The Caligula Effect: Overdose Reviews

Combat is fun and something different Story seems promising, pacing is bad Music is nice but gets too repetitive. 1 Level keeps on playing the same song over and over again Levels are bland and boring NPC and enemies are just horrible.

First off you should play Caligula Effect 2, it builds on everything this game does really well and is a fantastic JRPG. You don't need to have played this one to appreciate it, and while I enjoyed my time with Overdose a fair bit of that came from finding it interesting seeing what came before 2. That's not to say that Overdose isn't interesting on its own merits of course, but it is a very flawed game (if steam reviews permitted a "Mixed" instead of the binary Yes/No I might go with that). The game features a group of misfits attempting to break free of a virtual reality that draws in those with a desire to escape from the real world and does its best to try and fulfill their desires. This premise enables some interesting characters and subject matter which you rarely see in video games, both on the side of the heroes and the villains. There are definitely some misses in how it handles some of this, but I think ultimately its heart is in the right place, which definitely comes through more clearly if you do play side route Overdose has where you spend more time with the villains. This side route threads somewhat awkwardly into the main story but does a lot to flesh out what might otherwise be pretty flat characters, expanding on the themes of the story in some good ways. While I don't want to spoil the story in this review I will provide a content warning: you will see characters saying some rather fatphobic and transphobic things, I think the games handling of these themes is ultimately messy but good, but seeing those things can be a bit rough. As for the gameplay the combat is interesting, operating off of a sort of prediction system that lets you see a bit into the future to plan your moves, and encouraging you to combo moves with different party members to juggle enemies. This is overall pretty cool and fights are mostly fairly quick, but has some flaws. When fighting enemies significantly above your level your ability to hit them plummets making things frustrating, and damage can be very spiky making it so allies can drop very quickly if you aren't careful (at least this was the case on Hard). The dungeons meanwhile are the low point of the game, they range from bad to mid and are largely uninteresting mazes of corridors, with the worst of them being too narrow to let you dodge encounters. The game also has an odd system of sidequests attached to various largely interchangeable NPCs to unlock passive skills, which would be really grindy to try to do much of, but can also easily be ignored after its introduction as the few passives I encountered didn't do much. Overall I think Overdose is an interesting game and I'm really glad the devs got the chance to build further on the ideas behind it. If it sounds interesting then I'd say grab it on a sale and give it a try. Again you should definitely play CE2 though.