I've seen other people say that this game being short is a positive as it means it doesn't overstay it's welcome, but personally for me with the game being so short, I feel doesn't fully explore the gameplay potential of a game where you control a hole. With other games I would be fine with them being super short and simple, but I feel like there's too much dialogue in between the levels that really halt the pacing to make it a smooth experience. Playing through the levels is like eating an appetizer where you're getting a tasty small taste, and then once you feel like you're gonna get a big hearty meal with more in depth mechanics, you get hit with the bill, and then you kind of repeat this for the entire game.

A game with a solid foundation that has a lot of weird and frustrating things to it where by the end of the game I was kinda relived I finished it.

Getting the positives out of the way first, the obvious one being the game looks phenomenal, absolutely gorgeous pixel art. The other part being that they made navel combat feel much more worth buying units for, something I felt like Advance Wars didn't really figure out until Days of Ruin.

It's wild seeing how they managed to have navel combat on par, maybe even better than Days of Ruin, but the way how they tackled your commanders I find much worse than Days of Ruin. The fact that you instantly lose the game if your commander dies is so frustrating because these levels are insanely long. You can be out here playing the game and forgot to check the range of the enemy's dragon and then your commander gets blasted and now you either restart the entire level or go back to one of your saves. Your CO dying causing you to lose is far too punishing for an upside that's just a strong single unit that can occasionally use a good ability.

Going into the levels of this game. There is like no variety to these missions. It's either a standard skirmish where you have to destroy all the barracks and/or defeat the commander, or it's a level with infinite spawning enemies, the latter being just not fun and a slog to play through as some for some of them, you have to get your units to a specific area, so the best thing to do is to just run away from fights. There's also no fun mission objectives, and when they do try to spice up the standard skirmish levels, like with fog of war, they only did for 3 missions, one of those missions being optional. You also have some maps just being way too big, taking your troops forever to get to the battle. There's also the fact that the ai isn't all that smart. It will make baffling decisions like leaving it's commander unguarded and out in the open when you have an abundance of units to attack it with, or even just send it's CO into your group of units just because it had it's groove ready.

The story is also real whatever. Good guy must stop evil person from dooming the world. Advance Wars does the same thing, but at least the characters were entertaining while the characters in Wargroove felt cliche at best and annoying at worst.

I feel like a real snob constantly comparing this to Advance Wars, but this game wears it's inspiration on it's sleeve so the comparison is inevitable.

They really put you into open ass fields with no cover, weapons that barely have any ammo, and enemies equipped vehicles and are like "okay now fight them." Which is a shame cause when the game isn't doing that, it has some really neat levels.

A complaint I have is that when fighting the Prometheans, it's like 3 enemy types, and they rarely mix Prometheans with Covenant enemy types so in the back half of the game, you are just only fighting same same enemies again and again. This leads to weapon variety to be super limited as for majority of the time you have to use what the enemy drops, and the new Promethean weapons don't really feel distinct enough from already existing weapons. Like Promethean weapons are just: pistol, battle rifle, assault rifle, sniper, and rocket launcher. The only really new thing the Promethean's brought were the grenades which I found never really that effective as the enemy ai's can easily get out of the way. It's weird how they kinda fumbled with the new enemy weapon arsenal when the UNSC got some cool new weapons like the Railgun and Sticky Detonator.

I liked the story enough even though I prefer 2 and 3's. I like the unique dynamic between Cortana and Chief the game introduced though I wished they did more with it. The new main bad is a real wet fart though. He had a cool design (mask on, he's so ugly without it), but he barely leaves a presence in the game and he gets defeated in such an underwhelming way I can only describe him as a character as milquetoast.

I can forgive the game though cause it gave us the Red Vs. Blue Chorus trilogy.

I was so on board with the game in the first few hours, where roaming the city at night all by yourself finding out what happened to your team was absolute vibes. But it kinda quickly loses its luster as you find out that after a while, the city you explore doesn't have that much to offer. Everything kinda looks the same and the map turns out to be a lot smaller than you initially thought. The one upside to exploring the city is finding the audio logs. I did enjoy trying to find them and learning about its story, but after a while I just couldn't find anymore without having to resort to backtracking a huge part of the city which I didn't have the patience for, leaving the audio log story line to be unfinished and kinda left me blue balled.

None of the flashback missions were bad, but I also didn't find many of them to be that interesting or stand out. There was no mission in the game that was unique to this game that the previous games haven't already done. The setting gets very tiring to look at as 95% of the time you are just looking at city. I also wasn't really attached to any of the characters as you don't really spend much time with them or see them interact with each other that much. Also who's idea was it to make the final mission an escort mission.

