I finished a campaign for the first time in Phoenix Point yesterday. And then I immediately uninstalled the game, because the overall experience was so frustrating. On the easiest difficulty and having used some cheats, I barely made it through the final fight, as the aliens had infinite respawns, and I only had limited ammunition. This is not a game you can play "for fun".

Don't get me wrong, the individual battles in Phoenix Point are quite fun to play, most of the time. They do have this "one more turn" and then "one more battle" draw. As long as you are in a reasonably balanced battle, that is. And balance is certainly not the strength of Phoenix Point. If you compare Phoenix Point to the XCom series, in Phoenix Point the power progression of your soldiers is a lot flatter. You can reach their maximum level pretty quickly, their weapons and armor don't get so much better over the game from research, your squad size only goes up from 6 to 8, and your inventory size is limited and never goes up. Meanwhile the enemies, aliens and humans, go up in numbers and strength more than you do. You end up using cheesy tactics that exploit broken combos or flaws in the AI to win.

So basically I would love a version of Phoenix Point where I could just play individual battles, selecting the number and strength of the enemies. Unfortunately my only option is playing through the campaign, which is pretty tedious, and I don't want to do that again. The next time I want to shoot some aliens in tactical, turn-based battles, I'll reinstall XCom 2.