About This Game Phantom Doctrine is a strategic turn-based espionage thriller set at the peak of the Cold War. Drawing on a wide variety of influences and capturing the subtle intrigue of classic spy films, the game thrust the player into a mysterious world of covert operations, counterintelligence, conspiracy and paranoia. As leader of a secret organization known only as The Cabal, you are charged with preventing a global conspiracy that seeks to pit leader against leader, and nation against nation. By carrying out secret missions, investigating classified files, and interrogating enemy agents, a sinister plot is uncovered. With the clock ticking, it must be thwarted in order to save the world from an unthinkable fate.FeaturesA Deep Single Player Story Campaign: the 40+ hour Single player campaign mode features a rich gripping plot woven with numerous historical events and characters to bring the terrifying reality of the Cold War to life from a unique perspective.Next-generation turn-based combat: offers unprecedented flexibility of movement and actions, including variable Overwatch modes and assault-oriented Breach ability.Expanded battlefield: assets can be positioned around the world, enabling you to call for assistance in the heat of battle. But the enemy can also bring in reinforcements, including heavy weapons and even air support. Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.Knowledge is power: Improve your chances of success by infiltrating mission locations with undercover operatives. Attempt to stay one step ahead of enemy agents, who are also preparing to spring their own devious traps.Lurk in the shadows with fully-fledged stealth gameplay: Clandestine operations can be completed with muffled weapons, silent takedowns and cutting edge Cold War technology.Take charge of the crucial counterintelligence operation: Recruit from both the KGB and the CIA, the criminal fraternity, or even utilise the unique talents of subjects of secret government experiments. Weapons, resources and contacts can be secured around the globe, enabling you to command from afar. But if the situation requires a hands-on approach, you will be locked, loaded and ready to fight.Innovative Investigation Board: Utilizing a classic pinboard and string approach, the Investigation Board is the hub from where cases, locations and individuals can be researched to reveal new missions, resources and technologies. In Phantom Doctrine, investigation and intel is an active and vital element of success.Multiplayer Battles: lose friends and make new enemies in ruthless online multiplayer matches. Experience the deviousness and lethality of Phantom Doctrine in accessible 1v1 skirmishes.Utilize ruthless Technology: New capabilities can either be stolen from the enemy or researched, and then ruthlessly used to your advantage. Often experimental and morally dubious, brainwashing, interrogation, body engineering and chemical enhancement are all fair game as you extract information by any means necessary.Fully customizable character creation: Operatives can be customized each time they need a new identity. Change their appearance, forge their documents, train them in the deadly arts and send them back into the field.Carefully Designed hand-crafted levels: Combining the best of both worlds: the quality of large, hand-designed maps and meticulous, smart design ensuring visual and gameplay variety. Travel the world of the 1980s in the grip of the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain.Replayable modular campaign: a wide array of mechanics ensures markedly different playthroughs. A unique experience is guaranteed by randomly generated character names and backgrounds, algorithmically populated and adapted maps, and randomized intelligence snippets.A spy thriller from two different points of view: Play as either a former KGB counterintelligence operative or a renegade CIA wet work commando. Each has to come to terms with the truth and challenge the global conspiracy. Complete the campaign to be rewarded with an additional protagonist in Extended Playthrough.No mission is too big or too small: whether infiltrating a busy government facility to clinically assassinate a target, or mounting a full frontal assault on an enemy base. With optional objectives linked to a mission’s complexity, as well as loot and intelligence to collect, every decision has an impact. 7aa9394dea Title: Phantom DoctrineGenre: Action, RPG, StrategyDeveloper:CreativeForge GamesPublisher:Good Shepherd EntertainmentRelease Date: 14 Aug, 2018 Phantom Doctrine Free Download [portable] great game graphically very smooth on the eye's strategy game watch each step as my be your last... if your not careful highly recommended. Underrated gem. Wasn't sure about it because of the reviews at first.I like the old and newer X-COM, big fan of Invisible Inc. as well. This game is like a mix of that.Once you get used to the systems in the game it's pretty addictive. There's depth, and you really have to use your brain.Also a big fan of the combat system that doesn't rely solely on the RNG but on actual tactical skill.. The best game for spy genre fans since... Well, I guess since Cover Action. So this is not saying much. The game has many, many flaws, but since there are no other competing games in the genre, we have to take what is offered.That being said, tactical missions get to be a chore after a while, and the excellent Analysis mini-game could be more fleshed out, as well as other spy activities. And while I liked playing a non-evil KGB character, the plot isn't made very clear, so I can't say it's the big draw of the game.A few recommendations if you willing to give this game a try:1) This is NOT X-Com clone. If you fire an unsupressed gun, you probably already failed that mission, or are going to have a hard time. Use stealth - disguised characters are EXTREMELY powerful, and by the middle of the game, you can have two of them running under enemies' noses without much fear (do avoid named agents: they can see through your disguise sometimes). Use silencers, dispose of unwanted bodies. The lack of RNG in combat never was a problem for me, since I tried to avoid combat at all costs anyway.2) Use Breach with silenced weapons: you can clear a whole room of enemies without raising an alarm. But keep in mind that your agents won't fire on civilians during Breach action, and they might panic and raise an alarm when they see bodies. Breach is an absolute necessity during the final