Phoenix Point moves from top down to third-person views during combat.
Phoenix Point moves from top down to third-person views during combat.
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How Phoenix Point takes turn-based tactics where the genre hasn’t gone

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 7 min

Julian Gollop created X-COM: Apocalypse while at Mythos Games in 1997. For decades, he has been making turn-based strategy games that resonate with fans.

He started Snapshot Games in 2013 with David Kaye, and now they’re poised to ship Phoenix Point, a turn-based tactics and 4X strategy game (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) that is going where the XCOM franchise (which Firaxis owns) hasn’t gone yet. Gollop’s idea was to take some concepts from the early days and run with them.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.