Very cool single player mobile card game with a surprising amount of depth and some really fun risk/reward mechanics. The game seems to be heavily inspired by the Thief series, with a similar aesthetic and time period, and familiar thief tools like a variety of arrows, potions, the trusty blackjack, etc. Much more interesting, however, is the way these stealth mechanics are translated into a card game.

The game is played on a 3x3 card grid in which you, the player, must move around your thief card, dealing with obstacles until eventually reaching the end of the deck, pilfering the chest card and making a swift exit. The two main mechanics that provide the majority of interesting interplay are managing your stealth points, which decrease after dispatching enemies and are restored after gathering sneak cards, and dealing with light, which are provided by torches and make sneaking past obstacles much more difficult. This rather simple conflict is made more interesting via a pretty solid variety of enemies, obstacles, and thieving tools at your disposal. The tools are unlocked and upgraded by performing specific tasks, some of which actually do force you to play much more differently than usual, which I always really appreciate especially in card games, where it can be really easy to just meta-deck your way through 90% of the time.

The game has a variety of risk-reward mechanics which allows the player to naturally take a gradient of risky actions for a much larger score. Perhaps my favorite example of this is the path difficulty mechanic. Every so often, certain cards will randomly gain a path difficulty modifier, which will basically multiply the numbers of every subsequent card in the current path, i.e. the current 3x3 card grid. Bigger numbers mean tougher enemies, but it also means larger stealth restoration and more jewels. Managing the multiplier to maximize reward and minimize loss becomes a supremely interesting game of careful forward planning and clever tool use to craft the perfect path through, which can feel genuinely satisfying.

As fun as the game is, there's unfortunately not that much content. There's only like three areas and after completing the second area I honestly felt like I "got" the game. This honestly isn't the worst thing, as the design pretty much feels about as tight and focused as it could be for a game like this.

Overall though, it’s a well-designed, smallish card game perfect for your 10-15 minute breaks when you just want to feel like a smart little thief for a bit. Pretty good!

Currently imagining a world in which all mobile games were like this - simple, elegant fun prioritizing the player’s enjoyment instead of their wallets. Games that seek to provide a new, unique experience to players on the mobile platform instead of cynically trying to deceive them with skinner box monetization tricks. Take me back to the dawn of smartphones, when touch screens were seen as a visionary input innovation brimming with countless game design possibilities and not just a place to put an ugly, unresponsive virtual gamepad to the utter displeasure of handheld gamers everywhere. Why are there so few mobile games where moving around actually feels good and has a genuine tactileness to it, rather than just being a constant annoying battle with your fat thumbs for visibility? Was gosh-darn Fruit Ninja really the apex of mobile games that actually feel good to play?

...Mobile game diatribes aside, the central idea of this mobile game, Ordia, is pretty simple - you take a ball-like character that has to be flicked around like an Angry Bird to move but put it into an upwards scaling precision platformer like Celeste. The result is a short, polished 30+ level experience that feels absolutely smooth and buttery to the touch, thanks in no small part to the LocoRoco-esque minimalist art style and similarly bouncy, responsive animations. The level design in particular feels meticulously crafted. Every tunnel, peg, and wall bounce lands your little green dude pretty much exactly where it needs to go a lot of the time, owing probably to several level iterations and playtesting to ensure a smooth and guided user experience free of any major annoyances, much like an iphone’s UX philosophy. The game mechanics themselves are introduced gradually and deliberately, and build upon each other in fun ways. I wasn’t kidding with the Celeste comparison. There are even multiple mechanics that I swear are directly lifted from the dang thing such as: collectibles that only count after you land, midair nodes that give you an extra dash (or flick, rather) and are often chained together, differently colored evil clones of the protagonist that follow your movements to add time pressure, the list goes on. And while the game can be a bit frustrating at times, especially in the bonus levels, the wonderfully soothing electronic soundtrack and ambient Pikmin-esque nature-inspired sound design keeps the head relatively cool and the overall vibes chill.

I do wish there was a bit more to it though. Precision platformers like Mario, Celeste, and Meatboy thrive due to the sheer amount of ideas the developers cram into their games. 30 or so levels is just not quite enough time to layer and develop all of its mechanics to the same extent. And while the game certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome, it also doesn’t give itself enough room to reach its full potential, in my opinion. That being said, this little game was certainly a nice surprise that wanted nothing more than to provide a fun, pleasant experience, and I honestly wish more mobile games followed this design philosophy.

