About Phantom Forces:
Giving this a very tentative thumbs up and here is why. The only way to play this game in full stealth, complete all main and optional objectives, as well as using non lethal force to extract enemy agents from maps is to play on Easy mode. This is because of how the Takedown ability works. On Easy mode it works as long as you have enough Awareness and a at least one fire point, which is pretty much automatic, even when Awareness is depleted when using skills, ending turns refills it. Takedown is a non lethal action that allows you to knock out enemy agents. You can then pick them up and carry them with you to the extraction point and interrogate them at base. The problem is on Normal and Hard mode if you have less HP than the target (enemy agents almost always have more HP than your characters) you can’t use Takedown even when you have the Awareness and the fire point available! So now your only option is to kill the agent. That’s cool, but you want to do it stealthily? Well guess what. Your only option is to use a high powered, silenced weapon and if that weapon is not powerful enough to kill the agent with one shot, even when using the Headshot skill you are forced to fight it out with the entire map. This is not good for a game that is supposed to have a stealth, espionage type of theme. As someone else mentioned in a review. This game is meant to be played using stealth, but on difficulty modes most ppl play you don’t always have stealth options if you want to complete every objective. This game really had a ton of potential. The espionage and cold war them is really cool. Base management is simple, yet the base facilities definitely have that secret cell feel to give the player a nice spy game experience. The devs just messed up by thinking taking away certain stealth options in the difficulties players would use the most would make the game more challenging. Nah, it only made the game frustrating not due to difficulty, but due to lack of options.
