A unique RPG with good art and music, good moments more fitting for a slice of life style story, interesting mechanics that aren't utilized enough, and incompetently designed but fairly infrequent combat.
The main plot is hurt quite a bit by the fast pacing and somewhat nonsensical opening that bristles against the main more serious plot that it doesn't take the time or have the quality of writing to deal with in any meaningful way. With how quickly you are rushed into the main narrative you have no build up about the state of the world and no time spent working with the people in the army you begin the game being part of or seeing anything that could appear to give them any kind of sensible personalities based on their training and indoctrination.
You are part of an army of soldiers that have been born and raised in an underground high tech facility and trained to be soldiers since birth, all under the orders of a Father General who says their goal is to keep peace throughout the world. You've been trained as a sniper all your life and when the sniper of a more elite unit is injured you are assigned to take his place and join others on what ends up being a false flag operation where you pose as Polish soldiers attacking Russian civilians in small towns in order to start a war because your leader seems to want to be part of an invasion of Poland. Everyone knows you are killing civilians, except your character (mixture of night vision scope, lack of understanding about outside world, indoctrination explaining why he doesn't notice he's shooting unarmed random people in a town I guess), which as the the sniper and by extension the person who should be the most likely to be a psychopathic murderer that raises a lot of strange and never answered questions. Did they suspect you would have some personality flaw towards their goals if so why did they assigned you, why would they keep you as a sniper, did they not train any other snipers, why did they even need a sniper or a particularly talented one in this situation, why is everyone else ok with this when its most of their first assignment when they seem to have similar personalities to you, etc. It doesn't help that all of this seems to be completely contradicted by the shared briefing you had with the other soldiers, some early tutorial like lines in the opening area are also wrong as they reflect former mechanics that were changed over the early access period the game was in. You and another soldier you convince to join you flee the army after your first mission.
When you fight your old army many of them do seem to be portrayed more as the psychopathic characters they should be, but nearly everyone you meet at the start of the game is bumbling anime cliches like, "Can you bring me a gift from the surface," "lol my medical supplies weren't assigned correctly and I was excited and didn't bother to check," "Guard duty is boring can you bring me some cookies and apples?" You have people who should be closer to the Kurt Russell Soldier film and often are when it wants you to fight them, but seem more on the Forrest Gump side for the opening. Your two early characters also have no difficulty interacting with others or personality conflicts from their upbringing other than trying to make amends for being with the army in the opening and some repeated confusion over food. It's kind of like Tales of Arise's plot of, "Ok we freed the people who have been starving worked to death mining slaves for 100s of years...no other issues to deal with from that everything is fine now." 22+ years of indoctrination and it takes about five minutes to go, well everything we've ever been told must be a lie, we had better shoot them.
Combat involves the worst of the genres kind of buffs, debuffs, and lack of information. Each character has four stats and while ATK and DEF are usually pretty obvious you get no information on what AGI (turn order, dodge, hit, multiple attacks, etc?) or LUK (crit, hit, dodge, skill influence, bit of everything, after battle rewards, basically nothing, etc?) do. Combat follows a shown turn order, except when it decides it doesn't want to follow it. Many of the game's skills are worthless. Skills that cost SP may say they do more damage but then do less damage than a basic attacks. Buffs are often the useless kind of, my attack does 80 damage, if I instead use my attack buff skills by spending SP I sacrifice one turn to do 90 damage for my next three turns. Lynn is easily the best combat character in the game because she has more useful skills including one that can damage and blind all enemies and because the second gun you get for her shoots twice and only checks if the attack hits the one time. When you find an upgrade for your first gun it is worse than the second even with the higher damage, when you find her last gun after that it is still worth even with a high attack and agility bonus. The second gun says nothing about attacking twice and with the lower agility bonus compared to the last gun doesn't even make sense that it would attack twice. Keeping this gun has her often doing more damage than your sniper even when he's equipped with the game's most hidden and high attack value weapon. During combat you can aim at different parts of a targets body with torso shots being more accurate but less damaging, arms forgetting to mention an armor value but having a chance to paralyze (so low you have almost no reason to ever aim there), and head shots deal a lot more damage but have a high evasion chance (no idea what that means and since you rarely miss I would suggest never aiming for anything else, unless they have low enough health to finish with a torso shot or it makes sense to try for to paralyze based on turn order). After most battles you can choose a reward of either getting an item or equipment piece or regenerating some SP, the item and equipment is the better choice 95% of the time since most characters don't even have useful skills. Luckily combat isn't a constant focus of the game and it is so easy that it is never a challenge.
The areas where the game does a better job that can make it worth a playthrough is the good visuals with some nice environment details and some good CGs and animated moments. The music is good throughout the game from story tracks, exploration tracks, and battle tracks. The writing as the characters spend time with each other and interact with others is good and makes it fairly obvious that the developer's talent would lie much more in writing and working on a kind of slice of life story or civilians dealing with the situation of being in a war or civil war rather than the main plot dealing with former soldiers and civilians taking up arms against an army trying to gain control of the world and if the combat was replaced by dialogue choices and activities. Based on side quests you complete and your choices in different conversations characters can gain morale and while it can't have too massive of an effect on the game based on the smaller scale of it you can see some different fates for characters in their final scenes, different scenes or lines between characters, and may gain access to a few different quests if morale is high or low enough.
You are going to be spending more time seeing likable characters interact and doing side activities and that does push the game into an area where I can somewhat recommend it in spite of the poor combat and areas that shouldn't have been the focus.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1789401810634973206
The main plot is hurt quite a bit by the fast pacing and somewhat nonsensical opening that bristles against the main more serious plot that it doesn't take the time or have the quality of writing to deal with in any meaningful way. With how quickly you are rushed into the main narrative you have no build up about the state of the world and no time spent working with the people in the army you begin the game being part of or seeing anything that could appear to give them any kind of sensible personalities based on their training and indoctrination.