mission of the normal (non-extended) campaign, which I learned the hard way.3) Play the game on Normal mode the first time: Easy is too easy if you're familiar with tactical games even a little. AI is dumb on any mode, but at least Normal makes Body Enginering worhwhile, while on Easy you don't need it at all.. Now, I originally grabbed Phantom Doctrine right when it came out, but didn't get around to playing it for a while. Then I saw the awful reviews, and decided to put it at the back of the list in case it got patched. It did and, eventually, I got around to playing it and... it's just not good. I haven't played it much, but I can tell that keeping on playing it will just annoy me because I'm already tired of the game by the end of my third mission.I find it hard to order my grievances in my head, so let's just take them in the order that I encountered them in the game.First off, just STARTING a game where I can choose Plot Lite or nothing at all. If I want to play Plot Classic(i.e. the full plot), I have to beat the game first. And you know what? Eat a\u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665 developers. Far as I can tell this is like a campaign of X-COM, I shouldn't have to beat a goddamn X-COM campaign once just to be graciously allowed full access to the game. What the hell, guys? Why did this seem like a good idea to anyone?But then that stops annoying me and we get to the tutorial. And hey, guess what? Screw the tutorial, too. It's one of those tutorials so handholdy that it actually teaches you nothing because you can only do literally the exact moves it orders. It's not "get to X" and then you can decide how to get there yourself, the game will literally ignore any input but the one it requires. It's not a tutorial, it's a cutscene, and it suuuuuuuuuuuuucks.Speaking of, half of what the game tells you about combat during the tutorial appears to be lies. Stuff like the amount of Awareness a given character has is such a tiny bit of the UI that it took me two missions before I could reliably find it.So yeah, it's X-COM but with spies, spies who inexplicably haul around LMG's on their missions for whatever purpose. Like X-COM 2 it starts off with a phase where no one knows you're bad dudes yet, which is a neat idea, but making THAT turn-based as well is incredibly painful. It just takes so \u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665ing long, and there's no skipping ANY. ANI. MA. TION. S. You will learn to dread and hate every single one of them in short order. The SNEAKPHASE ends when you break cover, by being spotted somewhere you're trespassing or by going loud.Part of that problem is that the game only indicates shifts from trespassing to not on the same level. At the top of a ladder or stairs, for instance, it doesn't indicate it. Hope you like savescumming to avoid randomly breaking stealth and losing the mission, because the instant you break stealth infinite waves of enemies start spawning every X turns, so breaking stealth too early can lose you a mission easy. Another part of the problem with the stealth gameplay is that it's stupid. I can stand next to a door a guard is staring at, open it, look around the corner and spot him, then casually close the door again and he won't give a damn. At the same time, something as basic as hearing approximate enemy locations through walls, in neighbouring rooms or whatever when they move around, is missing. Replacing that with guards that can't see doors feels really stupid as a way to allow you to scout.It's also sometimes hard to tell if an enemy's gonna spot you or not.Or what actions they'll notice and react to.I took down two enemy guards silently on the same turn and hid their bodies, and then somehow, instantly, the next turn, all the remaining guards learned, through their PSYCHIC HIVE MIND that two of their own were missing and thus started burning evidence and hunting for intruders. I mean, fair, tip them off after a few rounds so it's not too trivial. But instantly? What the hell, devs.And let's get back to the mission interface, because you know what blows goats? The indicators for whether an objective is on a given height level. In fact, a lot of things about this game blow goats.So let's continue with the combat. Aside from the SNEAKPHASE the big thing about the game, per the tutorials, is that you have a layer of ablative HP called Awareness that both gets used as Spy Mana for abilities and which melts off when you're shot at before Health, but regenerates on its own so you don't need stitches. Attacks, it also claims, never miss. This is the game lying to you, by the way.Sometimes attacks scrape off Awareness and a little amount of Health, other times they completely ignore Awareness and blow right through Health. Sometimes attacks are Dodged, which I guess technically isn't the same as Missing but sure as hell feels like it. Sometimes attacks do the listed damage, sometimes they don't. The game doesn't bother to really indicate well whether an enemy is properly in cover or not from your current location. Overwatch also feels a bit pointless since it rarely has the punch actually needed to down a running enemy, it feels like.Anyway, the missions are garbage. The non-mission stuff is a muddled mess on the faux-geoscape. Just. It's hard to summarize it as anything but "garbage UI design." Poor choice of colours. Poor button locations. Many things require too many buttons to finish when it should just have been one click. A lot of submenus arbitrarily have no back button. Even starting agents have 500 traits to sort through. Much to the pleasure of gun nerds but probably no actual human beings, your guys aren't just trained in stuff like PISTOL or RIFLE or BIG GUN. Instead they have random backgrounds and trainings that afflict them with knowing how to use a grab bag of random weapons. Like, yes, sure, he knows how to use an AK instead of a Galil or an M16 or whatever because he has a background in the IRA. But can't we just say he has goddamn Assault Rifle Proficiency? It's just so stupidly FIDDLY.I also have no idea if the game expects it or not, but you can do like 500 random missions or however many you want between actual story beats, but congrats if you bother because three hours of your time will grant you all of a quarter of a level for a starting agent and what amounts to some random dude's wallet in terms of funds. Blazing progress, that.So long story short, this is a bad game. Don't bother.
Updated: Mar 11, 2020