TROUBLESHOOTER: Abandoned Children Reviews

Disclaimer: I played on Cruel + Always Challenge + Limits to Growth. +It has the deepest character customisation I have ever seen. 600+ masteries, multiple mastery sets, some of which completely change the way a character plays. +Even minor characters get dialogue talking about completely irrelevant things like talking about what they're going to do when they retire. +I liked that there are sometimes third parties involved who will fight against both you and your opponents depending on who they see first. +I also liked that you sometimes play as your enemies, it's a good way to learn about their abilities. -Difficulty is completely schizophrenic, I would breeze through ten very easy missions in a row and then have to completely rework all my characters masteries to deal with new threats. This happened multiple times. -The beginning is a very slow burn, it's about eight hours before you're out of the "tutorial" and they're constantly giving you guest characters who are powerful enough to solo the entire map. -I don't know why there's a limited inventory. You can buy more inventory space but it doesn't actually get added to your inventory, it just makes a separate inventory pool that you have to go to the online area to access. -Some masteries are locked behind achievements that are things you would never do naturally, like exhausting all of Kylie's protocol uses while a hacker. -They introduce a Pokemon gotta catch 'em all monster taming thing and drone crafting thing 80 hours into the game. Really, they couldn't have let you do this earlier? -Some missions have absolute clown cars of enemies, 100+ to the point where they can't advance towards you because they are being blocked by their allies. -The police units you get assigned on most missions are just bad, they can't keep up with your units and their AI is really bad if you set them on the automatic modes. -The camera sometimes gets distracted and goes off the interesting thing that is happening in favour of looking at an ally that has given support or cover fire.

Amaizing game, found you by looking at XCOM 2 like games on the web. I will be there for your second instalment, hopefully the early game gives you a bigger party faster, which is when the game truly shines. Mastery system really sets the game apart. The looting could be more rewarding, but its fair - crafting helps but seems like the only solution for me at mid-game. Will update when i make it to the last part of the game. I am not finding the encounters vs. animals that exciting, although they provide variety. I am 60h in, probably halfway through the story and i cannot put it down. Very recommended and a must-buy on sale if you are hesitating.

Solid game mechanics who use the TBT genere in a fresh way, an insteresting story, charismatic characters and A TON of content (the main story is huge) made this game a very easy recomendation for strategy games fans. Don´t let the art direction fool´s you, this is not a generic Anime game by any means, it has a lot of quality content to give.

very fun fresh and engaging, good build depth a bit repetitive in the late game and TOOOOOOOO LONG TOO MUCH GRINDING VERY SLOW, be prepared definitely gonna buy the sequel

Final Fantasy XCOM. Feels like a bootleg game at first blush, and it's certainly not very polished even once you do know what you're doing. The translation can be... a bit hard to decipher sometimes, and it makes the interfaces a lot harder to navigate than you might be used to. Even after you've got it figured out, which may take some time, you're probably still going to have a few gripes. But, pushing through the early game, once you unlock subclasses and your mastery options start to get a little less cramped, you have a pretty fun system to empower your characters. You don't NEED to grind to progress, or even to feel powerful, but if you want your characters to be mission soloing fighters of legend, then you certainly can help yourself to as many repeatable runs as you like. Playing on Hard (highest difficulty for first playthrough) and I only need to run 1-2 "repeatables" (it's more like filler missions at that point) between main scenario missions, if any. Also, the game frequently gives you allies to control, but there is a preset list of auto-commands you can issue for them to follow and it's super nice. You can keep focus on microing your own personal stuff while working with the AI, and the extra bodies save so much time that would otherwise be tedium in trying to explore and loot the map. There's a mission around level 10 that is a full blown firefight, which, while it does make the turns a little long, is really fun when you don't have to micro every single body present. Buy on sale if you're iffy, but it's definitely a solid game with a lot of content.

It's like I'm playing a Korean action drama about super heroes that aren't super heroes in a cyberpunk 20XX style city while a cult of wildly weird guys plot a take over. All done to a really catchy sound track and overwhelming amounts of charm. I adore post modern rpg's and tossing in one of my favorite kind of battle systems makes this a subjective yes. Mentally you have to come at the grind in the game like a NIS game. So many systems. So many. But that nuance is fun. I enjoy this over Xcom for theme alone and I love me some COMMANDER TO THE READY Roo---. Also the humor. It doesn't take it self so seriously so you find all kinds of little jokes and funny points. Make more games like this.

First, using "Mastery" as the skill system is awesome to play. Instead of grinding "experience" only to make your advantage, you can use your creativity to create your advantage from what you have as the second choice to do. Second, your advantage also can amplified from both "Mastery" and "Status" ( like burn, bruise, poisoned, etc.). The playable characters in this game is awesome. they have unique way to play alone and also synergy with others. In conclusion, The way to build Characters is like JRPG and the way to play is "XCOM"- ish.

