I see Lobotomy being mentioned and see that it's an anomaly management game, so naturally I put it on my list.
When I finally boot it up, it didn't take more than 30 mins to find issues and pet peeves. Like the subpar UI and scaling whether it's the sprites, the text or event box. Plus I'm greeted to a bland environment with doll designs that I didn't really appreciate personally. Although it's criminal how could you fumble an inspiration like the SCP foundation, I've played games with bad characters like neon white before so I didn't think of it a dealbreaker.
I play a few days and find a few questionable design decisions. You can retry workdays as much as you like but if you're soft-locked (due to agent death/gear loss etc..) you can only rollback to specific intervals every 5 or so days. What gives this feature its purpose is how grindy the experience is. Some missions require working for way longer past the daily goalpost due to progress resetting every day.
What compounds this grind even more is that specific anomalies require very specific combinations or measures to be worked on in relative safety. For example, I get an anomaly that requires itself to be off-screen to work successfully, how do they realistically expect players to shy their eyes from their newest anomaly for at-least the first few times they're worked on? How many times am I supposed to realistically retry this workday before giving up and looking up the required measure for it?
I strictly intended to not look up anything to not spoil the fun, but this was too much for my patience.
Was the management cycle even fun enough to bear with those faults? Not really. You can loosely group management into 3 phases/levels. Working is just sending agents to work on the anomalies to generate the prized power source, Countermeasures is when an anomaly escapes or an agent goes frenzy and damage control is needed, and ordeals are random events that trigger once you work on anomalies more than a set figure and is basically a base invasion that you need to fight off.
The management part is boring when things go as intended so you've got contrived perquisites and the invasions to keep you busy. Plus you can get extra screwed if you luck goes south when picking new anomalies.
So
- The cycle itself isn't that fun and revolves around a grind
- luck is a considerable factor to justify the rouge-lite elements
- Art direction is poor and in 10 hours I've heard like 4 tracks tops
-Writing fails to build intrigue and instead puts the effort on building bland uninteresting characters.
Honestly IDK who should be the audience for such a game. I don't want to say that it's made for crusty weebs who fixate on characters above all else but I'm dumbfounded to mention another type of audience. Didn't want to hold prejudice against a Korean studio but this further proves that Korea is a fake and gay country.
When I finally boot it up, it didn't take more than 30 mins to find issues and pet peeves. Like the subpar UI and scaling whether it's the sprites, the text or event box. Plus I'm greeted to a bland environment with doll designs that I didn't really appreciate personally. Although it's criminal how could you fumble an inspiration like the SCP foundation, I've played games with bad characters like neon white before so I didn't think of it a dealbreaker.
I play a few days and find a few questionable design decisions. You can retry workdays as much as you like but if you're soft-locked (due to agent death/gear loss etc..) you can only rollback to specific intervals every 5 or so days. What gives this feature its purpose is how grindy the experience is. Some missions require working for way longer past the daily goalpost due to progress resetting every day.
What compounds this grind even more is that specific anomalies require very specific combinations or measures to be worked on in relative safety. For example, I get an anomaly that requires itself to be off-screen to work successfully, how do they realistically expect players to shy their eyes from their newest anomaly for at-least the first few times they're worked on? How many times am I supposed to realistically retry this workday before giving up and looking up the required measure for it?
I strictly intended to not look up anything to not spoil the fun, but this was too much for my patience.
Was the management cycle even fun enough to bear with those faults? Not really. You can loosely group management into 3 phases/levels. Working is just sending agents to work on the anomalies to generate the prized power source, Countermeasures is when an anomaly escapes or an agent goes frenzy and damage control is needed, and ordeals are random events that trigger once you work on anomalies more than a set figure and is basically a base invasion that you need to fight off.
The management part is boring when things go as intended so you've got contrived perquisites and the invasions to keep you busy. Plus you can get extra screwed if you luck goes south when picking new anomalies.
So
- The cycle itself isn't that fun and revolves around a grind
- luck is a considerable factor to justify the rouge-lite elements
- Art direction is poor and in 10 hours I've heard like 4 tracks tops
-Writing fails to build intrigue and instead puts the effort on building bland uninteresting characters.
Honestly IDK who should be the audience for such a game. I don't want to say that it's made for crusty weebs who fixate on characters above all else but I'm dumbfounded to mention another type of audience. Didn't want to hold prejudice against a Korean studio but this further proves that Korea is a fake and gay country.