Chinese porn game. It's fine. Gameplay is just simplified QTE punch-out. Not much going on there, really. Story's marginally funny. Thankfully it leans more towards slapstick rather than male vindictiveness, as I assumed it would from the description. You play as incel Ryu, fighting off against five fighting game girl parodies (just five, it's pretty short). Throughout the fights, their clothes get torn off, as you would expect. There's a couple of CG sex scenes each; full mandarin voice acting too, which is nice. Art's actually pretty good. It's probably the best thing about the game honestly, and I'd love to see more of it, perhaps in an actual video game next time.

Alright, I've been playing for a couple days since launch. Here are my initial thoughts:

tldr; pretty standard gacha game with pretty graphics and standard predatory monetization.

Nikke is developed by Shift Up, who made Destiny Child, a flashy lottery machine of a gacha game with a Persona 5-esque aesthetic. They are also currently developing Stellar Blade, formerly known as Project Eve, which if you don't remember is the game whose trailer everyone made fun of for having an absurdly sexualized main character in a serious dystopian setting. This game has a very similar setting to that game, by which I mean it's basically their own take on NieR:Automata, in which the earth is ruined and taken over by robots and humans send sexy android women to fight them. I like to imagine the developers played Nier and was like, "what if this game had more 2B booty and less philosophy?"

The art and character designs, which is what most people care about, are admittedly cool looking. The sexy military outfits remind me of Azur Lane, but instead of the nautical theme, they're going for a tacticool aesthetic, kind of like Girls' Frontline. However, compared to Girls' Frontline, the characters here are thiccer (by which I mean more voluptuous) and more overtly sexualized. There's also (currently) not nearly as many lolis as Azur lane, so that's a plus. Ideally we would have no lolis, but you know how the audience for these types of games are. The Live2d art is honestly amazing, it has the same high level of quality as Destiny Child. Unlike Destiny Child though, they actually bothered to put some gameplay in here, so props to the dev team for making something like an actual video game this time around.

The gameplay itself pretty simple: you just tap and hold to aim and shoot, and release to reload and take cover. It's very similar to an arcade shooter and very simple to operate. Apparently it was designed to be playable with one hand. Not gonna make the obvious joke here, but I really do like the idea of one-handed gameplay ever since I encountered it in Earthbound. However, it's not nearly as handy here since, like most gacha games, you can just full auto most levels if your team's strong enough, though manually playing's admittedly fairly fun due to the flashy effects. Also, I like that they use full-sized character illustrations for the combat instead of chibis. A lot of other gacha games use deformed chibi sprites for combat which I always thought was dumb, so good for them for not following that trend.

The story is ok. They're going for some darker emotional beats, and balancing with dumb anime humor. There's some ideas I'd say they ripped straight from Nier, such as virus corruption and memory erasure, and I'm fully expecting a similar turn in which you find out the machines are actually more intelligent than you thought. The writers managed to put a little bit of interesting intrigue in here though, so I'll see how it turns out. The full voice acting also definitely helps. There are a couple of fun side characters, like the S&M couple - always like to see positive portrayals of BDSM. Not really sure how I feel about the flamboyantly gay comic relief character though. I'm not familiar enough with Korean media to know how homosexuality is usually portrayed but I assume it's not great.

Alright, so now for the gacha bullshit. Rates are ok, it's 4% for an SSR. Hilariously enough, there's currently 9 Rs, 9 SRs, and a whopping 44 SSRs, so they really want you to roll for that waifu. The gems you can earn in game feel a little tight currently, similar to the Fire Emblem Heroes launch in my experience, where you're constantly scrounging around for gems so you can pull that sweet, sweet gacha. But maybe that's just how all these games feel on launch, idk.

Speaking of money, the whale fishing is absolutely hilarious in this game. So if you didn't know, "whales" are players with highly disposable income who spend an absurd amount of money on gacha games. I'm exaggerating but the idea is they basically make up like 1% of the playerbase but 90% of the revenue, so developers are always looking to milk them for all they're worth. If you're a normal person, you should probably only buy the $5 30-day daily gem supply. It's the same as the $5 monthly blessing in Genshin Impact, in that it's by far the most bang for your buck microtransaction in the whole game, nothing else even comes close.

