Recent reviews by crusnik

Enjoyment: 65/100
Disclaimer: I have not watched the Love Live anime nor do I know any of the characters.

Positives:
+Animations and graphics are beautiful.
+4k is supported.
+Graphics look decently anti-aliased and clean.
+Game runs well in 4k on my GTX 1070.
+Gameplay is fun, works like a decent Slay the Spire clone with beautiful 3d characters and environments.

Negatives:
- Character design is boring, there's no spice, no fanservice, NO BOOBA :(
- Intro has a boring 30min VN scene. Waste of time. Terrible introduction to the game. Skip it!
- There's not enough chances to remove cards from deck.
- Game doesn't let you see eventual upgrade when choosing between non-upgraded card rewards, leaving you uninformed.
- Most dialogue is not voice acted, even though voice acting is the big appeal to Love Live fans.
- The writing is bad. Nothing was funny or interesting. Luckily, the VN scenes end quick, except for the intro scene.
- Lots of wordplays and rhyming, puns that only work due to pronunciation except they all fall flat because there's no voice acting.
- Characters constantly ending sentences with -zura etc is cringe and annoying as ♥♥♥♥. It's not quirky but idiotic. Gal*Gun's Kurona does it correctly with her -death/-desu pun.

Overall I liked the graphics and gameplay, but don't feel compelled to play more. Gameplay is fun, but it doesn't really grab me to the point I want to continue and unlock everything, so i guess it fails as a rogue-lite. I wish there was more fanservice, more cleavage & sex appeal. I wasn't aware the Love Live franchise was this prudish.

Enjoyment: 1/10
Really bad gameplay.
Only 45% of players cleared Chapter 1 (an hour into the game).
Only 25% cleared Chapter 2. (maybe 2 hours further in?)
That's how bad it is.
Entirely devoid of fun or tactics. Full of boredom, stupidity and everything feels bad.
Watching paint dry is more entertaining.
Disappointing even when it comes to fanservice.
Characters are chibi, so the only fanservice is from CG, not ingame models.
Even though I liked Noire's character design, watching her chibi character isn't very enticing.

Enjoyment 3/10
I like ecchi 2D monster girls, but I feel this game is fundamentally flawed.
It feels messy and not well thought through.
I hoped for a deck builder rogue-lite -Slay the Spire with waifus - but this game is very far from that and just does not play very well.

Enjoyment: 0/10 (Zero)
Unplayable for me.
- Horrible controller keybinds that are not changeable ingame,
- Attack animations on many enemies are far too tight on Normal difficulty. By the time it takes to move my thumb from the attack button (X on xbox controller) to dodge (A on xbox controller) the enemies have already hit. I don't think they changed timings on Easy either, just less damage.
- I rebound dodge through Steam's Input API so it is now on LB, but so is every other interaction that was on A before. For example: Confirm buttons for menus.
- I'm stuck on a very dark labyrinth level early on, after train hack. It is too dark, enemies are often hard to make out or distinguish from team members, their animations are unreadable.
- Enemies constantly snipe with projectiles from offscreen with no tell.
- There is no healing once your ally has run out of energy. If you get hit once in the first few rooms after quicksave, you might as well let the enemy kill you. You'll need to perfect every room because you'll never know how long until next quicksave and you can't heal at all.

Many might say skill issue, you might be right. Others have cleared the game after all. I tried a bit on Easy and I could get through this - probably even on Normal if I gave it a few more attempts. But I refuse. This is not fun. Even if I get through that level, the gameplay is fundamentally unfun and bad.
First game i ever felt so frustrated with enemy attack patterns and level design.

Enjoyment 6/10
Cute little prequel to the Nekopara series.
Doesn't overstay it's welcome like so many other Visual Novels that drag on and on.
The game is upscaling from a native 720p resolution and looks rather blurry on a 4k display.

Enjoyment 4/10

Positives
+ 2D art is decent
+ There's a bunch of mechanics (cards, changeable equipment, items, relics) which seem to work somewhat ok with each other

Negatives
- Art style is depressing/melancholic, which sucks - I want fun, not depression
- There's not enough fanservice
- Only 2 cards get drawn each new turn, which means you run out of cards quickly, card draw cards can't do enough to help circling the deck, this defeats the purpose of a deck builder game!
- Performance issues! While gameplay and effects render fine at 60fps why are some VN scenes dropping FPS?? It's only showing a single, static 2D image! No effects! Why is my GTX 1070 at 100% and dropping fps below 30???
- Some VN portions are annoyingly long with little information / character building, just wasting players time. This forced me to eventually skip the story.
- The cards in your Hand are shown as text on the left side of the screen from top to bottom. Why? Slay the Spire-like cards shown at the bottom of the screen looks way better and is more intuitive.
- The 'recycle a single card per turn' mechanic feels kinda bad, gets forgotten quickly because of that.
- Buffs/Debuffs feel bad to use. Slay the Spire did it far better.
- Shiranui boss fight is retarded, instructions unclear, things don't work the way the text implies
-Can't easily tell which cards are rare, which is important because some cards for example draw other cards except rares.

Enjoyment: 4/10

Far too RNG-heavy, far too little control of your own deck.
Enemies hit too hard, shields are too weak. Buffs/Debuffs are too weak/borderline useless.
The way to win is to fight as little as possible and evade stronger enemies.
Bad game design!
This is supposed to be a card battler, but the game punishes you for trying to battle with cards.
This is supposed to be a deck builder, but the game doesn't let you build a proper deck, it's mostly RNG which cards you end up with.

Enjoyment: 5/10

Positives:
+Fanservice, big boobies.
+Core gameplay can be fun.

Negatives:
-No nipples, boobs not big enough, not enough fanservice.
-20 mins of Visual Novel for every 2mins of gameplay. Most missions truly end in less than 2 mins, you'll spend longer in menus than playing.
-Story is bad, unfun and cringe.
-Gameplay difficulty is unbalanced, endgame bosses require you to fail/repeat until you figure out where you are safe from their attacks, it is not difficult but rather unfair, grindy and unfun, just force those fights on easy/normal to get them over with.
-Graphics are substandart, though improved over Estival Versus. I mostly liked the saturated color palette, though they overdid it in one stage where everything turned crimson red once you moved into a part of the map.
-Characters boobs look weirdly floaty, character models have static shadows drawn on the model which looks bad.

Inferior to Valkyria Chronicles 1 in every way.

This game is about 80% Story and 20% gameplay.
The Story is heavily character focused. All characters, especially the main characters are horrible. They're not likeable, they don't make sense in how they act in their role as soldiers or commanders, they are cringe AF, badly written, insults to the players intellect. I've suffered through the entire main story, continuously wishing for them all to die.

English localization is on the level of a bad fanfic, often entirely made up and getting character interactions wrong. But make no mistake, as someone that speaks Japanese, characters were horrible in the original language already. The english localization makes the horrible story even worse, but at the end of the day it was already so bad that it hardly matters. The localizers working on this need to be fired and banned from ever working as localizers again, though.

Gameplay sucks too. There's no tactics involved here. Just Load, Save, Reload, Reload, Reload, Reload, Reload, Save, Reload, Reload, Reload,....
It's not that different from VC1, except for the new Grenadier class.
VC1 gameplay wasn't very good either, I found it to be more enjoyable though, probably because the maps were better.

Graphics are bad but the gameplay is surprisingly fun.