Phoenix Point is delayed until the end of year

NEWS Fyra Frost - 30-Jul-2019, 12:33 pm

If we say Phoenix Point the name may not ring a bell for you, but if we tell you that it's the upcoming game from the creator of the original X-Com Julian Gollop most of you will probably get excited. After all, X-Com has been one of the most popular strategy games of all times, and its two first titles UFO: Enemy Unknown and X-Com: Terror from the Deep have been followed by plenty of other XCOM sequels since they were released in 1994 and 1995 respectively. Turn-based tactical combat where you control a squad of soldiers that fight against aliens is the foundation of a franchise that reached its maximum expression with XCOM 2. Phoenix Point is the spiritual successor of the series, and with it, Snapshot Games is trying to bring back the best features of the old X-Com games in a new package.

You could think that Phoenix Point is "more of the same," but that doesn´t mean that it can't be an awesome game. It's the year 2046, and you will have a military organization under your control while you fight sort of an "alien invasion." In this case, the threat comes in the form of a strange virus able to mutate living forms, the Pandoravirus. If you take a look to the following demo that was shown during the last E3, you can see how similar Phoenix Point is to X-Com, but fans of the series will also realize that there are many new additions and details that make this game quite interesting.

The development of Phoenix Point seems to be going well, but it's slower than originally intended. It´s been revealed that the game won´t be released on September 3. The launch has been delayed until December, and it's not even the first delay that Phoenix Point sees since it was originally scheduled for 2018. Snapshot Games has explained on a post in Phoenix Point's forums that the main reason behind this delay is that the game still needs polishing.

We know this is not our first delay, and we are very sorry to the fans who we know are highly anticipating getting their hands on Phoenix Point. No one is more disappointed than we are, but we collectively agree that we would rather miss a launch date than ship something that does not meet our exacting standards. We want the Phoenix Point you play to be one of your favorite games of all time, and that means we need a bit more time.

This is another blow for all the players that are eagerly waiting for this new strategy game, but at the same time we can think of it as good news, It happens quite a lot lately that players get an unfinished/untested version of a game just because of the pressure that developers get having to meet certain timelines. It´s true that in most cases the problems of a game can be fixed through updates later, but it's quite unpleasant to pay the full price for a game that is unfinished just on the hope that it will be better in a near future. For that reason, we are glad to see that they acknowledge that Phoenix Point needs a bit more work before it's ready to launch instead of just launching an uncompleted game.