Absolutely outstanding turn-based tactical combat game. Fantastic 2D artwork although the 3D character models could be improved. I hesitate to call it an RPG as it's completely linear and you seem to be replaying simulations of the scenarios in the game. The concept of enemies dropping skills when defeated as if they were equipment is unusual, as is crafting skills from other skills. As well as characters you can create a roster of robots and tamed beasts level up and have their own set of skills.

XCOM Style game made by a small korean studio. In terms of art and coding its really well done especially when considering the no doubt limited resources the studio has at its disposal. The gameplay is generally entertaining if padded and the soundtrack is good if generic.

The Main problem lies in the story and pacing of gameplay. The game is really long, which could be a selling point to some but after 16 hours it feels like nothing has actually happened or been developed, with kinda samey missions all throughout.

The story isnt awful for a first attempt by a studio and the translation isnt great, though this is understandable if they dont have enough resources for multiple localizations. So far you might have picked up on a slightly patronizing apologetic tone to this review but rest assured Im less forgiving in the main issue of the actual plot of the game.

This is a very wordy game, in a sort of pseudo VN style along the lines of persona. This again, is fine in itself (I enjoy some of those types of games) but the execution is pretty fudged. In XCOM we are fighting against fictional aliens. We learn more about their motivations but they are at the end of the day a clear enemy without any reservations in killing, abducting and subjecting its victims to nightmarish bodyhorror. This game however goes for a fictional but broadly "real world setting". Sure its a not a realistic setting and the countries are fictional and all that but we are broadly dealing with humans and human problems. This again, is fine in itself but it has to be done right as the adding greyness to the setting requires more justification or thought which frequently this game seems to be unwilling or unable to do.

The problem is that this is an almost cyberpunk serious setting but we are not really given many reasons why our actions are justified. The bad guys are criminals, yes (and some are even cultists) but other than "this fictional state has been purposefully made weak and disarmed by other countries (which oh boy lets not even think about which real world parallel was trying to be established here) its never really adressed in my time playing why there is such an apocalyptic level of crime and lawlessness. In a more competent Deus Ex type cyberpunk game this might make us suspect we are perhaps working for an ineffective or corrupt government that maybe is partly responsible but no, the good guys are just good.

This is later slightly remedied but very little humanity is given to these goons especially in the early hours, which added to the fact we are given rewards for how many of these we mow down and that the games' idea of difficulty is spawning wave after wave of these Death Wish 3 extras you get desensitized to killing them like they are horde of Zerg from Starcraft.

At the same time for being a supposedly "disarmed" nation the police is pretty bloody well equipped and trained, much more than the thugs they are up against, as well as imposing what seem to be authoritarian measures (no travelling between districts) which again made me thought there would be a "are we the baddies?" moment but no (At the very leasy not even a suggestion in the 17 hours I played

I can already picture someone responding with "What the hell were you expecting your character to organize rehabilitation programs and joining the salvation army to feed the homeless?" No! Obviously not, thats exactly the point that they would have saved themselves so much trouble if they had just made the enemies aliens or monsters or demons or whatever so as not to have to justify it all in the story of the game. Its like all those call of duty campaigns where you bomb infinitely worse equipped people with drones that blow them up without any possibility for fighting back.

Other than that, if youre looking for more of a review of a product than a critique, its 20 euro and well worth that price if you enjoy Xcom style combat, low level grindy missions, silly shonen stories and you like them being long AF cause you have no money and way too much time. Its definitely got its charm

Troubleshooter is not a perfect game. There are problems I could list with the story as it stands, or small issues in gameplay that largely live in the later game of the DLCs.
But those nitpicks pale in comparison to the passion and ambition dripping from every inch of it. A small studio decides to spend the better part of a decade on a project, one which in essence is a prologue for a somehow even larger planned story despite being well over 100 hours long, and it works.
Getting to the credits and seeing that the game had TWO programmers was an extreme shock. Seeing that the devs have a 400 page thread on Steam to take ideas and feedback they've been maintaining for 6 years was too. The fact that such a small team created such a deep and intricate TRPG is downright inspirational.
Every character is unique and fun to use. Every character has a ridiculous amount of customization. Many maps provide a challenge even on the normal difficulty. It's a massive pile of ideas and systems built up over years that should collapse under its own weight, but never does.

