Mech combat action game. Decent flashy visual style and a good soundtrack, mechanically does just about everything you would want in a game of this style while offering some of the varied styles of missions you would see in something like Ace Combat, it just does it all badly with a rushed tropey unfocused nonsense story that drops entire characters at random and for some reason includes a horrible attempt to have Metal Gear Solid 3's boss fight against The Sorrow as one of the stages.

Gameplay has you piloting a variety of mechs where you can rotate and fly in any direction while boosting forward, back, sideways, and up and down while locking onto and engaging enemies with a small number of different weapons and a few defensive abilities. You can cycle through weapon that include different version of a rapid firing gun, different types of missiles that you can fire in a group or lock onto the current locked target, a longer ranged high damage rail gun, a very high damage slow to recharge particle gun more for larger enemy ships, and the defensive items include energy shields, decoys, and flares. A few of the units you can pilot have the ability to switch to a flight mode that I never found useful and some have melee weapons with better ones being able to chain attack more quickly, how useful the melee weapons are was based entirely on how the game was feeling at any given moment as an sword icon has to appear to use it (when it will appear is questionable), then you have to actually hit the enemy with it (even though you do a magical lunch towards them that you would normally be incapable of doing if they are moving at all you will probably miss), and then even when you do clearly hit them about half the time it just does no damage (as opposed to many other ranged weapon that can just decide not to do any damage closer to 1/4 of the time).

The controls are awful (both in the overly floaty movement and in terms of button placement) and unintuitive. The lock on system that you have to engage with constantly is one of the worst I've ever seen in a game like this, it has an on and off mode that when you turn it on will target what you are currently looking at and sometimes switches to other targets nearby when you shoot one down. When you play a game like this ideally you want options like swap target to aimed at, swap to nearest, next, or previous not on or off. Enemy "aces" are barely noticed and some entire missions and capital ship fights can be over in a minute before characters even finish talking. The most and only difficult battles, meaning cheap nonsense you have to exploit the game to win comes when the two most main characters you control fight two times during the game. Ground targets are a mess with your hit doing nothing a much higher percentage of the time than aerial targets, as ground targets are never really a threat the amount of missions that need you to shoot them just wastes times and adds to frustration. While there is a variety of units to pilot it isn't like planes for different roles in Ace Combat or mechs for different roles and with entirely different styles to them like in Armored Core, here it mostly just comes down to can the mech do more, less, or a lot less and once it gives you more it's not much fun to go back to less especially when ideally the game should be getting more exciting as it goes on with more and wider varieties of enemies (never really happens).

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1688818356848377856

The fact that the same people who made Sumire, which had a story that I quite adore, also wrote this mess is baffling, especially considering project nimbus comes AFTER sumire. Did they somehow regress in literary skill? Because this story is trope-filled, cringey (I hate using that word), and nonsensical from start to finsih. Every character felt like some anime cardboard replacable cutout with no development and no defining or unique characteristics, to the point where I couldn't even remember their names half the time and the names were on the screen!

Of course, nobody plays mecha games for combat, which is why a game like Daemon x Machina recieved praise despite the story being universally panned as horribly-written and the stuff of generic anime light novels, much like this story. Yet, while the combat here is fine -- it's certainly passable -- it does not stand out at all.

I got it on sale for a grand total of one dollar and fifty cents, so it's hard to really complain about many details when I've been treated to worse experience by games that had 1000x the budget, 100x the developers, and 10x the price on Steam. After all, at the end of the day, this thing costs less than a medium size McDonalds fries even with no discount, and I genuinely did get some enjoyment out of it. It's too bad that enjoyment was so sparse across the runtime of this game that looking back, I don't know if it was worth it in the end.

Overall Rating: 1.5/5 (Horrendous)