Science Girls

I was really enjoying Science Girls. It has a great turn based battle system; a good variety of skills the girls can upgrade to; and until the end was a well balanced game. I say until the end because the final boss fight was far and away vastly more difficult than anything you encounter before it which throws the difficulty curve into the shredder. You lose whoever your most powerful girl is right off the bat and it goes downhill from there. I didn’t finish the boss fight as I just became annoyed at it. I found myself getting steamrolled rather quickly and no strategy I was trying was working. The game just stacks the deck against you in a way the rest of the game didn’t and it felt unfair and sadistic. The story was decent as was the art. I played Science Girls on Linux. It never crashed on em and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. You can’t change the difficulty level after starting the game which is something I really felt was a terrible choice once the final boss fight showed it’s ugliness. Alt-Tab didn’t work. You can manually save whenever you want and there are 54 save slots. Game Engine: Ren’Py Graphics API: OpenGL Disk Space Used: 104 MB Save System: Manual GPU Usage: 0-44 % VRAM Usage: 631-652 MB CPU Usage: 1-3 % RAM Usage: 2.6 GB I am conflicted because up until the final boss fight I would have given this game a glowing review and a good score but I can’t bring myself to do so anymore. I spent 11 hours and 42 minutes on this game and paid $5.49 CAD for it. Outside of the final fight this game is worth it but as a whole it was an uneven annoying experience. My Score: 6/10 My System: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.1.2 | Manjaro 21.0.7 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.12.9-1-MANJARO

overall alright.

Jrpg на ренпае... Лет много назад полностью перевел эту игру на русский, и потом питонисту было лень вставлять текст, и щас я хз даже где все эти файлы Про происходящее в игре не буду, это бл**** довольно странно

I found it fun till the game just devoled to a big, dull maze with repetive, mindless encounters

Gdybym porzucił grę w połowie - recenzja pewnie byłaby na plus.. Niestety dobrnąłem do końca i cóż mogę powiedzieć.. Gra jest zepsuta przez beznadziejny sposób odnawiania energii. Przez minutę ciągle klikasz w umiejętność "obrona" każdą z postaci i dopiero możesz atakować (potwory giną na 1 hita jak masz lepsze umiejętności). A potem kolejna walka... to samo. Pół gry to tak naprawdę mordęga z odnawianiem many. Można też zjadać różne rodzaje jedzenia - ale odnawiają bardzo mało energii i jest ich bardzo mało.

Great game idea heavily impacted by very poor (IMO) execution and programming. First the good; I love the characters, and the story premise, while completely trope, is entertaining. Now for the load of bad; The game itself runs on the Steam Deck, but tries its best to fight it. Won't recognize the controller parts, so you have to either play it solely as a touchpad mouse game, or design your own controller layout. Saving the game automatically brings up the on-screen keyboard, and while exiting out of it will quite often soft-lock the game. No cloud saves. So can't play the same save on PC and Steam Deck. PC gameplay is what it was designed for, and runs well on practically any PC not in the scrapyard yet. But... Game is very short. Even though you can go up to lvl 40, many finish at around lvl 10 in four to five hours. I like to have a price versus gameplay ratio of $1 per hour of gameplay. Even at $5 the game is marginal when it comes to "bang for the buck". Every level up you only get one single point to distribute in eight or more attributes, making it ludicrously meaningless, except for the fact that... The higher any special ability, the more costly it is to cast, with greatly diminished, even detrimental returns. You can cast a level one ability ten times at full power, or five times with a half damage increase only five times, level three at double damage but only three times, ect. So basackwards it's truly jaw-droppingly idio...err...detrimental. Maze puzzle events that serve absolutely no other purpose than to pad out game completion time. Thankfully can be skipped with the H key with no detriment to achievement hunters. Basically, IMO, as much as I like the characters and story premise, all enjoyment ends there, so there's no way I'd ever, in good conscience, be able to recommend this game to friends or family, so I can't recommend it to anyone else either.

fun on the steamdeck.

terrible and unfinished.

Science Girls is an older game from 2014. It's a venerable 10 years old at the time of this review. It's a hybrid E-book and turn based lightweight tactical RPG (which makes it sound much better than it is... it does a terrible job of both). There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time. We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. My gaming rig is not a Kindle. Disregarding the garbage, badly written E-book components (the majority of this product) and reviewing the actual "game" components that remain will disappoint... it's very badly made and unpleasant to play. Let's go into why. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game component features somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 2D graphics, and it's hard to say if this is due to the age of the assets used, if it's a deliberate attempt for the game to look bad/retro on purpose, or if the assets are just, well, terrible looking. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game in 2024, such poor quality 2D graphics in the 3D era just aren't good enough, whether it's a deliberate design fault on behalf of the developer or they just couldn't manage to do any better, this is a compromise gamers shouldn't have to put up with. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the video game construction kit/toolset, Ren'Py/PyGame. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur/unskilled developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Science Girls didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is "Dough, Not Whole", for retreiving a box of donuts (happens early in the e-book), trivial to get, but less than 29 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, even the people who own this game weren't interested in it. The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Science Girls has the pathetically optimistic price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you real games (not E-books) like "X-Com: Enemy Unknown", "DOOM" or "Payday 2". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.