This hurts to write about.

Troubleshooters as a game is something I liked a lot. I played for close to 80 hours and loved making builds, watching ideas come together, all the different characters and playstyles. The map design is way too big and there's way too much chasing down singular enemies when the mission is clearly over, but in general, actively playing the game is a good time. It's got some of the most fun RPG stats to mess with in the genre since FFT.

But sadly, this is all mired by the absolutely terrible translation this game is. The dialogue is stiff, there's no character voice, everyone speaks like stiff broken robots. This game reads like minimally edited machine translation. This could be ignorable, but there's a LOT of story cutscenes, rules text, everything.

At the 80 hour mark, with the dripfeed of mechanics and characters finally slowing, the mission design is starting to get repetitive, and the story keeps introducing more characters and stakes that are hard to really appreciate because the translation is just THAT terrible. It's a pity, because there's some amount of charm and clear effort in what you can gleam through, but it's not enough.

I might come back to it one day, but not now. I think if this game had some more varied mission design and a better translation this would have been one of my alltime favorite games ever, but that's sadly not the world we live in. To spoonism I go.

Troubleshooter is quite a video game, it's surprising how much is in it given the small Korean development team. So much artwork (a new CG for every little thing, I'm honestly shocked how much there is), cutscenes (that should have had voice acting in some important ones), and thought clearly went into this one....

And there in lies the problem, it's all too much at times.
There are so many complicated systems in play that makes strategizing tricky
The maps are absolutely huge which makes navigating them a pain in the ass, especially since every map is Fog of War (with a generous line of sight but not enough) . You could trim their size by 1/3rd with no issues. The Fog of War also hides the existence of enemies, which is really silly when one mission is "Don't let the animals escape!" when you can't see where they could be on the massive map.
There are way too many enemies on each map, two of them practically hitting 100. This gets compounded with some enemies possessing the skill that prevents them from taking more than half their health in damage, as well as the skill that makes them block every attack if they are below 25% health to really drag them out. This is made worse with 90% of missions being "Take out every enemy" which makes me beg for more mission variety.
Systems like paying rent/employees and character motivation feel solely there to justify the use of money. You'll also never have any issues with this since the game constantly throws money at you that I often gave them bonuses without even thinking about it. They're just pointless busywork after each mission.
The turn system is mostly functional and a neat idea with using time to account for actions, and losing time if you are attacked by enemies, but if they gang up on a unit they will never get a turn until they die which creates some hilarious stalemate situations that thank heaven there's an abandon mission button because you'd be there for hours watching it play out otherwise.
Crafting Masteries isn't explained how it works all that much but you can figure it out by the end, but given there's no way for you to just obtain easy masteries to use as ingredients if you ran out you'd have to grind, and you can't make undiscovered Masteries, you have to find them on the field. It wants you to grind but I only did that for Irene in the final mission and that was just recompleting an earlier mission.
Crafting items and machines is hardly explained at all, you're given a workbench and some other menus and have fun! Which I rarely used outside upgrading some gear with whatever I had and crafting one Drone. He's a good boy, but the complicated crafty systems aren't explained at all.
Stats stats stats stats stats. Everything has a stat of incredibly minor skill associated with it. Take for example character arcana, an element clearly lifted from Persona: Everyone has one, as nonsensical as some may be (Anne is Hermit? She fits better as Star, while Sion has The World but is very clearly The Sun with his endless optimism) but it doesn't contribute anything and just feels like fluff. There are a handful of stats like this but the Arcana was just the one off the top of my head. Meanwhile Weapons and Armor have plenty of little attributes that make it confusing if a new one is truly an upgrade or not that I wind up not wanting to change my gear at all unless they died too easily last mission or something.

