VideoGame Feels shallow and unfinished
(I'm copypasting here the review that I wrote on Steam.)
I loved Zeboyd's previous short comedic retro RPGs Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World, so after reading CSH's description was convinced to buy it, to support the devs and their future projects. In the end though I was happy to have paid it half price, because, while nice, it wasn't nearly as good as I thought and hoped.
The first impressions are very good with the very nice graphics, BGMs, retro cutscenes and innovative battle system, three wholly different planets and several sidequests. However after a while the game loses steam and at about 3/4 of the story I felt I was going through the motions. The battle system feels needlessly complicated rather than strategic, is poorly explained and the various ailments are mostly irrelevant; I largely stuck to my strategy of buffing everyone, healing and using the most powerful elemental attacks and had mostly no problems until the end of the game (played at Heroine difficulty). Not to mention there still are bugs that sometimes freeze the game or make it so that battles never end.
The writing is nothing special and consists mostly of sci-fi cliches; the best part is of course the humour so I hoped for a mostly comedic game, but no, this is a serious and dramatic story... And in the end I didn't really care for it, since all characters are so shallow and unoriginal that you never feel anything for them. The last dungeon was supposed to be the epic climax, but was so poorly done and easy that it almost retroactlvely ruined the game for me.
Obviously something happened during the development and so Zeboyd rushed CSH's second half: I would have excused that, since they're a small indie team, but not after three years of development. BODVII and CSTW were made in a few months and were very clever, funny and fun - sometimes, less is more.
Rating: 6/10.
VideoGame Play the game, forget the story
Its funny, I'm somewhat writing this review as a rebuttal to the other review, but I also largely agree with it.
So let's get this out of the way, the plot has the potential to be moderately interesting and though provoking, but the characters are flat and do not develop, and the villains aren't any better. The game is mostly just one sci fi set piece after another that is kind of fun but without any meaning or substance. But I still like this game and I'm glad I bought it. Why?
Because the gameplay is really good. Yes its really easy on Heroine and below. Yes its silly the game has 4 different difficulty levels and 3 of them are derp easy where you can screw around and come on top anyway.
But the 4th difficulty setting, Super Spy is one of the most legitimately challenging, fun and strategic jrpgs i've ever played. And there's 0 grinding or farming because enemies spawns are fixed, there's no seeking out random battles till very late into the game, and aside from learning new abilities, levels dont drastically change a character, if you lose a fight the solution is to change your strategy, not to grind.
The battle system is similar to the others games this guy made like Cthulhu Saves the world and Breath Of Death, but there is more depth to it, characters have wider arrays of abilities, and you'll be using more abilities in a battle and there are a lot of distinct characters you will use and all of them are useful in their own way.
So if you're looking a for cheap, strategically engaging, challenging game and don't care about the cruddy story, absolutely buy this game, especially when it's on sale since it can get dirt cheap, but its easily worth paying for at full price as well. That and the ost is pretty great. Though be warned Super Spy is really hard and Heroine and below is really easy, so only buy this game if you want either a really hard or really easy game.