CreativeForge and Good Shepard team-up for a Cold War themed turn-based tactical strategy game that recently released on most major platforms, PS4 included. Inspired by successful franchises like X-COM, Phantom Doctrine (PD) dives into an alternate 1983 in which two shadowy organizations, The Cabal and The Beholder Initiative, are performing espionage ops against one another with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.
The experience begins with players choosing between CIA and KGB, with a third faction unlocked after successfully completing the campaign with either CIA or KGB (something I have yet to achieve). Creating your first agent can be about as detailed as you want it to be in terms of a myriad of appearance options, which later you’re going to have to change anyway to keep your agent undercover. During these times you can also re-tool and re-train your agents as well, a nice touch. Anyhow, difficulty settings to choose from out the outset include an “easy” mode for genre beginners, which is what I chose. While I played Wasteland 2 a couple of years ago, I still consider myself an amateur at this genre. A ridiculous Iron Man mode difficuly is also available on the opposite end of the spectrum, which prevents saving during the mission and permadeath — yeah, no thanks, but hey, for the hardcore, I’m sure they welcome the challenge.
And challenge is an appropriate way to frame up Phantom Doctrine. This game has layers of depth well beyond what I was expecting, making it a much more robust and involved experience than I was both expecting and, frankly, hoping for. I knew this game was not setting out to be “close” to the classic Commandos games from many years ago, in which players controlled a small team of agents, including a spy, and handled a variety of assassination and objective-capturing missions. A key difference of course being that that series was played in real-time, where as with PD, X-COM, and Wasteland 2, actions cost Action Points, and is taken in turns, requiring careful planning. There are also Fire Points, spent when you use a firearm. Careful planning is not only required during mission, but before and in between as well, because your choice in missions, how you carry them out, who survives, and so on, are all part of the game within the game, if you know what I mean. You get some hand-holding on the brief opening mission that sees a couple of agents sneaking into a German-held facility to steal some documents, but much beyond that and you’re more or less on your own, with a lot of gameplay mechanics and ‘gotchas’ to figure out, at times through trial and error.
I value this type of design and trust in the player, and do understand the argument that modern games sometimes provide too much hand-holding. That said, for a game like this, with stout difficulty and lasting impact, you’re probably going to find out pretty quickly in those first three to five hours how sharp your understanding and appreciation of the genre is, and how much you want to invest. Personally, I struggled and found myself having to grit my teeth sometimes and press on (which is one reason why this article is as late as it is). I found the balance of fun and enjoyment tempered by frustrating combat outings (read: mission failures) and the breadth of management responsibilities I was required to handle, including headquarters upgrades, agent health, training, double agents, agent recruiting, and so on. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that CreativeForge included this much depth and layers to what could have been a straight-forward spy game, but I suppose I found it more complex and demanding than I wanted to make time for. Certainly, your mileage may vary, and the quality that CreativeForge brings with these various gameplay mechanics is commendable, I just didn’t find it particularly captivating and worth the grind and learning curve.
While there are some frustrating lows, there are also those “Ok, I’m glad I stuck with this” moments in PD as well, no doubt. Times when your agent selection, training, loadout, planning, and execution all click, and you come out ahead. Times when you put together the clues in between missions that you discovered on previous missions and learn more about the very well-written conspiracy that makes up the game’s story. In those times of triumph, it makes it all seem worthwhile, but whether or not those moments come often enough or not is up to the player.
In terms of presentation, I appreciated the ‘deep dive’ into the Cold War theme that is present in everything from the music, voice-acting, art work, descriptions of items, and so on. This level of detail helps counter the lack of detail in the visual department, which is indeed lacking, enough to bear mentioning, but certainly not enough to be a deal breaker.
Clearly, fans of the genre, especially those that prefer to play on console as opposed to PC, should give PD a serious look. If you’re on the fence about diving into the genre, and your committed, this is also a great way to jump in, just expect some frustrations along the way.
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