X-COM creator is crowdfunding a new strategy title

Julian Gallop is crowdfunding what is described as a spiritual successor to his 1994 strategy hit X-COM.

Phoenix Point is looking for $500km on Fig, and has already reached almost $296 with over 40 days left of its funding drive.

The game is pencilled in for a Q4 2018 launch on PC, Mac and Linux. Development has already been underway for a year with staff whose backgrounds include time at studios such as Ubisoft Sofia and Crytek Black Sea.

We are creating Phoenix Point by taking influences from the famed X-COM franchise,” Gallop said. We are updating our favourite gameplay features from X-COM titles such as UFO: Enemy Unknown and X-COM Apocalypse that I designed, and mixing them with some of the amazing ideas Firaxis Games executed brilliantly in their franchise reboots, to create an entirely new game whose essence lies in the XCOM genre.”

Gallop’s studio Snapshot Games has previously successfully funded, developed and released Chaos Reborn. Fig has previously proved a successful funding platform for games such as Psychonauts 2 and Pillars of Eternity 2.

Here’s the narrative description of Phoenix Point:

The spread of alien Pandoravirus was an unimaginable extinction event, nearly wiping out all human life. The fortunate majority were quickly killed off by the virus, but some were mutated by the aggressive virus, which attacks human DNA sequences and imbeds its own transformative DNA, thereby mutating humans into horrifically disfigured alien species with the ability to clone. Those who somehow survived gather in isolated havens spread throughout the world, with several of the largest and most powerful factions of radically contrasting ideologies controlling most of the world’s resources.

You play as part of the Phoenix Project, a worldwide organization set in place before the Pandoravirus, and designed to activate in times of world peril. You and your team must find out what has happened to the other Phoenix Project sleeper cells as you race to bring humanity back from the brink of extinction. Along the way, you will encounter constant threats from an ever-increasing variety of alien mutants (procedural generation system) armed with varying tactical abilities and intense boss battles with massive monsters and alien land walkers. Aliens are not your only concern as you will come face to face with unpredictable interactions with human factions with their ideologies and rife with internal conflicts including kidnappings, assassinations, sabotage, military coups, and base defense missions.”

There’s a trailer too: