Resonance Solstice

i like cute girls & trains!!!!!

Lovely game that sadly isnt for me. Its a train conductor sim, where you have to go back and fourth between city to buy and sell stuffs and make profit. There's also a real time battle system that uses cards as skills, thats where the gacha part of the experiece come in, as you need to pull for character, but no weapon banner thou thank god. For starters the game is pretty generous giving you around 100 pulls ish and an standard ssr selector, but everything is spread out between 35 days, so it wont feel generous. Not to mention the constant lack of stamina, they will send you more time to time, but in my case it wasnt enough.

Get through the cluster of tutorials at the beginning and it's a very comfy experience. The developers clearly invested lots of life in the game's overall mechanics and stylization, more than enough to separate itself from the emerging gacha slop that is constantly being pushed out today. Resonance Solstice's primary appeal are its trains and the logistics behind it. Progression is greatly tied to 'coin'. The means and strategy to make coin are plentiful and complex, to the point it feels rather addicting. There's always something to invest coin into, thus always a desire to get more. Investing resources feels scarce and moving the train has a nice level of decision making. Regarding the gacha aspect: players can use their premium currency on recruiting crew members which are used for the combat component of the game: an exclusively PvE real-time card battler. While initially I was not impressed with the gameplay and the first roster, as I recieved more characters through its gacha, its mechanics grew to be more satisfying and felt rewarding. So far the game's premium currency gain feels quite generous, and I have recieved all the characters I want despite hitting pity multiple times. There is no such thing as weapon banners here. THE GOOD: addicting game-loop, lots of strategy, enjoyable soundtracks, very unique aesthetic, many things to do especially early game, and doesn't feel like its fishing for my wallet. One-of-a-kind logistics gacha game that can be played with varying levels of investment. THE BAD: onboarding experience is aggressive, UI is very confusing to the point it can hide some important features from unknowing players. FINAL REMARKS: A hidden gem that I'm glad I tried. Was indifferent about trains until now: they're really cool!

As a free to play game, it's surprisingly engaging. Of course, as with all such games, don't expect a free ride as you will have to spend money to get anywhere, but the combination of RPG combat and an economic trading simulator means that by the time you've exhausted all of your Clarity (required for most battles) or all your Stamina (required to craft better trading materials and drive the train), the day is half over and you'll spend your time on the other half of the gameplay. Just don't do them in that order if you don't have to; Trains get blocked by semi-random encounters so you want to have Clarity on-hand while using up your Stamina. I didn't bother trying to go super-deep on micromanagement, but the game seems up to that. It will likely very much save you time, real money, and game currencies to obsess over the logistics of your trading. Money is surprisingly straightforward. There is no premium currency, just coins that can be earned from completing quests and challenges or bought in a daily pack of 1m coins for $1 USD. At that porice, it's actually fair, funding the game without milking you if you screwed up a lot early on like I did. The cons are mostly invalid now; the game had weird crashes at first but the server seems stable now. The one that is a valid criticism is that this game was originally made for tablets and it shows. A Steam Deck or other "Gamerdeck"-style handheld PC with a touch screen (personally I use a Legion Go S) works surprisingly well as "a tablet", but on a desktop PC the game's GUI is a bit awkward. However, be aware that the game's graphics are very janky if you look closely at them. I regularly groan at some of the mistakes made in aligning the 3D models of the train cars with each other. Honestly, this game's strength is actually the depth of the lore. It's nothing special, but far better than the average quality of most microtransaction-based gatcha games. I won't spoil anything, but you will encounter many characters that seem sinister but are just humanly-flawed rather than evil, and a couple characters who seem trustworthy but are not. As someone who lost my entire social life to someone else's actions, it does live up to the moniker of "a story about rebuilding connections", addressing a lot of fears people have today about everything from government corruption and corporate greed to childhood trauma and technological authoritarianism without turning it into a simple "corporations and wealth are inherently evil". The combat system is also extremely engaging; You are you, a conductor employed by BCRL (Bonfire City Rail League) to ensure your train passes safely between cities in a world where reality-hacking accidentally broke reality. You do not fight. Instead, your escort squads do the fighting, and you "assist" using cards that give attacks, buffs, etc. depending on the card's exact mechanics. This means you oversee the battlefield but never actually engage directly in combat. Despite this, your character does have a "chibi sprite" and you can even give them an outfit with various clothing items. Essentially, this game seems to use low-end mobile game graphics and design to emulate the appealing factors of games which are great but require an expensive PC to run. I recommend it if you're looking for something that can occupy time during commutes, or if you are into any of the numerous genres it blends. It is not a AAA game, of course, you don't get that quality for free, but it is something that would require at least a Gamecube/PS2/OG Xbox if not an Xbox 360/PS3/Wii if it was on a console. The amount of work put into the game is actually on par with those systems as far as I can tell, so it is an interesting-looking game for less than $35 a month (probably a little more here in Canada). 7/10, here's hoping this game doesn't shut down after a month like far too many MMO attempts have because it's a really cool storyline!

The onboarding experience is just awful. I really wanted to get in to the game because the characters, world, art style, and overall aesthetic/vibes are really cool... but whew. The opening was pure frustration for me. #1) It uses the typical modern mobile game style of tutorial where it highlights a section of the screen and won't let you interact with anything else because obviously you're too dumb to do anything that's not completely idiot proofed. Except that leads to... #2) I can't access the damn settings menu. Why isn't it even available on the main menu before I start playing? I know I'm weird for this, but checking out all the settings is the first thing I do with every new game and if I had been able to with this one, it would have saved me 90% of my frustrations. i needed to access it because... #3) The game opened as a window too big for my screen. I couldn't see the bottom of it, including dialogue text and a lot of UI elements. And... #4) The music is 2x louder than the dialogue voice acting. I couldn't hear anything they were saying over it, and the music was extremely annoying to boot. A very short loop of something that absolutely does not fit my tastes, so it was driving me insane. Since I couldn't hear the voice acting anyway, I just muted the game and started reading in silence. #5) You can click to progress dialogue, but it has a minimum amount of time each line must display before it actually registers your click and progresses it. Since I can read pretty quick, I was left spam clicking on almost every line just for it to ignore me. So I went back to auto progress mode, but it does that lovely thing where it some times leaves super short lines on the screen for way too long and progresses through super long lines the instant they finish typing out (also, no option to make text appear instantly). Also also, it resizes the text as it gets typed out for long lines to make it fit in to the dialogue box instead of just having the size pre-set, which causes all the words to constantly shuffle around. I ended up playing for 3 hours before calling it quits. I was still locked in that mobile game tutorial crap where I couldn't ever click around to look for the settings menu. #6) And finally, the writing just isn't good... like the opening is that you wake up with amnesia but like only for current ongoing events so that your friend can exposition dump on you. It never improved during my 3 hours and like 2hr 45min of that was pure dialogue, sooooo.... I'll try to come back to this later because it really looks like it has potential to be something I'd like, but for right now it's been a purely bad starting experience.

its alright, mediocre gacha story, fun in concept and its innovative at least, its a cozy and chill game and i do like it but not enough to continue playing long-term. the dailies didnt seem doable within a reasonable time frame and it was surprisingly grindy. the cast of characters were charismatic and thats the best thing the game had going for it. there is soul put into the game from what i can tell though, and i think that makes it deserve an updoot

This game is not pc friendly with the UI. not User friendly at all, straight to tutorial without any options to adjust settings. No setting adjustments at the load screen or within the game. Due to the forceful tutorial in the way stopping you from pressing anything else other than the quest line. It's annoying for the most part. but good for a gacha MOBILE game.