One Hour of Phantom Dust

  For some reason, I was on the Xbox store on my pc and saw they had a game called Phantom Dust you could play for free.  I had not actually heard of it but I figured I would give it a try.  I loaded it up, set my clock for an hour, and played Phantom Dust by Microsoft Studios, Microsoft Corporation.

The Experience: 

  Phantom Dust is old and the graphics show it.  It originally came out for the first Xbox in 2004 and its art style really ages it.  This doesn't excuse the soundtrack though as it seems they set a recorder up to a 12-year-old and asked them to hit notes on various instruments.  Not a fan.  Within the levels, it's a little better with the music just being a generic action soundtrack.  The voice acting is bad as well.  It's really before studios starting spending a lot on it so anything pre-2010 I never expect much from.  The sound assets for this game just are not that great.

  Now on to the game.  The game is strategy fighting game.  It's an interesting title in that it acts as a deck building game where you build a deck of moves and you will use those moves to defeat 1 or 2 enemies on a map.  Each move requires what is called aura points that will recharge after use.

  The way you get skills in a fight is from orbs that pop up on your map that represent the moves from your deck.  They are attack, buffs, skills, debuffs for your enemies, and finally, there are aura spheres which you use to raise your aura number.  You will move around in a 3d environment shooting your skills off at your enemy and trying to kill them before they kill you.

  I found this game tediously slow.  Skills have certain ranges they work best at so you are spending a lot of time getting your enemy into that range then firing, missing, waiting for the recharge, and rinse and repeat.  There is a bit of strategic thinking in that you have to decide when you want to use aura for defense or if you want to use it for offense but besides that, I found myself just using the environment to block a skill and then walking around the corner to fire back.  It didn't really engage me at all.

  There isn't much in this game beyond that and now that it is free to play they have added a microtransaction store where you can buy skills for PvP.  These skills get a little more complicated and are bit stronger so they provide a little more range in the gameplay but its still the same core running around a small level waiting for your aura to come back and then firing away. 

  The story started to have promise until you started hearing the voice acting and you saw the protagonists. Everyone has obnoxiously large lips and eyes on what otherwise are realistic models.  I am not sure what the art direction here was but it wasn't that great.  Your base of operations where you go between quests didn't have me thrilled either.  I found myself looking at my watch a lot near the end of the hour.

  This game does seem to have a small following and there are genuinely people into it.  It is a different take on deck building games but it doesn't strike me as something you are going to get a lot of people to want to jump into.  This might be for some but it definitely wasn't for me, so much so that I have no desire to finish the single player on this title.  This is one I am letting go.

TL;DR: 

  This game is an older title that really has not aged all that well.  I am not sure it was even that great, to begin with, based off of the art style and what can be counted as a soundtrack.  This game seems to be for those looking for a nostalgia kick or maybe something different along the lines of a deck building game but I don't see it appealing to much more than that.