Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery

Longer Review I really, really wanted to like this game. I bought it on day 1, expecting it to resemble 'shooty' squad-level turn-based tactics/RPGs like Silent Storm or maybe Troubleshooter. Those games emphasize flexibility and solutions to foreseeable tactical problems. Through smart analysis, character customization, sound tactics and luck, you can have lots of fun beating maps. Not this game. This game will throw curveball after curveball at you. The experience is less like a tactics game than a puzzle game with tactical elements (sometimes). 30% of the levels are stealth levels In those levels you will dodge enemy patrols and searchlights. Unfortunately, the levels rob you of most of your tactical options. Only one character has a useful stealth skill, which he unlocks fairly late. Most of your turns will be spent waiting & working out enemy patrol routes... which frequently change mid-map. Patrols will suddenly appear. Enemies will suddenly become suspicious (for no gameplay reason) & change their routes. A random tank will show up. None of the above changes are foreshadowed. This means that you will not be able to plan properly unless you restart levels or savescum. Later stealth levels add more and more systems to juggle to the point where I just wasn't having any fun. Gimmicks This game loves gimmicks. Every 2 levels or so, you're introduced to a new item or mechanic which you'll be expected to master to complete that level. And then... the mechanic doesn't recur, or the item is so niche (looking at you, hole-in-the-ice maker) that it feels pointless. And then one level near the end of the game will use it again and frustrate you. This also applies to bosses. Many of the bosses are (a) gimmick bosses, or (b) damage-sponges. Sometimes you'll get both in one multi-part level, and there's an infamously difficult one at the end of Chapter 2. I get the want to surprise players and (I guess?) simulate being like a guerrilla faced with impossible odds, but the bosses felt especially unfun to me. Reinforcements! There are really neat maps in the game, which have you exploiting enemy behavior to doom them or lead them into death-traps. These are few and far between. Most often, you will be served a map with many enemies which seems doable, but by turn 6 the game deploys those sudden reinforcements, and by turn 8 there are more reinforcements, and then by turn 10 the map becomes one big chaotic mess with lots of half-dead enemies running around and no real way to deal with them except for RNG-fu. Again, the maps start doable, but game-breaking reinforcements will ruin your fun. The last few maps of Chapter 4, for example, love suddenly spawning multiple high-level units in the middle of your formations... constantly. Red queen's race You know how in games like XCOM2 you can sometimes get a really strong soldier and have him solo maps and have it be really fun? This game lacks those moments. All the upgrades you get are rote and matched by the enemy, to the point that they're meaningless. Towards the end, even basic enemies will have ridiculous buffs (healing! ability-locking! guaranteed avoids!) that dealing with them singly becomes a chore, let alone a whole platoon of them. Seriously, before upgrades, a grenade will kill the most basic enemy & injure the one a step above that... after all upgrades, a grenade will kill the most basic enemy & injure the one a step above that. This goes back to the reinforcements problem. You will have to deal with platoons of enemies, and specialist troops, and damage-sponge bosses. You will have at most 6 (8 with proper ability use) people in your squad, with a very limited amount of actions-per-turn, no reliable counterattack mechanic (except with 1 character), and with very little in the way of tide-turning abilities. Towards the end I was relying on RNG and funky placement options because with the sheer number of troops, it was just very tedious to find that smart move. Which is a shame, since the art assets are gorgeous. The little unit sprites are really expressive and they've programmed all sorts of cute gestures. Jefuty is fine as a main character. There are cute bonding scenes. The story is alright. If you like anime war stories, you'll like this one, although it relies very heavily on an invincible antagonist towards the end. Also the dolls show up for two levels, tops. I've played the standard campaign to completion (Chapter 5) & I know there's another chapter but... this game had no catharsis for me, no point where it all suddenly turned fun. Too bad.

