Chrono Gear: Warden of Time

Owo senpai

I wanted to love this game. But the core offense is the game is tedious, repetitive, and doesn't know what it wants to be. The combat is fairly satisfying, and the humor is passible, but the map design is just absolutely all over the place. The tutorial of the game is fairly straight forward. it shows you how the game intends for you to move about. Kronii is the main playable character, and she has a slew of offensive mobility options that allows you to navigate around very quickly. The way the combat feels is the game is intended for speedrunners to just go nuts on it, and this is a very positive for me. The main problem with Combat is it's pointless for 99% of the game. You use it to kill Bosses, but that's it. There's almost never a reason to take on random enemies mid-stage. Very quickly, I was able to figure out ways I could abuse the drill attacks to bounce off walls and make it over segments of the maps that I don't think I was actually intended to do, and half the time I bypassed over half the stage's obstacles. However this also quickly got old, as a lot of the stages started to get puzzles set up so you can't just be cheeky about what you do, and that's where the game really throws it in your face that the developers didn't fully have a design theory in mind. Each stage feels like it's slapped together based on what just sounded fun at the time. The end result is a bunch of stages that, thematically, are frustrating for different reasons. The start of the game isn't too bad, as you go through the Time world to reclaim your lost land. The stages are fairly straight forward, you can bypass puzzles if you want, or you can take your time to actually explore, and obtain the collectable CDs or Crystal Thread currency. At the end of each stage, you pick up a Golden Cog, which is the central theme to the story. The currency is used to purchase either more border picture art, or more music, but neither are critical to the game. In the Time world, it's structured more like a traditional hack and slash type of game, where you have a boss at the end. This is the core theme I was actually expecting from the game. The problem is, this is not what the game is. The game is actually an exploration based collectathon with occasional combat thrown in. As you run around stabbing random foes, you pick up music notes, that I still have no idea what they actually do. It became more obvious that the stages became less and less coherent when you move onto other worlds. In the Desert world, the entire stage is a giant maze of spinning the world upside down, when you try to turn off lights so you can exit the door. There are no bosses to be found here (not including the story forced one), just sprawling ancient Egyptian pyramid tombs, and long drawn out hallways that just were not fun to navigate. In the Clown/Circus world, it's like it was built by someone who played entirely too much Sonic the Hedgehog. Stages were super long, stretched out, and required you to run through literal rings of energy to pick up speed, while you ran around warp spots trying to get to the end. The Nature zone felt like it was designed by someone who played entirely too much Donkey Kong and Sonic. In the Trees section, you spent a lot of time in the Donkey Kong sections, with growing vines, damaging thorn walls, and the occasional acorn collection (this was dedicated to just one entire stage). In the second half, you're busy running around water segments, where they had the map design of Sonic, but the underground sections (You know the maps that literally no one enjoys, because they are horrible?). The difference here is you can swim, so it feels like they lifted the swordfish mount from Donkey Kong, while injecting it to the same underwater sections. In these areas, you're busy toggling pillars to transform literal giant blocks of the arena into passable terrain so you can move forward. There's also the Space/Moon Castle segment that feels more like something you'd see from either Mega Man or Castlevania, as you're busy punching rotating mirrors to push light from one side of the map to another. The only time I actually felt like I was having fun was the final stage of the Nature map, where mutliple of the characters you saved actually came in to help you navigate a stage with their powers, and helped you fight the boss by creating wind currents or water segment so you can elevate up since the boss was vastly more mobile then you. From there I tried to move onto the Chaos realm, got sucked into the Void realm, and sampled the Human realm before I just uninstalled the game. The story is also on the nonsensical side. You're a time warden, who's golden cog was shattered, so you're off to collect it from all the different zones. During this time, the game makes multiple references to how Kronii is this super cocky/arrogant/egotstical character who actually feels like she's perfect (and more then once talks about how she's so vain, she can get lost looking at her own reflection), and there's more then one villain who tries to actually force a kiss out of her, or they make multiple weird comments on how they're just straight up romantically interested in her, while Kronii stands there mentally telling herself not to fall for it. It was at this point that I realized that there are literally zero men in this entire game, and that's when I had to look up to find out that this entire game is literally just a VTuber advertisement. If I wasn't over the 2 hour limit, I honestly would have refunded it. This game had a lot of okay ideas, but it really needed someone who understood map design, map thematic cohesion, and someone to weed out a lot of the weird story parts, as the majority of the game is basically "All the girls are attracted to the Perfect MC" and it's some power of friendship thing that doesn't really work all that much.