Phantom Doctrine 2 will be real-time and third-person

Phantom Doctrine was a turn-based tactics game about espionage, with brainwashing, double agents, and a conspiracy corkboard. Its newly announced sequel, Phantom Doctrine 2: The Cabal, seems more like a third-person stealth-em-up in the vein of Hitman. It's such a big shift I had to double-check it's the work of the same developers, CreativeForge Games (it is, though with PlayWay publishing rather than Good Shepherd this time).

Phantom Doctrine 2 explores an alternate reality where the Chernobyl accident was a deliberate terrorist act, and the first in a string of attacks orchestrated by a group called the Cabal (the organization you played in the first game). You build a squad of agents with different skills then choose which one to send on each mission, where they'll sneak in, impersonate enemies, use silenced weapons, and do whatever it takes to complete the job.

There's also a tactical pause system and a return of the conspiracy corkboard as nods to the original game, but it does look and sound pretty different. Let's hope the shift in perspective and gameplay is better received than The Bureau: XCOM Declassified was.

Phantom Doctrine 2 currently has a Steam page, with a release date that's "Top Secret".

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.