Phoenix Point is coming in Q4 2018

The X-COM spiritual successor has launched a crowdfunding campaign too.

Snapshot Games has today announced that Phoenix Point, their spiritual successor to the X-COM franchise, will launch in Q4 2018, with a crowdfunding campaign also starting today with an overall goal of $500,000 USD.

Phoenix Point has been in development for over a year now, and is the work of a team including Julian Gollop, who helped develop the original X-COM games, as well as David Kaye, who founded Gaming Insiders.

"We are creating Phoenix Point by taking influences from the famed X-COM franchise. We are updating our favorite 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," commented Gollop, who's the CEO of Snapshot Games Inc.

Here's how the press release describes 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 organisation 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."

You can see the crowdfunding campaign for Phoenix Point on Fig here. Do you think it can stack up against X-COM?