Grid Force: Mask of the Goddess
Developer: Dreamnauts Studio
Publisher: GRAVITY GAME ARISE Co, Ltd.
Platforms: Steam, XBOX
Release Date: 9/15/2022
MSRP: 19.99

I feel a little sorry for Grid Force: Mask of the Goddess. It’s a game that wears its influences clearly, from the anime and webcomic-inspired artwork to the bright colors and parallels to the deckbuilding/action/rhythm roguelike One Step From Eden. There was also clearly care and time taken with the premise and worldbuilding— the characters all look unique, there’s clearly some deeper mythology at play with the world and its various goddesses and champions, and that style even figures into some of the tactics and elemental mechanics at play in the game. It has a very impressive look to it, and that’s at least half the battle of any game right there.

Now if only it played as good as it looked.

Grid Force: Mask of the Goddess casts you as Donna, an amnesiac warrior tasked with fighting the goddesses known as Machinae to restore order to the world known as The Grid. In this task, you are assisted by a number of other characters, all with their own agendas and reasons to join Donna on her quest through the goddess’ realms as she fights to regain her memories, defeat the Machinae, and uncover her true purpose. But all of this has happened before, and it might just take more than resolve and Donna’s power to succeed for good this time and finally break the loop.

Grid Force’s main gameplay takes place, appropriately enough, on a grid of squares. You move around, attack dodge attacks, and try to reflect attacks back at the enemies. In this task, Donna is aided by up to three allies, all with their own attack patterns, defensive abilities, and specialties. As you progress through the game, you can choose to spare or kill the bosses you find yourself up against, adding to your roster at the end of each stage. As you progress, you also gain tokens from the various elements that can be used to level up, uncover new abilities, and make your characters into stronger, more specialized types. With the element system and ability to switch between characters with different roles, pretty soon this becomes a fast-paced tactical shooter, with you flipping between characters for defense or offense, staggering an enemy only to switch to DPS to wail on it. If a character loses all their health points, they’re benched and you’re forced to switch to another character. It’s an interesting design, certainly.

Which would be great if it worked. The problem with having great mechanics is that you have to have them very precise before you release. In the game, however, the further in I got, the more cracks started to show. The entirety of a projectile would intersect with my player character’s hitbox. I’d hit a “reflect” timing, which would register, but then get hit with the projectile anyway. Some attacks registered as a single projectile, but others registered as multiples, without much differentiation in how they looked. Furthermore, there’s next to no damage feedback on the player characters, which leads to situations where suddenly you thought you were dodging, only for the character you thought was at almost full health and doing well to be benched. It became especially egregious when one of the bosses could inflict a “charm” status, which meant I was losing characters rapidly as they popped up on her side of the grid and the screen was filling up with more visual information, something that led to a defeat seconds later.

The amount of visual information is another major issue. The screen can get incredibly busy with attacks, and as a number of attacks are unavoidable since the game relies on you to reflect, this can seriously mess up your timing and when and where to dodge. Especially when the attacks come as fast as they do, suddenly your side is wiped out and you have no idea what did it, just that you’re one step closer to losing. It’s an exhaustingly artificial level of difficulty that could have been handled much better by either fine-tuning the timing of projectiles onscreen, or simply not overwhelming the player by making them have to account for six different attacks, only half of which they could see (this is an exaggeration, but not by much). I once found myself stunlocked by something I thought I’d dodged from, only to then have my character charmed out from under me, leaving me completely disoriented.

If the mechanics weren’t so sloppy, there’d actually be an interesting game under all of it. The presentation is actually pretty good, with a unique art style and the kind of deep worldbuilding and stylized designs combined with narrative risk-taking that reminds me of better 2000s-era webcomics. Similarly, the music takes a while to get repetitive, with tracks as hyperkinetic as the battles taking place onscreen and perfectly matching the tone and mood. It’s a wonderful display, and the amount of creative talent onscreen kept me throwing myself against the brick wall of the gameplay time and again as I wanted to see more of this story, tell where this was all going.

But again, the actual in-game parts let the whole thing down. Characters are introduced with either too much exposition or not enough, making the story feel convoluted and exhausting. There’s the idea that you’ll come to care for these characters down the road, but the initial buy-in on the narrative is large enough that it doesn’t really inspire the interest it requires. And when the player has to fight through the mechanics of the game, it doesn’t really endear them to the plotline or finding out who these people are and why. It’s a shame, because again, the work put into the story, art, and style is actually very good, but having to fight the game just isn’t worth it.

Which is unfortunately where we leave this right now. Grid Force: Mask of the Goddess has some interesting ideas, and a plotline that, when you take enough time and care to push through the gameplay, seems fairly rewarding, with branching plotlines and alternate levels. But when the game is so fussy, frustrating, and the mechanics so undercooked, it just doesn’t feel worth the effort.

The Good:
- Excellent visual presentation and music
- Intricate worldbuilding and character/world design

The Bad:
- Shoddy mechanics
- Shallow gameplay with a lot of features but not much impact
- Too much visual information, even for a game that calls itself a “bullet hell”
- Wonky narrative pacing unbalances any investment in the story

Final Score:

Grid Force: Mask of the Goddess review