YMMV / Phantom Doctrine

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Vahalla isn't all that difficult to defeat in combat if properly equipped, especially seeing as the Grenada bunker is one of the few levels where reinforcements don't arrive upon raising the alarm. Grenades, breaching, and overwatch can make light work of him.
  • Tai-Pan in the extended campaign is even easier to defeat, as you simply need to maintain stealth to take out his five fairly well spread out bodyguards, who are all marked on the map, and open the freezer where he's hiding. Better still, his control phrase can be used to instantly subdue him once he's discovered.
• Broken Base: The combat tends to split players into two camps. Either you enjoy it because it's difficult and isn't rewarding, which some argue is appropriate for an espionage-themed game, or you hate for those very same reasons. The two biggest sticking points are how every shot hits and the infinite enemy reinforcements.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Enemy Agents can see through disguises (unless your agent has Actor perk) and have larger view range than usual guards. They're also noticably tougher than mooks during fights. Not to mention that they will start to go on patrol once you’ve taken down too many guards in the level, destroying any classified documents and turning security systems back on whenever they come across them and potentially ruining your agents’ well-planned infiltration routes.
  • While the armored Elite Mooks are usually just as bad as average guards during infiltration, they can be hard to deal with during ambushes.
• Difficulty Spike: The first chapter covers a particular region of the world with cities relatively close together. As the game progresses, the map expands and incidents can occur on multiple continents, making it more difficult to respond in time. Enemy units get tougher and have more dangerous abilities. The Cabal do get upgrades of their own, but the game becomes noticeably harder in later chapters.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Disguises make it so regular guards won't recognize your agent, and civilians won't freak out when spotting unauthorized persons in forbidden areas. The system can be abused by dressing two agents with disguises, then making them walk everywhere in pairs. As long as there aren't any witness, having two agents allows to perform a takedown then dispose of the body during a single turn, which greatly reduces difficulty. Agents won't be fooled, but this tactic would allow to perform a takedown and stabilisation during the same turn. What also helps is that during most tactical encounters, disguised agents will be placed inside the facility being infiltrated, often close to objectives or security system terminals.
  • Initially, the actor perk broke the game even more once combined with disguises. It makes even enemy agents blind to your guys. It makes stealth so easy that it honestly gets boring. Just have your disguised agents slowly clear out the map while your heavily armed backup sits with their thumbs up their butts in the extraction zone. The 1.0.5 patch makes enemy agents able to spot disguised agents with the perk if they venture close enough, but disguised agents can still maneuver around their lines of sight and take them from behind if played smart.
• Goddamned Bats: Civilians. Unlike enemy guards or agents, they don't have an icon for when your people see them, so you can accidentally set off an alarm while stealing weapons/documents because you didn't notice a civilian in the corner. They also make breaching more costly as you won't always have tranq darts, but if you let them live through the breach they automatically sound the alarm.
• Paranoia Fuel: Some of your recruits may be Beholder Initiative moles, and even turn against you during tactical missions.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The tactical missions consisting in destroying a Beholder cell require to eliminate every enemy units onsite (agents and mooks). The mission's objective includes a counter detailing how many units are remaining, but no way of locating them, which occasionally makes proper completion tedious: unless you luckily found each mook and agent without searching, you will need to manually scout every corner of the map to find the last enemies. Worse still, if the alarm is raised and you don't eliminate the entire cell before reinforcements arrive, the reinforcements will have to be dealt with as well, since they count as part of the cell.
  • Body engineering can make your agents incredibly powerful by the late game, but without a guide or spending half an hour to make a spreadsheet, it's very hard to get the most out of it. Throughout the game you slowly gain new possible compounds with varying positive and sometimes negative effects, in an intricate webs of compounds having prerequisite other compounds and blocking the application of other compounds. You can receive compounds before getting their prerequisites, there's no way to see which compounds an agent already has, and no way to preview the cumulative effect of a certain chain of compounds. Also, you can't queue up several compounds to apply, you have to go back to the world map and let the ingame clock advance slightly, then go back and apply the next compound. Oh, and the stat descriptions that tell you raising which attribute raises which in-game statistic are incorrect.
• That One Level:
  • The mission where you go to Tai-Pan's restaurant to capture him can be a pain if you're doing a full-stealth run. If you want every collection in the level, you're required to go through a heavy security area in the back of the restaurant with multiple guards and enemy agents should they were stationed there, not to mention a well-placed security camera that won't allow your non-disguised agents through until you disable it, and the control panel itself is located in a small room with very little room to maneuver and civilians and enemies view ranges constantly overlap each other. The same goes for the area Tai-Pan himself is located in at the top floor of the restaurant, where it will take a very well-thought-out plan to take down each of the guards, Tai-Pan, and one pesky civilian in such a way that will not break stealth, which is all but impossible if none of your agents wear disguises, or wearing disguises but doesn't have the "Actor" perk.
  • Any mission where you got ambushed by the enemy. While some of them have hints in the dialogue that clue you in about what you're going into so you can prepare yourself accordingly, there are a few where you just won't see the Beholder coming. Examples include the Silicon Valley ambush, the numbers sending station after six turns, and the extended campaign version of Almaz Control Station, all of which have you bring only a few agents that will limit your team's performance in combat, and should you apply disguises to your agents not knowing that you're walking into a trap, you'll have to fight elite enemy mooks with weak weapons and light armors.

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