If you're a whale though, your options include: a $20 seasonal battle pass, a $20 campaign pass that gives gems for completing story levels, limited time packages (available for 2 weeks after first playing) that range from $1 to $100 dollars, various daily, weekly, and monthly packages that range from $1 to $100, gem packages (with first time double bonuses of course) that range from $5 to $80, and various level up specials of increasing cost that last 2 hours after reaching certain commander levels. I know this level of predatory monetization is basically standard for these types of games at this point, but it still surprises me when a game like this is so brazen with it. I know people always say this but please, for god's sake, if you have a gambling problem, do NOT play gacha games, because holy shit this is awful.

Anyway, I'm a sick freak, so I'll keep playing for a bit. In general, the production values are certainly high, but people might be put off by the aggressive monetization, so we'll see how long the game lasts.

___

Update: Alright, as of the first Christmas update (Dec 2022), I've stopped playing this game. The microtransaction bullshit was just getting way too much, man. This might actually be the worst I've seen it in a gacha game (besides Destiny Child lol). Also, the game kept crashing for me, even on Bluestacks which was weird. I thought for sure they'd fix it eventually but the crashes still kept happening even a month after launch, which was very annoying. It's kind of a shame, though. Like I said before, the story isn't actually complete trash, there's some stuff there, I think. The Christmas story, for instance, was actually pretty sad, I quite liked it. But I figure the time I would have spent on this game will now be spent on better games that aren't hounding my wallet. So for anyone still playing I would honestly say you're better off uninstalling and just staying away from gacha in general. It's just not good for you, man.

I honestly could not believe that the global statistics for the final choice could be anywhere even near a 50/50 split when it absolutely turned out to be exactly that. Like, what do you mean? Is this not the most clear-cut moral choice a human being could make? I was genuinely flabbergasted. How could 50% of the audience for this game make quite possibly the most obviously wrong choice you could make in a video game?

Thinking back on it, though, I realize people probably just went back and selected the other option so that they could see both endings. In fact, this is probably the best example of how much of a farce "moral choices" in video games are in general. I realize now that many people don't think of moral choices in video games as genuine moral conundrums or as honest thought exercises for what you would actually do in a morally complex situation, but merely as a later option that you'll get to in a second or third playthrough. But at the time when I first saw those stats, I was under the impression that people were genuinely making what they thought was "the right choice," which pretty much made me completely lose hope for humanity, so props to the game for making me feel that I suppose.

warning: political rant

This game is often criticized for its sorta hackneyed delivery of the "war is bad" theme and for making the player feel bad about actions they have no control over. But honestly, if you ask me, an American military shooter game that literally yells at and antagonizes its own player for liking American military shooter games is pretty cool and based, actually.

Like, I don't know man. I remember being a teenage gamer in America in 2012. I remember playing Call of Duty. I remember Call of Duty being "that game that all the boys play when they get together." I remember how, when the media talked about video game violence, they were pretty much specifically talking about Call of Duty (or sometimes GTA or Mortal Kombat or something). Regardless, American war shooters were all the rage and you couldn't escape talking about them, whether in praise or derision, whenever any topic concerning video games would come up.

One thing I don't remember hearing that much about though, and maybe this is just my experience, is how weird it was that all these shooting games were very obviously military fucking propaganda. Support for the military industrial complex is so incredibly ingrained within American society that the media will literally talk about how dangerous video game violence is to the youth without ever even entertaining the notion about how that violence glorifies modern imperialism or how it contributes to manufacturing the perceived necessity of foreign invasions. Game critique was so criminally underdeveloped that the only retort that gamers could come up with to "Do video games cause violence?" was "Actually, video games don't cause violence." Any further nuance about how this very specific glorification of military violence could, in fact, serve the interests of the state via its utility as recruiting material for impressionable young boys, needless to say, did not quite make it into the critical minds of teenage gamer bros at the time. So honestly, when Spec Ops: The Line came out and took an admittedly blunt hammer at issues like war hero worship and needless military intervention that even now, as a nation, we're still really bad at talking about, I actually found it refreshing.

I could ramble about politics for hours, and I haven't even really talked about the game at all...but honestly, so much has already been written about this game that I would literally just be making the same points other people have already made, but worse. Ultimately, the point is that Spec Ops: The Line hates you for liking Call of Duty and that's kind of awesome, in my opinion.