Staff – December 3, 2019 at 9:35 AM
In the 1993 film Jurassic Park, there’s a scene in which the park’s warden, Robert Muldoon, is describing the intelligence of the raptors under his supervision. He shares an anecdote about how the raptors attack the electrified fences that line their pen whenever it’s feeding time, though they never appear to attack the same spot twice.
“They were testing the fences for weaknesses, systematically,” Muldoon says. “They remember.”
The silent terror that underscores that line — “They remember” — follows an implicit logic: If they can remember, then they can adapt. If they can adapt, then they can overcome us.
Such are the fears that players of Phoenix Point, the latest game from Snapshot Games, will surely experience as they progress. Phoenix Point’s AI enemies are much like Jurassic Park’s raptors, only they don’t simply remember your behavior; they mutate their bodies to counter it.
Snapshot Games was founded by David Kaye and Julian Gollop in 2013, the latter of whom is best known for creating the legendary XCOM series of turn-based tactics games. Phoenix Point furthers Gollop’s work in the genre by enlisting the help of advancements in procedural generation computing.
The game takes place in a not-too-distant yet utterly dystopian future. Phoenix Point is set in 2047, 25 years after an extraterrestrial virus named the Pandoravirus started spreading across the Earth via melting ice caps that had been housing the virus in permafrost.
The virus makes mutant abominations out of any living thing it touches, and by 2047, Earth has been ravaged by apocalypse and split into conflicting factions. As the leader of the Phoenix Project, your job is to save humanity from extinction, fighting terrifying alien forces along the way.
“I think there was a desire to try and bring back a little bit of that sort of existential terror that really stood out to me as a fan of the original XCOM,” Snapshot Games President and Co-Founder David Kaye said. “Lovecraft is definitely a strong influence there.”
Indeed, Lovecraftian cosmic horror pervades the design of Phoenix Point’s alien enemies (named Pandorans after the virus), which ranges from enormous, crablike monstrosities to face-hugging parasites. Yet the real terror stems not just from their appearance, however, but their behavior.
Phoenix Point utilizes familiar turn-based tactics mechanics, but with a twist: Rely too heavily on a specific tactic for taking down enemies and they’ll adapt to overcome it. Procedural generation drives the mutation of enemies, granting them the ability to learn.
Many Pandorans in Phoenix Point are designed to have destructible limbs. Each limb governs different properties, and destroying individual limbs can disable abilities, cause negative side effects, or impede movement across the map.
But once an enemy type is beaten using the same means repeatedly, it might develop a variation that possesses a different set of mutated limbs. Instead of a gun, an enemy might recur in a later mission with a giant pincer; instead of using a grenade, the enemy might have one limb that acts as a fully-body shield.
“We want the player to exist in this state where they're not too comfortable and not thinking, ‘Oh, this is a cakewalk,’” Kaye said. “What we want is for people to always be on that knife edge.”
Phoenix Point uses procedural generation to generate meaningful challenges instead of simply creating vast amounts of randomized content. The need to be flexible and stay a couple of steps ahead of your enemy has always been a staple of turn-based tactics games, but Phoenix Point takes that principle to another level. In some ways, you’re not only anticipating your enemies’ behavior but also your own.
Furthermore, procedural generation keeps the game fresh playthrough after playthrough. “We're making a game that we hope people are going to play many times and, potentially, for years and years if we if we support it in the way that we want to,” Kaye said. The game’s environments are also procedurally generated, meaning no two missions are likely to feel the same.
Phoenix Point aspires to break the mold of turn-based tactics games. Even its new, realistic ballistics mechanic hopes to swap out the “dice-roll” randomness of other games’ combat in favor of a more sophisticated, nuanced system that mirrors the trajectory of real-life bullets.
So don’t underestimate the intelligence of Phoenix Point’s Pandorans when you play. Jurassic Park isn’t too kind to Muldoon by the film’s end — don’t let the same thing happen to you.
Phoenix Point is available on PC today.
Recommended specs:
- OS: Windows® 7 (64-bit) or newer
- CPU: Intel® Core™ i5 or higher
- RAM: 8GB of system memory
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon R9 390X
- DirectX: Version 11