I am about 15 hours into the game. I really really like the anime xcom, I even lovingly call it Squid Game Tactics when I speak about it. There's just so many casual quests, farms, repeatable missions you have to go through. It's the worst part of a Korean grindfest MMO in a single player (mostly) SRPG. Starting around the lvl13-15 missions, map sizes, enemy numbers, and naturally, enemy turn timers increase exponentially. It becomes a slog through an enemy swamp. It becomes more annoying when the maps have height, since the engine doesn't handle it well (controls/LoS) and your units don't seem to get that much of a jump height or any tools to traverse it. It's a great effort, I don't feel like I wasted my money, but I don't think I'll ever be seeing the ending of this game. If you like the Korean grind, go for it.

Troubleshooter combines XCOM style combat with a JRPG style story and upgrades. It's wildly and uncontrollably ambitious, with a flood of side systems and mechanics that don't always serve much purpose, but which can be easily bypassed or ignored at will. There are rough edges everywhere, particularly in the translation, but nothing detracts from an engaging story, really solid combat, and an immensely rewarding upgrade and skill system. The world building is strong, with the concept of a minor nation overrun by gang violence that reaches out to mercenary groups to support its woefully undersized police force. As one of these groups, your team regularly fights alongside nameless police forces, which while mildly tedious at times, really adds to the atmosphere. There's a huge variety in mission types and as long as you don't get too bogged down in the optional areas, it all remains very engaging. Some of the battles towards the later chapters get very long and flooded with enemies, and some battles are small with more preset units that raise the difficulty unexpectedly, but it's worth experiencing in full. The best part of the game by far is the fact that it has over 800 abilities (called masteries) from which each character can equip upwards of a couple dozen with time. There are numerous hundreds of four mastery combinations that you can find that provide added benefits and mixing and matching to identify and optimize these combinations is fantastic. All of the characters have unique playstyles and classes, so there's strong reason to diversify. This is clearly the indie SRPG/JRPG to play and I'm eager to see what the sequel is going to look like once they have had the opportunity to streamline and focus their design.

The combat system in Troubleshooter is usually a good balance of fun and challenge, backed by strong art direction and a cast of unique, mostly likeable characters (even if they can sometimes grate on your nerves). Unfortunately, the game's other elements significantly undermine these strengths. The first major issue is the game's storytelling approach, with constant appearances of overpowered NPCs who either solve missions for you or taunt you before leaving. While this trope can work well to establish a sense of progression (think Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII), Troubleshooter overuses it to the point of tedium. Yes, you're supposed to feel like a small fish in a big pond, but when every third mission involves some godlike character stealing your agency, it stops being effective storytelling and becomes frustrating. The progression system seems deliberately designed to be grindy, either requiring repeating low level missions or taking a risk on higher difficulty missions for better rewards. This would be fine, except the difficulty scaling is wildly inconsistent. You might face two missions with similar ratings where one is a quick 10-minute skirmish against 20 dogs, while another is a 45-minute slog clearing 100 enemies across 8 city blocks. The lack of clear communication about mission scope, combined with the game's slow pace, makes failures especially punishing - losing on a bad LOS push feels awful not just because you screwed up, but also because you now have to grind your way through those 15 low level patrols again. This is further complicated because as alluded to above with the deuses ex machina, raw stats mostly trump skill. When a difficult level has a surprise miniboss, you probably just lose. And again - the alternative is just spending more of your time on low level missions, so why not just have those give a bit more XP in the first place (or accurately convey difficulty). Even with the above issues, I probably would have pushed through the rest of the game. The straw that broke my back is the world management system. Character customization offers complexity without meaningful impact - you'll spend ages navigating a clunky UI to combine masteries and adjust builds. The mastery system is particularly egregious: to craft high-level abilities, you need to manually craft each prerequisite ingredient, one at a time, with no way to see what you're missing or craft from the top down. You'll constantly bounce between menus just to figure out your crafting path, only to find each choice changes your output by tiny percentages. Maybe this is less painful if you are playing with a keyboard and mouse, but on the steam deck it is tedium incarnate. You can undo these choices (which is good, given how little information you get about their effects), but you are going to have to go back to the grind for more masteries. The entire process feels like turning 300 different knobs that each make a 3% difference, all while knowing there's probably some hidden, poorly-documented combination that makes a 50% difference - but good luck finding it without extensive trial and error or a wiki deep-dive. It just does not feel impactful enough to justify the effort. I really wish this game had mod support. The developers have made a solid core combat system, but everything surrounding it feels designed to waste your time rather than enhance the experience. I'd love to play a streamlined version that respected my time, but the design philosophy here seems to be from the Monster Hunter "grind for grind's sake" school of thought.