Phantom Doctrine Review: A Spy Eat Spy World (PC)

Phantom Doctrine takes place near the tail end of the Cold War. In a time of rising tensions and falling trust. Of deception, schemes, conspiracies, and itchy trigger fingers. But taking a side step from history in this game, it is a time of mind control and world domination. No longer just East vs West in nuclear-deterred deadlock, a new superpower throws its hat in the ring using stealth and sabotage as its preferred weapons of mass destruction. Whether you work for the CIA, KGB, or a secret to unlock a third organization, it is your job to uncover their plot and stop them at all costs.

Phantom Doctrine is currently available on PC, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One for $39.99.

Story – Your Mission Should You Choose to Accept

At the beginning of the game, you get to choose your difficulty, including the infamous Ironman saving. If you haven’t heard of this mode, it only allows auto-saving and no mission restarting. Every mistake is permanent and will make the game exponentially harder for every single one. You can also see an option to play extended story mode, but you must complete a first playthrough to unlock it. I will let you know off the bat and Spoiler-free. The extended mode will give you additional context in the story and some bonus missions to play, but it isn’t game-changing.

Next, you get to pick which faction you play as. You can pick to play as a CIA agent under the codename DeadPan doing some wetwork or a KGB internal investigator trying to hunt down traitors to the Soviet Union, codename Kodiak. There is a third character you have to unlock by completing the other two. From what I have seen, all three stories converge within the first third or so in the game, so there isn’t a significant amount of a story difference.

Is under seas shipping cheaper than over?

Codename Acquired

After that, you customize your character’s appearance and start the story. The game opens with a cutscene of MI6 stopping the ship CS Marquis. Intercepting mysterious cargo from an even more mysterious organization called the Beholder Initiative. The United States and the Soviet Union caught wind of the interception and got involved. Presenting a danger to Beholder Initiative’s secret project, Iceberg. As punishment for getting caught, the Beholder member in charge of that mission is murdered by one of his fellows. After that, the first mission begins.

If you play the tutorial, you will follow a mission with the re-occurring character agent Kingfish as he talks a bit about your character and gives you some backstory. After the tutorial, we follow your character as they start with their original missions until they catch wind of this Beholder Initiative and go down the rabbit hole as you uncover their conspiracy. The story gets more intriguing as you find intel and classified documents and try to piece them together. Unfortunately, there is little in the way of a character story as most of the story focuses on the conspiracy.

Looks like the folders some of my high school classmates had.

Gameplay – Xcom meets Invisible Inc.

The gameplay is excellent and is great for people like me who love the Xcom 2. You have a couple of different modes of play. You have what I refer to as the hideout mode and the mission mode. 

Hideout mode is similar to Xcom’s strategic mode. At the start, you have your five areas in your HQ. Crew Quarters is where you will hire/fire, train, level up, and equip your agents for the field. The infirmary is where your agents go to heal over time from damage taken during missions. There is a workshop where you can craft items and abilities to use during missions. Such as smoke grenades, bulletproof vests, weapons, and potentially means to make and control sleeper agents.

Ah the LMG a sneaky weapon for a sneaky spy.

As well as make other rooms such as recon to get more information before entering missions. Agent aids like sniper nests, or forging press to get your agents’ new identities to shake off any heat or to print counterfeit money to fund your operation. Then there is the analytics room. You will take all the intel and classified documents found during missions or investigations and figure out how they are connected.  

The Hunt

Finally, there is the map room, where you will send your agents around the globe to investigate suspicious activities. Depending on where you send them, you can uncover intel, potential hideout locations, missions to perform, enemy agents, and more. Be careful, as Agents can start building up the heat if they hang around too long, go on many missions, or get caught acting suspicious or out of place. If one of your agents has a lot of heat on them and you send them out alone, there is a good chance they will get ambushed and might get killed. 

The other side of the coin is the mission mode. This mode is where you will notice the similarities with Xcom 2, such as the turn-based system. Mission mode is where you are out on the field, most often starting with infiltrating. While infiltrating, you can try to sneak through enemy facilities. If you are spotted, make a lot of noise, trip an alarm, or are otherwise caught, the enemy will try to hunt you down and call for reinforcements.

Oddly enough, breaking into that building was not considered trespassing.

The movement and cover systems are pretty identical to Xcom, but what’s not is the shooting system. Instead of having a percentage to hit/miss, you will always hit your target if you are in the line of sight and range. Your weapon will have a minimum and maximum damage. To get maximum damage on your enemy, you must be tactical and do things like outflanking them, using equipment like flash bangs, or having allies attack them to reduce their awareness.

Graphics & Audio – Smooth Spy Jazz

I adore the music in this game. It has excellent smooth noir jazz that the devs manage to fit in each setting. Moscow with an added deep choir or Japanese wooden flutes mixed in. Even in gunfights with dramatic swings to the music, yet keeping it smooth. You would have to hear it to believe it.

Graphics-wise, Phantom Doctrine does what it needs to. It uses an unreal engine, which makes the environment look great. But their characters and animation look cheap and can stick out a bit next to the more realistic environment.

Phantom Doctrine was reviewed on PC.