You are part of an army of soldiers that have been born and raised in an underground high tech facility and trained to be soldiers since birth, all under the orders of a Father General who says their goal is to keep peace throughout the world. You've been trained as a sniper all your life and when the sniper of a more elite unit is injured you are assigned to take his place and join others on what ends up being a false flag operation where you pose as Polish soldiers attacking Russian civilians in small towns in order to start a war because your leader seems to want to be part of an invasion of Poland. Everyone knows you are killing civilians, except your character (mixture of night vision scope, lack of understanding about outside world, indoctrination explaining why he doesn't notice he's shooting unarmed random people in a town I guess), which as the the sniper and by extension the person who should be the most likely to be a psychopathic murderer that raises a lot of strange and never answered questions. Did they suspect you would have some personality flaw towards their goals if so why did they assigned you, why would they keep you as a sniper, did they not train any other snipers, why did they even need a sniper or a particularly talented one in this situation, why is everyone else ok with this when its most of their first assignment when they seem to have similar personalities to you, etc. It doesn't help that all of this seems to be completely contradicted by the shared briefing you had with the other soldiers, some early tutorial like lines in the opening area are also wrong as they reflect former mechanics that were changed over the early access period the game was in. You and another soldier you convince to join you flee the army after your first mission.
When you fight your old army many of them do seem to be portrayed more as the psychopathic characters they should be, but nearly everyone you meet at the start of the game is bumbling anime cliches like, "Can you bring me a gift from the surface," "lol my medical supplies weren't assigned correctly and I was excited and didn't bother to check," "Guard duty is boring can you bring me some cookies and apples?" You have people who should be closer to the Kurt Russell Soldier film and often are when it wants you to fight them, but seem more on the Forrest Gump side for the opening. Your two early characters also have no difficulty interacting with others or personality conflicts from their upbringing other than trying to make amends for being with the army in the opening and some repeated confusion over food. It's kind of like Tales of Arise's plot of, "Ok we freed the people who have been starving worked to death mining slaves for 100s of years...no other issues to deal with from that everything is fine now." 22+ years of indoctrination and it takes about five minutes to go, well everything we've ever been told must be a lie, we had better shoot them.
Combat involves the worst of the genres kind of buffs, debuffs, and lack of information. Each character has four stats and while ATK and DEF are usually pretty obvious you get no information on what AGI (turn order, dodge, hit, multiple attacks, etc?) or LUK (crit, hit, dodge, skill influence, bit of everything, after battle rewards, basically nothing, etc?) do. Combat follows a shown turn order, except when it decides it doesn't want to follow it. Many of the game's skills are worthless. Skills that cost SP may say they do more damage but then do less damage than a basic attacks. Buffs are often the useless kind of, my attack does 80 damage, if I instead use my attack buff skills by spending SP I sacrifice one turn to do 90 damage for my next three turns. Lynn is easily the best combat character in the game because she has more useful skills including one that can damage and blind all enemies and because the second gun you get for her shoots twice and only checks if the attack hits the one time. When you find an upgrade for your first gun it is worse than the second even with the higher damage, when you find her last gun after that it is still worth even with a high attack and agility bonus. The second gun says nothing about attacking twice and with the lower agility bonus compared to the last gun doesn't even make sense that it would attack twice. Keeping this gun has her often doing more damage than your sniper even when he's equipped with the game's most hidden and high attack value weapon. During combat you can aim at different parts of a targets body with torso shots being more accurate but less damaging, arms forgetting to mention an armor value but having a chance to paralyze (so low you have almost no reason to ever aim there), and head shots deal a lot more damage but have a high evasion chance (no idea what that means and since you rarely miss I would suggest never aiming for anything else, unless they have low enough health to finish with a torso shot or it makes sense to try for to paralyze based on turn order). After most battles you can choose a reward of either getting an item or equipment piece or regenerating some SP, the item and equipment is the better choice 95% of the time since most characters don't even have useful skills. Luckily combat isn't a constant focus of the game and it is so easy that it is never a challenge.
The areas where the game does a better job that can make it worth a playthrough is the good visuals with some nice environment details and some good CGs and animated moments. The music is good throughout the game from story tracks, exploration tracks, and battle tracks. The writing as the characters spend time with each other and interact with others is good and makes it fairly obvious that the developer's talent would lie much more in writing and working on a kind of slice of life story or civilians dealing with the situation of being in a war or civil war rather than the main plot dealing with former soldiers and civilians taking up arms against an army trying to gain control of the world and if the combat was replaced by dialogue choices and activities. Based on side quests you complete and your choices in different conversations characters can gain morale and while it can't have too massive of an effect on the game based on the smaller scale of it you can see some different fates for characters in their final scenes, different scenes or lines between characters, and may gain access to a few different quests if morale is high or low enough.
You are going to be spending more time seeing likable characters interact and doing side activities and that does push the game into an area where I can somewhat recommend it in spite of the poor combat and areas that shouldn't have been the focus.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1789401810634973206
I don't think this was quite the game I expected it to be, but I enjoyed it more as I went along and reoriented myself to it.
I liked the resource-management aspect of the combat, and the characters were all charming. However, there's some pacing issues and stiff writing throughout that dampen the experience. Still glad I played it though!
I liked the resource-management aspect of the combat, and the characters were all charming. However, there's some pacing issues and stiff writing throughout that dampen the experience. Still glad I played it though!