Planet Stronghold

This game is very interesting. It's an RPG/visual novel hybrid, like Loren or Cursed Lands. It's in the same universe as Planer Stronghold: Colonial Defense, but I think I liked PS more than PS:CD as the latter had cringey dialogues in my opinion. This game is very hard even on easy mode. I would recommend saving the game before each battle as if you lose, it's game over. I did enjoy it though and I believe that fans of similar games are going to have a lot of fun with this one.

Planet Stronghold is very ambitious in what it tries to do, and it has some clever ideas. Unfortunately it isn't executed terribly well. Characters are pretty shallow with not much development, for the most part. The worst offense is how imbalanced combat is. It seems that it is intended to use certain weapons in "aimed" mode for higher crits/accuracy, and others in "regular" for balance, and a tank character should do "burst" (no crit & miss more) once in a while to gain aggro. In practice it didn't work out too well for me, but I do really like the idea. Psionic skills are important to winning some battles and they miss way too much. There aren't enough levels to gain by the end in order to train up many skills, and some skills just aren't useful. I do like the idea of using skills outside of combat to solve problems. I like the worldbuilding, art, and music. I am leaving a positive review because I was able to overlook the weaker bits and appreciate the parts I did like. I enjoyed it enough to still want the sequel. My advice is to focus on the story and overlook the combat.

A game I didn't like as a kid, but it fed into my recent carving of light SciFi games - as in not that open SciFi, more closed off and manageable with more emphasis on RPG elements and party combat rather than spacecraft flight and whatnot - by only happening on one planet with a set of contained areas. And kid me was right: image having a rough draft for a story (it's been polished and has no spelling mistakes, but hasn't been lifted from idea format with due diligence and has a barebones story) and not only making it out to be a "full fledged", but a commercial game and a visual novel and those thrives on great stories. XD Barely any companion is truly interesting (those that are make it worth playing), the combat can be speeded up with the skip button - the animations are barely there and not interesting at all and the sound effects are serviceable, but basic - and should be interesting and flashy enough NOT to make happy I can skip it, but it sure isn't, the artwork is well done, but with very few character facial expressions and the style is older and far less polished than Winter Wolves's later game - that's the right assessment for the whole game: serviceable, but not polished at all and very barebones everywhere it counts - and the music mostly won't play unless you're in a few scripted areas. You have classes to pick from, but all that does is give you haedstart in some skills, later the game is very generous with EXP and repeatable encounters and you can buff up characters a lot and make them multitask easily. On the easiest difficulty (I'm going with that because combat is boring anyway, though you can switch the difficulty as you wish at any time) very few quests are timed and those that are, are very generous, so you can heal nearly after every battle and only fail, if you're going out of your way to do so and you only advance plot if you want to after a while, so you can maximize the affection all characters have for you with ease. All of which I greatly appreciate for a very laid back and chill experience. The only thing I don't like are gender locked romances, not because that doesn't make sense, it's more believable for your companions to have preferences, but because I'd need to replay this train wreck to see where that leads to with the person I'm most interested in seeing develop (a blind psychic soldier more suited to being a medic). Storywise a certain someone in a position of power has been exterminating alien races since before your character arrived and that's absolutely something that's been used a 1000 times over, but what really hurts is having it all done in a very lazy way - it's all talked about, but in ways that gloss over any detail, at least have a short battle cutscene with someone being killed for minimal believability - and it's presented in the most generic way imaginable. Not a strong suit where the medium demands one. Another wrong move by PS: you can only romance one character, but the game NEVER tells you that before your character just flatly refuses another character's advances just because - later games like the Amazon Princess at least had the decency to warn you and even made dialog options out of who the player was trying to romance at the same time and who would react how. Bottom line: Winter Wolves have some fantastic games, but this one is near the bottom of the barrel, avoid at all costs, unless you're purchasing the game to learn what NOT to do with a visual novel.

Planet CRAP

It's a pretty simplistic RPG with a heavier than average focus on relationships. Which is not a bad thing, it does what it does well, just without a whole lot of added frills. A good game for people who liked Mass Effect or Dragon Age, but don't want to dedicate that much time into those sort of games right now for whatever reason.

Me encanta el juego! y el 2 es muy bueno tambien, ojala saquen mas secuelas!

Not sure why this doesn't get talked about more. I haven't played tons but it's really fun and cute so far. I like that it seems to be letting me go for a romance with my (female) roommate while playing Lisa, that's so sweet! I don't really know anyone else who plays it, which is a shame. I think this would be fun to play with my friends and discuss it together.

Giving this one a thumbs up, but do know you're getting into a pretty rough game. It would be one year before we got something on the level of Loren, but Planet Stronghold was a great foundation for what was to come and has a lot of unique things going for it. You just have to get to grips with the maximal UI, busy angular art, and the rather rough difficulty due to some choices with how armor works (don't be afraid to start in easy), along with the odd pacing (the first four chapters are basically the training wheels before the game fully opens). It does pick up from there, ends up having some fun characters once their hangouts open up, a surprisingly interesting conflict and route split, and there's satisfaction to be had once you know what you're doing and can play the enemies properly to control the flow of combat. I'm enjoying this a good bit, but you do need to have some experience with clunkier RPGs to vibe with it I feel.