Reverse Collapse is hands down the best turn based strategy RPG I have played full stop. No game in the genre even comes close to the level of care for complexity and story narrative. The game is hard, but I never experienced a losing situation that was not entirely preventable had I thought more carefully about my moves. Items feel like they are scarce within missions, yet never to the point that you feel discouraged to use them. Early on this usually means biting the bullet in case you need that item down the road, but eventually you will have many items at your disposal, allowing you to use other items as a substitute in many situations. All of the playable characters are unique in their own way, and the character availability changes from map to map. While you aren't afforded the same amount of customization as a modern Fire emblem, you are still given variety in how you can use each character. As mentioned previously, the story is leagues ahead of most other games. While it could be argued that the story gets in the way of the gameplay and vice versa, I personally found that the balance between the two was good overall. There is one notable exception close to the end of the game, however the game gives a fair warning about the 1.5-2 hour lore dump before the start of the last chapter. One other critique is that the story can sometimes be confusing if you haven't play some of MICA's other games. While the keyword glossary exists to mitigate this, there is still some large context that is missing if you want to fully understand the overarching lore. If you don't care about the Reverse collapse's implication for the other titles, then this is a non issue. To tie it all up, this game is amazing. It takes about 80-100 hours long to complete the main story. I would recommend it to almost everyone.

这个游戏的优点：所有战棋里道具最有用的一集，确实做到了战术多样化，前期巧用道具降低难度后期养成结束直接开杀，成长曲线和难度曲线不错。 这个游戏的缺点，潜行关实在是恶心，我每次都是一路杀过去，杀到第二章关底蹦出来个坦克真是绷不住了，关键这个坦克还没血条，全网搜怎么打破坦克的力场也搜不到。摁着脑袋让你潜行看似做了杀进去的选项其实等于没做。 本来是好评，被潜行关恶心10个小时之后回来改成差评了，如果讨厌被按着脑袋教你怎么玩游戏的人慎入！

I find it really difficult to leave a negative review here, because I actually like the game very much. The story, the gameplay, the art and animation, everything is very well done and entertaining. The combat feels good and everytime I got a new character, a new ability or item to play with, I could not wait for the next mission to try out all the new possibilities. The music in this game, especially for this genre, is just simply amazing and I got instantly hooked into the fights because of it. Even visually I think the game scores. Yes it has simple graphics and a chibi art style but it looks good, fits well and the animations during combat look clean. I would truly be enjoying it, were it not for a single simple thing: The stealth missions. They completely ruin the entire game for me. They are aweful and just a pain to get through. And please don’t get me wrong: I genuinely enjoy difficult games. I don’t mind taking things slow and really thinking through my next move, along with all its consequences. Learning new things, and pushing every game mechanic to its absolute limit. In return, however, I expect the game to respect my time, yet every time I play one of the stealth missions, I get the distinct feeling that the game isn’t even trying to be challenging, but is merely attempting to keep me stuck in the mission for as long as possible. If I constantly have to reload save files, just to see how certain situations play out, then I am already dissatisfied with the underlying mechanics of those missions. But the sheer frequency with which I’ve had to tackle "difficult" sections in this manner, because otherwise they felt like sheer, endless torture, is simply insane. Could this be due to a lack of skill on my part? Yes, of course. I am definitely no master of this genre. And considering how highly this game is regarded despite its flaws, I can certainly see that the problem might lie more with me. Nevertheless, I stand by my points: I feel the stealth sections could have been handled better. It really is a shame because I really love the combat missions in this. I like the mechanics and I do love the story and franchise. But I am not willing to endure another one of those stealth missions.

