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.

as of this writing I have 2,290 hours played in Phantom Doctrine. It is infinitely replayable. This is perhaps my favorite turn-based game of all time, and that's saying something, as I'm 54 and been playing since Castle Wolfenstein. The depth of the game's character development, the myriad ways to buff characters, get cool weapons and gear, just wow. Then the whole investigative angle where you physically connect clues to advance the story is epic and has been copied in other games I've played since.

It's a shame the developers went under because this is a great game and if they had just a little more time to cook this could have been one of the best turn-based strategy games of all time.
If you want to play a stealthy XCOM-type game with a Cold War jazz vibe, if you love stringing up documents on the board like Charlie Day, and if you can tolerate it's relatively minor flaws (mainly some UI inconveniences and not enough unique assets) then this is for you!
If you pick it up, definitely play on Easy to give you a bit of breathing room until you figure out the flow of the game.

Getting into this game is just too unclear for me, it TAKES a lot of want to, so many facets that are not clear or understandable. For example, I still don't fully understand how training works entirely. I will continue to try and slog through it for a bit more, but I kind of regret the purchase and will likely abandon - disappointed as I really like the the genre and concept of the game.

Combat is much like xcom, as advertised, but without the aggravating RNG frustrations. You also have the option to complete all but 3 or 4 of the missions in full stealth, which is fun at first, but becomes super trivial as you get some of the skills along the way (particularly the skill that lets you sneak around the enemy agents in disguise).
Overall the game is fun, but it does get repetitive after a while. Combat is enjoyable, stealth is enjoyable, the body enhancement stuff is a cool system, the weapon diversity is good, the theme is cool, it has all good elements, but at some point you're just doing the same things over and over.
That said, it was good enough for me to want to spend the time to play it through to the end, which will take you 40-50 hours. It would take quite a bit less than that if it wasn't for the one pet peeve I have with this game... DON'T make animations in turn based games that can't be sped up extremely or skipped altogether! I'm so sick of watching my agents stab themselves with those stupid movement increase syringes and slowly walking halfway across the map with a KO'd agent on their back - let me skip it!

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.

phantom doctrine is a isometric espionage tactical RPG that is a tad too long. it's a really cool game and concept but it does wear out its welcome because of the fact that you don't really get anything new introduced after like ten or fifteen hours, which is NOT good when the main story is at least three times that length, if not more. a lot of the stuff you do in the gameplay loop feels extremely tedious and repetitive as a result of the game not introducing anything new. it really captures the idea of a spy thriller decently but there are a decent amount of flaws that make what should've been a 20-30 hour banger of a TRPG into a game that is much longer than that, especially if you're trying to go for 100% completion.