Quick Critique: Chroma Squad (Patreon)

Chroma Squad is a bit of a rough playthrough. It's a great concept with a ton of heart and love for the sentai genre, but it really stumbles in some core gameplay elements and the balancing. Because it shines so brightly in the things it does well, that makes its negatives all the more painful because you see what it could have been with better execution.

The first thing to praise is the writing. It's one of the most genuinely fun and humorous games I've played in a long time. I usually played a few missions on my lunch break and I'd find myself snickering and giggling while sitting at my desk. It's hard not to love a bad guy named "C-Shark", the IT criminal. The people that wrote those puns deserve an equal amounts of kudos and groans.

The whole game gets meta in really fun ways. You’re controlling actors in a TV show, but then the TV show starts to cross with reality… but then the fact that you’re playing a game playing actors in a TV show becomes part of the game’s plot and you start breaking the fourth wall  of the game for actors that are openly breaking the fourth wall of the TV show. You as the player have a role in the story, to the point that the bad guy actually reprimands you if you try to make a certain decision at the start of the game because it would invalidate your role in the plot. I think it's the only game I've ever played that didn't turn me off with the inclusion of Kickstarter content. The backer characters are typically fun and the fact that the game was Kickstarted actually plays a role in the story.

 Chroma Squad's major problem is that the actual gameplay kind of isn’t fun. I highly recommend bumping it down to the easiest difficulty because the harder difficulties are just tedious rather than actually difficult. In every difficulty, there are enemies that constantly run away from you,  enemies that knock you back further than you can move in a single turn, and chance-based elements of whether or not you'll actually connect with your hits. There are long animations and intro sequences and to preserve your sanity, you need to fast forward through the scenes of enemies running onto the field that drag on but show up in almost every mission, but then you miss some of the dialogue. Mech fights are super tedious due to the long, repeated animations and the gameplay mostly comes down to the roll of a die and your team frequently misses attacks that have an 80%+ chance to hit. It doesn’t seem like you can save mid-mission and some battles have multiple stages, so with the stages that drag on, you really need to set aside time for something that could have been extremely easy to pick up or put down if it actually let you save. 

The game is pretty buggy too, but thankfully nothing as bad as crashing. Text frequently gets cut off, distortions flash on the screen, effects don't disappear or layer improperly leading to confusion as to what's actually on the field, the camera doesn't pan over to characters, etc. There were multiple instances where I thought the game froze but it was because an off-screen character had a dialogue bubble that I had to clear to move on. Since I couldn't see them or their text, the game wouldn't advance until I tried to fast forward the scene.

The UI is pretty messy too. It constantly tries to default to a team order I didn't like, team-ups and team movement are poorly communicated, you can line up for combo attacks but the act of calling your team causes the enemy to change position, completely invalidating the team attack, and so on.

CS's other major problem is that the economy balancing is a mess. Until the very end of the game, you’re constantly strapped for cash, so money is the only thing that matters to you. I could only ever buy the best equipment for 3 of my 5 characters and the other 2 just got hand-me-downs. It’s never worth buying the studio upgrades because they’re too expensive and raise your operational costs for too little in return and they don't feel meaningful in battles. There are trade-offs in paying for marketing where you lose money to get fans and fan influence, but since money is the most important thing, you’ll completely ignore fans anyway so most of that feature is pointless. I never came close to losing enough fans to be in trouble or running out of influence that they mattered. You get less money for beating a stage without completing missions, so if you're ever in a situation where you might lose a fight, you're just going to reload a previous save to get the money, so fans are a meaningless system to you and you can ignore anything related to them that takes away money. Crafting feels so pointless because the items you can make are worse than what’s in the store and breaking equipment into materials is based on a die roll, so you rarely have parts anyway. Crafting the mech parts is the same. I always beat almost every enemy I could in missions, but I still never had enough crafting parts to regularly upgrade my mech and the only way to get more is to buy loot boxes, but, again, you’re so strapped for cash that you kind of can’t.

This is the kind of game I'd love a "new game +" mode for, just so I could play it over again to see the other endings and story branches without having to worry about buying the upgrades again or having a worse time because I'm trying to complete the missions that involve crossing your fingers and hoping enemies don't teleport away from your team attacks. I checked online because the end credits mention that a NG+ mode will be added, but it seems like only some versions of the game have it? Kind of a really sour note to end on.