Recent reviews by Wired Rat

This game is actually so good that just thinking about it gets me viscerally angry. There will not be one like it ever after, certainly not from the same team. Desperation begets ingenuity.

Do you see how we've changed? You used to be my flame.

Girls' Frontline is originally a character collection game, which, as time goes on, eschews most of its gacha influences to fully focus on its Kojima-esque spy thriller narrative. Its literary influences include Goethe's Faust, greek myth, just about all of 20th century hard SF, and a kind of elevation of general science into a mythology of its own. Its gameplay is a charmingly janky pixel-hunting mess programmed in spaghetti code, which is essentially designed to be broken by the players over time. It's a game which has clearly never wanted to be gacha at all, and only did so to attract an audience of hopeless schizoid nerds, and trick them into reading a good story against their will.

Project Neural Cloud is a spin-off presenting a side-story which is from the beginning doomed to be meaningless, informs the larger setting of Girls' Frontline/Bakery Girl in absolutely no way, and focuses its gameplay on player convenience, which results in any wall being insurmountable due to reduced player agency. Worst of all, it fully partakes in some of the most predatory gacha whalehunting I have witnessed in the industry.

This game is not Girls' Frontline, but fortunately it's not quite Neural Cloud either. Its writing is bad at times, but at least I don't feel like my time is being wasted on slop the way it is in Neural Cloud. Its gacha mechanics are a pretty direct port from PNC and mihoyo games at a glance (a very bad sign), but there isn't the kind of powercreep that would require you to own absolutely every new character. While pay-to-win pvp modes are present, the differences aren't that big for a f2p player, and you don't really lose anything for avoiding this content. The XCOM gameplay gets pretty complicated, and comes preloaded with an extra level of complexity (secondary stats) that the game is not yet making use of, on release. The CPU does very stupid things at times, but that feels like a cost of having a lot of things it could do.

You might like it if you like cute girls, guns, and depressing siberian landscapes featuring not much, in juxtaposition with irradiated crumbling commie blocks and masonic transhumanist cyborgs. Take it or leave it. Your mileage may vary. I dislike how the game makes the setting look generally more rubbery, plastic, and pastel-colorful (and thus makes it look more like everything else on the market in tyool 2025), but that's just me.
There is potential for the writing to kick into high gear, but it's certainly going to take a year or a few from this review on.

This is, by wide margin, the best fighting game on the market right now.

There are some stupid things in it, mostly the result of the stage being smaller and characters being bigger than is common in airdashers, which makes unga buttons a bit stronger than anime usually has them - especially since they are used sparingly, or to put it better, not everyone is as mechanically retarded as your average Blazblue character.

If you want an introduction into fg's of sorts, though, I can recommend nothing else. It does really good at teaching you, and remains fun to play after you actually figure it out. Rev2 is out, it's time for you all to finally pick it up. Here's Bai, now buy.