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.

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!

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

For me this game hinges on the border between a thumbs up and a down. It would be very simple to say it is X-Com with spies, but if it had X-Com’s gameplay it would be nice, however it ends up with a washed-out version of it.
So, what this game does bad is the spy stuff, it feels like the devs wanted to make an X-Com clone but at the last moment they remembered “Ohh crap, we need to add spy stuff!”
The way the tactical combat works; first of all, it relies on Infiltration, meaning you sneak around without being detected. That sounds good but when I tried the game on normal difficulty it was a mess. Often times I woke up triggering the alarm (and thus ruining infiltration), out of the blue, it was so damn often it was painful to get through the levels. Regarding that alarm, what it does its to make every enemy aware of you, and this game has that NPC can sniff your farts kinda system, so if you think of going in a hidden spot and wait for enemies to wander around aimlessly, NOPE, they will home in on your location, once that alarm sounds prepare for combat!
And this brings me to the second point, the combat. Let me just say it will make you miss the % system of X-Com, here all hits are 100% and damage depends on cover and armor. It is so annoying, because enemies know where you are, they will often shoot right on the edges of the fog o’ war, and you end up getting ganged from all sides. No cover and some armor mean certain death. There is also an energy bar called Awareness which gives you some dodge chance, but against enemy agents it is almost useless. To brush up on what an Agent is in this game, they are the guys you control, but they can also be fighting for the enemy, basically they will be a mini-boss, so expect from them to dodge sniper shots from the back, point-blank head shots, and all the BS your agents can do, except Takedowns. And good thing too, because takedowns are 1 hits KOs, you need energy to perform them but late game, a few mobile agents with 2 action points and plenty of awareness can decimate the enemies. To close up the combat, I hate this system; shots are being fired through walls, through covers (because even full covers do not fully block shots), distance does not count for digly dick, snipers have similar range with pistols, enemies can see you but you can’t see them until they shoot, once that alarm sounds and you did not clear up as many enemies as possible during infiltration it becomes tedious to not get flanked, ohh and reinforcements pop out a few turns after the alarm sound. At very best, use infiltration to complete the goals and then you can trigger the alarm so you are able to evac in a moment’s notice.
Ok enough complaining about the combat, the third thing is the investigation board. What this does is to unlock agents for you to hire, weapons, armors to buy, components (which are drugs to inject in your agents to boost stats) and a few more things. For me this was a tedious mini-game, it is basically tying the string on notes (like the boards you see in detective movies). The problem is that you often get sh!t rewards for completing one of those! Especially at the end game, where I just got new agents when my roster was full… It feels like such a waste of time completing those boards.
Why I am giving it a thumbs up is because I enjoyed it a bit in Easy difficulty. It had that balance to not make you feel overwhelmed by the combat and I could finally complete infiltration without having to go around the map looking for weak spots which take too damn much. It may have been too easy but at least the pacing was alright. There is also a new game+ unlocked after beating it once, it gives some extra story, but I sure as heck will not play it twice.
So, I recommend this game during a sale or in a bundle and really want that tactics kick after finishing X—Com, JA, Hard West, Commandos, and might be other good ones out there which I haven’t tried.

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