Watch: Phantom Doctrine’s ‘debriefing’ trailer shows gameplay and covers all of the features

CreativeForge Games and publisher Good Shepherd Games have released a new trailer for Phantom Doctrine, their alternate-history, cold-war espionage game. This, latest one covers a lot of the game’s features, while also showing off some more snippets of the game in action.

Phantom Doctrine, for those who haven’t heard about it before, sees the player leading a covert operation which must fight back against a clandestine international-conspiracy at the height of the Cold War.

CreativeForge Games (Hard West) have created an interesting twist on the recent XCOM revival, with the game taking largely taking place over two distinct phases – Base and Management, and combat instances. The former will see players researching mind control devices, creating new identities for their agents, as well as procuring information and structuring combat plans. In the field, however, your agents can operate with a large amount of freedom; you can set up support spotters, snipers and more on the periphery of the battlefield; you can secure the objective through pure stealth, or you can activate plants and spring deadly ambushes.

You can find the new trailer, which showcases a lot of the game’s mechanics and features, below,

The agents, both friendly and rival, are really the stars of the game. One of the main features which sold me on the game’s pitch was the ability to use a ‘Manchurian Candidate’ style ‘drills’ to reprogram an enemy agent, and that same thing can happen to yours. You can be halfway through a mission, and you’ve been keeping an eye on ‘Wolfe’ since they returned from being captured, and suddenly they flip. The enemy thinks they have you now. But, suddenly. Boom. You issue the kill words and enemy agents flip to your side. The tables have turned, twice.

Another thing I’m very excited to see in action is the Investigation Board. All of the intel gathered throughout missions can be slapped onto a large cork-board, with you able to thread string around the various pins to try and draw connections between all of your gathered evidence. If you can get enough then you can launch an attack against one of the rival factions, and possibly gain a massive foothold against them in the race to survival.

We wrote about the game’s E3 Trailer earlier in the year, and while it painted a similar picture as the above, it didn’t spend long on the gameplay. The game’s conflicts are tense experiences where players must use their tact, and silences, to deactivate traps to ease navigation. An alarm being triggered spells bad news, and the enemy has unlimited resources to stop you.

Phantom Doctrine launches on Windows PC (GOG & Steam) and Xbox One on August 14.