Climate change has released some space virus that is turning people into crabs and now most of the human race is split into three groups; an anarchist mutual aid network, a church worshiping the virus, and a fascist BOS knock-off formed by the phoenix project's former leader (there are few independent settlements but that's about it). The factions and their individual squabbles sound fun to start with but inevitably it just becomes tedious busywork trying to stop the fascists flipping their shit and ruining everyone's chances of avoiding extinction.

Much like the factions the alien faction (the pandorans) are also a cool idea on paper. Basically there's a bunch of basic classes of pandorans and as time passes there's a chance that they'll mutate a new variant. The harder units are spawned based on how large the alien colonies are instead of the time frame XCOM uses so as long as you keep wrecking nests the pandorans are easily manageable. The problem is that this tends to snowball rather quickly if you aren't very good at strategy games (like me :/) harder enemies spawn during missions, leaving more troops either dead or out for the count, which in turn allows the colonies more time to merge and grow, which means you encounter harder enemies, until finally you're sending rookies out to fight some kaijuu ass crab monster that's headbutting the local church. Alongside the attacks on cities pandoran colonies increase how much of the globe the mist covers, if mist reaches a human colony it slowly kills it, the anarchist faction can make anti-mist technology if you help them finish their research but the factions won't work together so you end up stuck babysitting these colonies until they build their damn fog condensers in the hope they don't get destroyed next time the pandorans raid them.

You start the game with your standard XCOM classes: sniper boi, big shooty boi and fast running boi. On top of this each faction has their own classes that you can unlock when either by stealing research from them or by get your reputation high enough that they share their research. A stabby boi and a psychic church boi for the cult, the fascists get engineers (of course), and the anarchists have sneaky lads who have shit damage but can deploy walking mines and shoot poison crossbows. These classes are all distinct and fun in their own way and can be multiclassed when they reach a high enough rank. This variety combined with cybernetics and genetic engineering allows for a large range of viable builds. This is probably the best part of the game. The downside is that you have to build equipment for each unit individually like in the OG X-coms, this can be a bit annoying and can make recruiting new units needlessly expensive since hired rookies don't even start out with a pistol. Also you can deploy armoured vehicles in missions, so that's cool I guess.

Phoenix point is a bit buggier than XCOM 2 suffering from the same problem of long loading screens but also occasionally hanging on enemy turns for long times. I've also rarely experienced CTDs during missions as well. These bugs are compounded by the fact that by default autosaves only happen at the start of missions so a crash can set you back a significant amount of time.