Like its predecessor Crystar, Crymachina suffers from spotty combat, though it is a big step up from it: Good ideas and decent execution are dragged down by bloated visual effects that impair enemy move legibility; flashiness is prioritized over visual clarity and control over your character which, in a game in which you can easily get one-shotted by many attacks in its later stages, will often see you dying to bullshit. This is compounded by an unintuitive equipment and stat system that is not properly explained and some not-so-well though aspects of design (e.g, one of the characters immediately closes in for a big attack after a perfect evasion, so perfectly evading an attack that persists after its first hit will see you being automatically dropped in the second volley, usually resulting in death.) Still, the moment-to-moment combat, while not the best, is fairly enjoyable.

And once again, like its predecessor, Crymachina shines in its story; It's hard to speak about it without spoiling things, but Crymachina delivers an interesting SF story that intelligently utilizes its main concept (Robots trying to restore humanity) to instead turn social moral codes on their head and speak of the often arbitrary and oppresive ways in which we elaborate cultural and social dogmas. That said, the game would've definitely benefitted from being longer; at just about 15 hours it barely just manages to deliver its main thesis, and does this at the cost of sidelining the background lore and side characters (Trinity!). I would've liked the game to spend more time on these two aspects as I feel would've made what the game is trying to do all that much stronger, but at the same time this is the kind of game that is made on a shoestring budget with what I assume a not very long development process so I won't hold it against it too much.

Robot yuri saikou