What's here is basically a shell of a game. There's some solid potential that's completely squandered. Graphics are beautiful, enemy designs are neat and strange, the fighting mechanics are decent... but it's all thrown out the window because of how everything else comes together, and that's a shame. How these guys create Vanillaware-quality graphics and a distinctive art style with decent combat and then waste it with short and mindless levels easily completed in sub-3 hours with no effort only that long because it's padded and you might get distracted by side missions hoping for SOMETHING to do is just terrible. How did the team behind Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds, which had flaws but was ultimately a fantastic beat-em up with Treasure-style grouping dudes in the corner and smashing em all at once for a shower of coins stumble so badly?
Levels are basically walking into a screen, the computer moving your character to the center of the "arena" area, and things spawn. Sometimes they're right on top of you, sometimes they're invisible and slowly float down after like 10 seconds. Kill everything and the wall boundaries go away, and you move on. It's all flat, and you're usually running for another 5-10 seconds before either another enemy group spawns or you go into a new background. You'll go through this between 0-10 times (yes, one mission is running to a spot, fighting nothing) and the mission abruptly ends. You'll have to remember which levels were actually "fighting levels" and which were 0-1 encounters too, because the mission select screen just points you at the last level you've played and gives no other context. You must go home between levels, breaking the pace, too.
You level up your character through experience, but mostly what matters is just getting new equipment. You can buy pretty terrible equipment in the store with from 0-5 open slots for skills and gems, both of which poor versions of can be found in missions. If you do well in a level with your combos you'll be given a shower of money and seemingly more likely to get weapon drops, the latter which are far and away better than anything you'll buy in the store and cap very quickly... I got an Overly Godly weapon a few levels in and that was pretty much it. The only reason to collect more was because skills can't be unlocked from weapons once slotted, but by the end I had about 10 of these same class weapons. Similarly, the only reason to collect money is a way to quickly get your other characters up to speed; they'll be level 1 if you try a different character but your money and gems/skills carry over, so you can buy them a better-than-starting-weapon in the store. Throw them into a mid-game mission and hit stuff well enough and you might get the Overly Godly weapon.
Movement is strange. You can double tap to dash, but there's a massive window for when you press the second time. For example, you can walk right, pull your hand of the remote, and press it again after around a second or two and you'll run. It kinda reminds me of the TMNT Turtles In Time "hold right to run". When running you can press down or defend to roll. Pressing up jumps, but that's also how you go into some rooms from neutral, so you always jump when trying to go into rooms like the jewelry store from the subway... this isn't mechanically jacked but visually weird, and feels like it's just something that needs to be polished.
Combat is fairly simple, with the first few levels just being single button. There's a neutral, forward, down, and down-forward attack as well as jump with similar inputs, plus a throw. They're all somewhat unique, and some will create combos when used back to back, but they don't really matter at all for the most part. A few levels in you get access to supers, which you can level up through challenges, but again... they don't really matter. They can blow through bosses, and they give you a little more variety to your basic attack since a 0-level super can be used as much as you want, but there's no point focusing on leveling them up because the game is over incredibly quick anyway and you never need more than a level 1.
Hurtboxes can get really goofy at boss time, combined with very unclear position-based hitboxes on those bosses. It's like sometimes a grounded boss will be hit by this attack at point blank, and others they won't because they're in a specific animation frame. It's not terribly frustrating because the bosses are so easy anyway, just guard and roll through their attacks. And that's pretty much how the game goes... dodge roll through things, attack a lot, and you win. There's no challenge and no real reason to worry too much about the combat system.
Story... well, whatever. Super short, fairly inane, but I preferred the writing to something like Jitsu Squad.
For anyone who wants anything like a challenge you should just play immediately on Hard. Damage is much higher. It gets even higher for Very Hard. There's no penalty for continuing, though, so... if you already know how to play beat em ups, just throw yourself into one of these difficulties. You might need to grind for levels here and there but it's very doable. Unfortunately I didn't notice a huge uptick in enemies between difficulty levels, but that doesn't matter much anyway, since being on a single plane you just hit a lot of stuff all at once regardless.
Edit: They just released an update. Two new difficulty modes, but if you knew what you were doing before, this doesn't change much. Just go buy Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds instead. It did pretty much everything better, even if this one looks a little nicer.
