I bought this back when this was released in 2016, played about a hour of it, was a bit underwhelmed, put it in the backlog. Decided to come back 10 years later and play through the darn thing. Yup, still pretty underwhelming.
In all fairness I have to say the game [i]isn't[/i] an unmitigated disaster overall - I've played [i]so[/i] much worse games - but it just tries too hard to be much more than it actually is, and all the PC port jank doesn't help. It's just not a game that I can recommend anyone to play for fun, or even to play as a historical footnote.
Overall, the game is plagued by the developers coming up with neat ideas and then failing to make sure that the ideas work as a cohesive whole, and sometimes not if the ideas work individually. Example one: ooh, a combat system based on a tactical grid! ...which isn't all that tactical in practice. Combine that with the short length of the game, lack of enemy variety and the fact that combat takes a sizable chunk of the game runtime, it's a recipe for disaster. Example two: Reputation/loyalty/competence scores - which would matter a lot more if it was part of a huge multi-factional narrative (like Mass Effect), but now it's "do you side with this person or that one? are you professional or a rogue? can you do things or not?" It ultimately ends up mattering very little. (I know the devs cited Mass Effect as influence, but that's a game series with 100+-hour runtime and hundreds of characters and side plots. A 3 hour game with 5 main characters with a few branching paths should probably not try to act bigger than it actually is.) Example three: the game has RPG character progression, but the stuff hardly matters when the game whizzes past you. You can do powerups. Whee.
Writing is frustrating. The overall plot is fairly formulaic, yet there's all this bedazzling backstory and lore that is hinted at various points. Competent writers do show-don't-tell to intrigue the audience and make them want to learn more. Here, however, the audience goes "I know how this story will go, all of these random details are just muddling things".
Now, I appreciate the fact that the developers took a mobile game and at least mildly tried to think of how to do the controls in a distinct way on PC. But I'm afraid it falls flat in practice. A lot of the game is based on quick-time events, and for those, you can do mobile-style slidey puzzles with a mouse or - [i]or![/i] - you can do The Typing of the Dead. The frustrating thing is, the controls are [i]janky.[/i] I have no idea if I kept messing up some of the QTEs or if the input was buggy, I had to switch to mouse control to get through some parts. Third person "exploration" sections have mouse control that you sort of have to trick to center it, otherwise things get wonky. Also, typing activation sounds like a neat idea at first but gets really really repetitive.
I think the game was sold as "kinda like Mass Effect, but with girl power and gimmick controls". Eeeeehhh, if you squint a bit, the description might fit. However: If you want Mass Effect, you know where to find it. If you want girl power games, there's [i]so[/i] many better games nowadays, and this game just [i]doesn't[/i] deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as some of the best examples. If you want games with gimmick controls, again, there's a zillion cool indie games on Steam.