Epilogue cutscene goes hard though.

A very pretty puzzle platformer where a lot my complaints with the game are because I played Inside before playing this game. I felt like such an asshole playing the game because through out the entire thing I just kept on thinking to myself "okay, but I liked how Inside did it better."

I found the puzzles to be not that fun to work out and execute on because even when you know the solution to the puzzle, the game is just so slow with everything. Your character, Lana, climbs up ledges, runs, moves objects and swims at a pace where it's not egregiously slow, just annoying enough for me to complain about (Lana could be chased by an eldritch horror and will run like a grandma power walking through a neighborhood). For a game that has way more mechanics with what your character can do compared to Inside boy, the puzzles are not that varied as I'd say 70% of them were "how do we stealth past this robot." There's probably like only 2 puzzles in the game that were unique, both of them being music based, and the former being one I really didn't like due to how slow Lana moves.

When it comes to the presentation, obviously the game is pretty. But when it comes to the cutscenes, every time one played, I kept thinking to myself "why does this have to be a cutscene" as almost all of them could've been done in game without having to take control away from the player.

Lana is a very pretty game where the gameplay is unfortunately holding it back by a lot.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that I think Inside boy could beat Lana in a Death Battle.

For a game that's set after a world ending event and takes place in an apocalypse, this game is probably the funniest Advance Wars game cause of the hint system. Characters will do some two man comedy bit talking about the most random shit like cooking rats or drawing doodles of tanks on war notes, and then the enemy CO will tell you the most optimal way to choke out their units.

Also shoutouts to the game only letting you play as the ranged CO specialist once in the campaign in a pre-deployed mission with no ranged units.

This game frequently had me flip flopping between thinking "Oh this is neat" and "Oh this is dumb." I found that a lot of the areas have a really not fun gimmick to them that makes traversing to them a huge slog (stuff such as water that makes you move really slowly through it, lava streams that take like 3 full seconds to disappear, invincible ghosts you can't dodge through while you have to fight several enemies etc.) There's also a bunch of really weird design decisions that I just don't get, one of the biggest ones that comes to mind is that to unlock fast travel between your save points, you have to donate like 10k of your currency to a random alter that gives no indication that it will give you that.

For a metroidvania, I'm kinda baffled that the game never really gives you any powers through the main quest that allows you to backtrack and unlock new places like most metroidvanias do, but instead all of the abilities to unlock new areas are completely optional. And these abilities are so binary and uninteresting that don't do anything to affect how you play, but instead it's basically a switch you flick on and off only meant for discovering new areas and that's it.

Combat is simple, but simple isn't bad, it's just the fact that as absolutely gorgeous the artwork is for the game, and especially the bosses, I'm let down by the fact that all of the bosses in the base game are insanely easy and pretty much the most memorable things about them are their designs. The only exception when it comes to this is a snake boss that was added in a DLC that is an absolute nightmare of a slog to get to and one shots me.

Overall even though this review is all complaints, I did enjoy exploring this game, it's just that a lot of the times the reward for exploring is very underwhelming and aside from the visuals, this kinda soured me to the point where I'm just not interested in doing any of the DLC or NG+ stuff even though the NG+ features seems like a super cool thing I would love on any other game than this.

A very short VN with some charm to it and an aesthetic I really dig. Honestly I'd say that the visuals were my favorite part of the whole thing, I love the harsh stark colors plus the environmental designs making the setting feel alien.

The tone can wildly flip flop between trying to be comedic, emotional, and atmospheric with varying success. I can totally see if people don't really jive with the constant rude and crassness of the main character, my tolerance for these types of characters is pretty high so it didn't bother me that much. The game tries to go for some emotional moments, and they just did nothing for me really. The game is super short so trying to get me to care for a character we only know through flashbacks is a losing battle. Comedy is super hard to write so I can't even blame the game for not really making me chuckle, but the attempts at humor undercutting other scenes feels very jarring.

For a visual novel with multiple endings with barely any choices, it sure is really hard to figure out what to do to get the other endings. Trying to get endings in this game is like banging your head against the wall, because there's so few choices in this game, Q.u.q. makes it so that all the choices matter in a way where you need to have a specific combinations to progress that and this wouldn't really bother me in other games but some of the combinations of choices you need to do feel so abstract that I needed to use a guide to get like 5 out of the 10 endings.

TLDR I think the game is at its best being a weird abstract vibes game with really nice visuals, and is kind of hit or miss with everything else.