy AI did not seem to change between difficulties, the enemies just got more hp and damage, often leaving enemies with 3-10 hp left, which is incredibly frustrating if you dont have more than one FP, and didnt really add much to my normal difficulty playthrough either in forms of challenge nor fun. No mission has more than 9-10 enemies, 3-5 of which are usually just absolute trashmobs + reinforcements, which also doesnt really give you the feeling of storming a base of anything. The weapons are balanced in a weird way, where there is always half of the available inventory which is straight up useless or hopelessly outclassed, but which class of weapons this is changes as the game progresses ( Shotguns and pistols are great in the beginning, Shotguns, Snipers and SMG in the midgame, and Assault Rifles in the Lategame, LMGs are always useless)
The story itself is intruiging on the first playthrough until you realize everything is completely scripted through as it has to align with historical events and reach the quite unsatisfying ending. All story is strictly communicated through brief voicelines during the mission and are at times quite easy to miss, not that you are missing a lot as most of the times it is just another breadcrumb. Even in the end the big unbelievable threat you have to stop to save the world lacks any sense of urgency or drama as it is just another mission where you push a button on a terminal. The "extended" playthrough seemed to add exactly one 5-10 minute mission in the very end to clear up the REAL mastermind behind Beholder, and with as little as the story actually changes you figure out halfway through the second playthrough anyways who it is.
The additional faction you unlock after the first playthrough Mossad , has no real unique spin or perspective, nor uniqute mechanics to add to the game. It baits you early with plotpoints about a chemical weapon attack on Isreal but seems to forget about that plot halfway through. It also dangles hunting down infamous nazi Jospeh Mengele in your face, but he ends up just standing around motionless in a big open room in a mission as a side objective with no real buildup and exactly 3 lines of dialog after you kill him, and that is basically all the story missions in a nutshell.
The Information gathering system is interesting the first couple of times, but quickly becomes an unbearable chore. While the files have 8-10 pieces of intel it is fine i guess, but it will later load you with 15-20 pieces of intel, each with red herrings on them, and expect you to do DOZENS of them, and character progression is locked behind them in the form of body engineering recipies. Also you will notice on your 3rd File or so that all the actual pieces of intel are completely identical, with random blacked out parts and names switched, so you wont get any additional lore from them either. And often times you will just spend your time micromanaging 30 agents since you can't actually put actions in a queue
If you enjoy the tactical approach and setting you will have fun with 75% of one playthrough and its worth picking up on sale. Just dont expect anything but a strictly linear story with a handful of story mission and a ton of random filler. Replayabilty is pretty much 0 in my opinion, so dont get baited into the second playthrough iif the first left you slightly dissapointed, that feeling wont go away. All in all it is not enough to give a thumbs down in my opinion, but it could have been so much more!

It brings the cool, restrained style of Cold War espionage to a turn-based tactics game. Its real weapon, though, is not the gun but the intelligence you gather. More than flashy action, its real appeal lies in piecing together clues and making sense of that intelligence, a quiet, methodical thrill that lingers.

This game should be marked as playable on the Steam Deck, as it runs without issues, and controls work without any problems. Text is a little small but readable.

For those who have experienced crash on boot up:
Note, this is a Reddit post from two years ago.
Two years ago.
I'm pleased they are making another sequel, but damn, ideally you should make sure there isn't a game breaking bug that kicks in when you try and load it while also being connected to the internet.
10/10 - no other game has ever forced me to learn about inbound and outbound exception rule making in Windows Firewall

XCOM 2 but with more stealth aspects, game is definetly janky at times but if you enjoy xcom you'll enjoy this