The vibes are so on point. I absolutely loved this story! Bought it on Steam, and liked it so much after beating it, I bought it again for a DRM-free copy. The atmosphere is straight up fantastic, the characters are fun, and the story was great to follow. This isn't a game where you'll make a ton of branching choices -- this is an experience with a story to tell.
If you let the (pretty excellent) voice acted lines play, this game'll take you 6-7 hours to see the story through, DLC not included. I really enjoyed my time with the main story, pecking away at this visual novel over a course of weeks, savoring it like I would good 'regular' novel. I'm definitely looking forward to starting the DLC next, and I liked the soundtrack enough that I actually *just* purchased a few minutes before writing this review -- juuust having completed the main game tonight. That aside, I'm really appreciating that the main characters are all college aged in this (kinda rare in this genre, in my experience), and their troubles and concerns feel well thought out.
As someone who grew up on the original build engine games, this is probably my favorite build engine game. It rocks all the way up to the end, and I'm pretty sure I'll play it again eventually to get more of the secret areas I missed the first time through.
This is seriously waaaaaay better of a release than I could possibly have imagined! The game runs and looks *great* on modern screens.
Runs great, includes all sorts of 'extras' I certainly don't remember from my ancient PSOne release -- and it looks better than ever on modern screens! This sort of this is *absolutely* worth supporting, even if you aren't buying the Dino Crisis games for nostalgia reasons.
Bought the game with DLC on Microsoft store *after* beating the vanilla campaign, and still had enough love for the game after to re-buy a DRM-free 'complete' edition on GoG! I liked it *that* much. This game manages to successfully combine elements of base building, tower defense, and good old fashioned hack-n-slash combat in a way that's just plain excellent. I really didn't expect to like this game as much as I did.
One of the few games that's actually pulled me in enough to actually want to beat it! The story is fun, the style is stick, and the brutally animated combat feels *great* once you get into the flow. Combat starts out feeling a bit clunky, but once you unlock a few critical upgrades like air dodging, plus you realize dodging works just as well to keep you alive as the parry move does. Pro-tip: if you want to kill enemies via parrying, keep in mind the purple 'parry attack' flash doesn't mean "press parry button now" -- the flash just means you should get for an attack you can either dodge, or parry. If you parry, you need to watch the enemy animation, and hit parry just before the animation hit. That throws a lot of people off, judging by other reviews I've seen. And keep in mind that attacks can be canceled into a parry or dodge.
Cute art, likeable characters, interesting plot situation, and the voice acting was a nice touch. Be aware the English translation is (I assume) machine translated. It's not so bad that it gets in the way, but sometimes a gender comes out wrong, or a person's name gets translated (Li Xiu becomes 'Deer Park' when people are talking about here in dialog.) It'd be nice if the story went a little bit past the plot being (more-or-less) resolved and the confession, but it was worth the $3 asking price, IMO.