Before I get into spoilers I do want to offer the game some praises. Its combat is fun and what grasps of the systems you do get over time definitely add to the experience. Even though your party can range from one man killing machine Albus to slow and not as useful Anne you can still find ways for everyone to have a purpose in battle. The story takes a while to get invested in but it's a long game so you eventually will anyways and appreciate everyone. My favorites were probably Sion for his ray of sunshine while showing an underlying understanding of the world around him, Irene for being a Hero of Justice and without question the funnest party member, and Heixing who's all around a really cool guy with how he handles his life. The conspiracies that are introduced are really fun too. If you like XCOM and Persona this game is absolutely worth giving a shot.

(Spoiler Time)
And lastly, the main problem that dominates every aspect of the game, it's way too wordy. Item descriptions are incredibly bloated with words and stats, some Masteries, notably the Sets, have more text than a YuGiOh card that are just too long to read. The Story itself is affected by this, the devs should have found places to cut the fat and even take out a few filler missions. It's just so wordy that at points I found myself clicking away, acknowledging the ambition of their story but wishing they could have cut to the chase faster in spots. There''s a lot of smaller gang drama that should have just been cut early on. Another notable example of its tendency to word dump is that you can tell without fail when someone is going to join you because you will get their whole life's story then and there (excluding Anne oddly enough) , which while it works in a few instances (Irene at least has her chapter revolve around her to excuse it, and is told through NPCs you meet along the way rather than flashback text walls) in most it's just me wishing this could have been a short glimpse into it and the rest put in some side content if you want to know more about them. By the time of Leton joining I had enough of seeing the same attack on Alley over and over. That goes with a lot of elements too, like the former Troubleshooter Team Silverlining. If they had just put more of these elements in side content that the player would be rewarded for clearing the story would have been better paced, had its cake, and ate it too.

While the narrative is a "it gets good like 20 hours in" and boy does it, it still has some fumblings in spots. An odd note in the narrative is the cult Spoonists (it is a stupid name but the game treats it with utmost seriousness which I can respect, run by the even sillier named Sharky) were the main focus of the plot, but the final boss of this Season (that's what the game calls it) was Foo of the White Tiger Gang. He could have used a bit more build up to his status of Final Boss especially since he's been fought like 5 times already. Rather than build him up they establish that he's going to be a scapegoat of the government used to bolster the mayor's votes in re-election which is good for me the player to know but for the characters the showdown with Foo should have been built up with some sense of finality to it (while not the end of everything, should have felt special rather than just another day on the job). This is made weaker with the final mission not even having unique music. Just a shitload of annoying snipers with the new Follow-Up Fire skill that gets annoying to deal with. The game has a chapter before it that's supposed to be a teaching element but it doesn't introduce the main annoyance so you just go into it thinking it's the same as any other chapter with snipers and will quickly get ganged up on by reinforcement snipers.
There are other missions like this too, with needless difficulty. I remember Angry Tiger being really irritating for some reason, and Kylie's recruitment mission has only two enemies but one is an absolute tank the two characters are not equipped to deal with that ultimately came down to luck to win.

That's enough bashing the game though. There are plenty of praises to give it. I really do enjoy where the story is headed, with the conspiracy and Carter throwing a wrench into all of it by taking the Spoonists in as his own. Like I mentioned before, the characters are all enjoyable in their own right and I don't think there was any I disliked. Some bits seemed contrived sure like how much Anne cares about Luna despite only hanging out twice but part of that is who Anne is so it gets a pass. She's also 15 but acts more like she's 9 or 10 but she's still cute. The standout characters of Sion, Irene, and Heixing make it all worth it. Irene's recruitment mission, Way Up High, is also a highlight as an incredibly cozy day off of Albus and Sion meeting people Irene protects and getting her to warm up to your group, all while Somewhere Over the Rainbow plays. Sure there just had to be a mission at the end, but that comfy Irene recruitment was a great moment.
I am very interested in these conspiracies and where they go, I just hope that the devs and learn a few things from this, simplify a few systems and trim off some fat, and they could really knock it out of the park next time with this game as a remarkable foundation!

It's a 3.75 /5 game but there's so much effort on display from such a small team that I figure it deserves the 4 rather than 3.5. Apologies for complaining about the wordy game with a wordy review. But like I said, this is still worth checking out, especially if you like XCOM and Persona.