This is less of a TRPG and more of a puzzle game because of how narrowly designed the missions are. Chapter 1 was well made, with a good mix of stealth, combat, and VN sequences for storytelling. Unfortunately the stealth sequences became really frustrating in Chapter 2 and killed my interest in the game. One mission involved crawling through a minefield with minimal vision & detection tools, and another involved studying overlapping enemy patrols while hiding from spotlights and snipers. There's too many tools and skills provided to demand such a strict playstyle for each mission... The game seems intended to be savescummed or played with a guide. The main complaint from the non-protest negative reviews for this game are the stealth missions but no one explains why they're bad. The problem with them is how vision and detection is work in this game: each character, including allies, enemies, and electronic tools (like turrets or radar), have a radius where they can detect anything in stealth (yellow) and another radius where they can detect normal enemies but not stealth (green). There's another layer on top of this for dense terrain or buildings, meaning you might be stealthed inside the yellow range but can't be detected because you're inside of a building. The issue is this works both for allies and enemies... I had to follow a YouTube guide step-by-step to complete Mission 2-6 because your units can only see one square around them while in dense forests, meanwhile four enemies were patrolling nearby (and moving every turn). If that character deployed any tools and that tool was detected, they'd run over and detect her too, effectively ending the mission. To help dealing with the hordes of enemies coming at you, there's RPG elements including character skill trees, weapon and tool upgrades, and tool crafting, but they all seem to scale with the difficulty of the game. Upgrading your grenades just keeps their damage on-par with enemy health increases, and enemies rapidly increase in all stats as the game progresses. Most missions you're outnumbered and outgunned so your RPG upgrades are only satisfying when replaying old missions or grinding simulations. Skill upgrades are heavily gated by levels so there's only an illusion of customization choices for the few units you get to control. Normally I don't write a review before finishing a game but I'm dropping this on Hell's Paradise, Mission 2-7, which involves your separated crew of three fighting against about 50 enemies, followed immediately by a boss fight with an invincibility mechanic and one-shot skills. You're usually outgunned and outnumbered, and the VN story sequences involve as much suffering as the gameplay. Judging by reviews and howlongtobeat, this game is anywhere from 60-100 hours long for the good ending, and I can't see myself playing this anymore for even the bad ending. Not recommended because it's extremely frustrating and has too much trial and error compared to other games in the genre.

Tired of steamrolling alien invasion with your supersoldiers in XCOM? Play this game. Tired of your bad habit of never using consumables? Play this game. Want to fight against overwhelming odds and feel like a tactical genius when you get S-rank in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 4 vs 80 battle? Again, play this game. +Likable squad members with pretty distinct roles. Not everyone can be your war goddess with mosin-nagant, but everyone is essential. +Satisfying progression. Skills, passives, weapong upgrades, equipment, consumables. From the very first mission and until the very end you grow stronger and your options expand. On the other side even the most basic enemy Ivan the Soldier does some workout between missions and refuses to become irrelevant and non-threatening. +Good variety of enemies, all having an elite version that can easily punish you if you are not careful. +Again - consumables. Never have I played the game where placing trip mines, remote control bombs, tear-gas, smoke, flashbangs and EMPs is so satisfying. Watching an elite squad of invisible special forces choke to death because they cant leave your minefield. Damage, crowd control, turrets, barricades, decoys - you have everything you need. +Straightforward story. Even if you haven't played Girls Frontline and doesn't know the lore you can understand what is going on. You know what you have to do - make out of Caucasus Mountains alive. But how will you do it? And who survive in the end? +Visual novel part of the game has some great CGs and backgrounds. And Chibi models are EXTREMELY expressive. +Mission variety. From normal extermination and boss fights to stealth, base defences, guerilla warfare, puzzles, almost every map offers some fresh idea or gimmick. +Secrets! Secret collectibles, secret skips, secret options to make the level 10x easier. +/- Stealth. Not gonna lie, it really depends on the map. Some of it is fun and challenging, some of it requires you to savescum every turn for an hour to achieve "the intended" way if you want to get your S-rank. And until chapter 4 you usually dont have the means to go guns blazing instead. Thank god we have Mendo and his silencing strike. - Now I am frustrated that Girls Frontline 2 doesn't use any of Reverse Collapse ideas in map and enemy design.

第一眼，褒贬不一。翻下评论，给好评的人均100小时以上，我估计也要奔着100小时去了，真的量大管饱。一开始还怕过得太快，结果发现前三章只是intro，第四章才是开始。打完发现还有二周目，干二周目去了。作为玩过前作的人只能说这作质量远超预期了，转头去试了下追放，感觉商业化对游戏性还是荼毒不浅。然后觉得面包房这个质量拿个褒贬不一实在不值得，给挂个好评。