Destiny's Sword - Early Access Look

Destiny’s Sword
Release Date: Early Access as of 9/28/2022
Developer: 2Dogs Games
Publisher: Bonus Stage
Platforms: PC
MSRP: TBD

THE FOLLOWING REVIEW IS FOR AN EARLY ACCESS GAME. IT DOES NOT REFLECT THE FINISHED PRODUCT, BUT REFLECTS THE PRODUCT AS IT WAS GIVEN TO US TO REVIEW.

I shouldn’t have to do this. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have to. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and sometimes things like this happen:

Do not under any circumstances pick up Destiny’s Sword. Having received a free copy of the game, I feel like I was overcharged for the privilege. While there are some moments where the ambition of the premise shines through, it’s a severely broken game, so broken that I couldn’t even get an hour into it without the game soft-locking me within its opaque, typo-ridden purgatory. I’m sorry that I have to write this— I hate writing bad reviews, especially for games that seem relatively ambitious— but I need to remain true to my experiences.

Destiny’s Sword puts you in the commander’s chair of the Stellara, a vessel full of cadets thrust into the center of a three-way conflict on the planet Cypris. On one side, the Protectorate, a galactic government tasked with keeping the populace safe and mining the mineral known as Lucidium. On the other, the Consortium, a group of megacorporations who want Cypris and the Lucidium mining for their own purposes, brutally putting down any opposition from the local populace. In the midst of all this, a group of rebels tries to take back their planet from the Consortium and the Protectorate by any means necessary. You and your team will have to bring peace to Cypris and discover a solution to the complex political situation, whether that means violent “pacification,” or more gentle means. But the situation is more complicated than it seems, and good and evil are rarely as clear-cut as they first look.

Destiny’s Sword itself plays out as kind of a traditional visual novel. You navigate through the Stellara, click on text where appropriate, and make decisions when it comes to a branching choice. In between the main “episodes,” you can talk to your crew, tend to wounded in the medbay, check equipment, and do a variety of other tasks. The game claims an advanced personality and background system, where different facets of your squad members’ personalities offer them different kinds of interactions during combat and different ways you have to manage their emotional state, as well as a multilayered branching narrative.

Not much of this is true.

For one thing, the choices the game gives you are somewhat limited and opaque at that. There’s no way to tell if someone has an ability or who’s even making an ability check, so you just have to make a few random choices and hope the right thing happens. There’s not really a lot of direction or transparency, so the whole thing feels weightless, like the game is going to do whatever it wants and you just sit there and click choices to make it advance. While occasionally a skill bar will pop up, or a progress bar for specific tasks, it just seems like they’re there more to provide the idea of any risk than actual risk itself. After all, you have very little connection to what’s going on onscreen, even with the ability to occasionally make a choice to do something. At the end, a commander (and do not get me started on the fact that your character is referred to as “commander” and there’s also a guy who’s your commander and referred to as “Commander” and how confusing that is) or the ship’s AI tells you how you did, or gives you further mission objectives.

That disconnectedness also extends to the crew, those people you’re supposed to be managing the emotional states of. While the game is in early access and some bugs can be expected, there were times where they repeated conversations from the previous chapter, or just didn’t have much to say at all. I was astonished to find out five chapters into the game’s first episode that the guy I’d thought was squad leader was actually the team’s medic, that my team had medical capabilities that weren’t even listed, and that at least one of them hated me, despite no conversational indication we’d ever had anything but a neutral reaction. It also didn’t help that the game doesn’t even teach you half the dialogue system until the end of the first chapter, which means that you essentially don’t even know half the options you have. While the dialogue system does open up, it once again forces you into a series of weightless choices as various values like “TRUST +3” and “DISGUST -6” flash across the screen, seemingly meaning something while not really explaining anything.

Which connects into the larger opacity. When you have a game where choices matter, those choices have to feel like they matter to the player. They have to have weight, consideration, and be something other than a weighted coinflip between several choices you don’t even really know you’re making. When you’re supposed to care about the characters and story, it helps if those characters and that story are understandable quantities you can care about. Unfortunately, Destiny’s Sword doesn’t appear to be quite there yet. There’s too little information, the narrative tries to get you involved in the larger conflict but just feels disjointed, and while you can learn a little about your squad, there’s not a lot of information easily accessible to make you feel like you’re learning anything at all.

Speaking of things that aren’t easily accessible, for a game that’s supposedly “feature complete,” it’s upsettingly easy to get soft-locked. The first time it happened, I was stuck on the medbay screen waiting for an event to fire while it never did. The second time was a little more obvious, with the next chapter’s cinematic being played twice and then the story refusing to progress whatsoever despite having completed all the chapter tasks. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game didn’t autosave constantly, meaning that any soft-locked game has to be started over from the beginning. This also means (much like with the dialogue sections) that you see a lot of repeated content over and over again, hoping that this time, things will actually allow you to progress the story. This is only compounded by a large number of typos throughout the text, things that should be fixed by the time your steam page is boasting that it’s “feature complete” and has text by a New York Times bestselling author. “It’s Early Access” is an excuse that only gets one so far, and when you are claiming a game is “mostly done” on your Early Access page, that confers a certain responsibility. Destiny’s Sword shirks that responsibility.

It’s a shame, because the game’s fairly flashy and the art is excellent, using painted backgrounds and portraits that do tend to change as you talk to people. It’s kind of cool the first time you see the skill bars or progress bars, even if they tend to mean less and less the further you get into the game. Even if a game is sparse, that doesn’t mean it has to be shallow, and I wish a game with this much flash had much more substance and transparency and much less bugs and typos.

But I have to play the game I get, not the game I wanted. Maybe in the future Destiny’s Sword will be worth more of a look. But in the already impressive field of narrative games, and with early access titles that had much less of a pedigree and staff but came out much more finished, this one’s an unfortunate swing and a miss.

The Good:
- Intriguing systems where you manage the crew of your starship and take on away missions
- Fantastic artwork

The Bad
- Bugs mean you end up caught in loops of conversations
- The game can soft-lock you at random, forcing you to start from scratch due to autosaves
- Opaque systems mean choices might as well be random or a coin toss
- A lot of flash, but seemingly little substance

Final Score:

It’s so raw. It’s just so raw. Please make this game better.

Grid Force: Mask of the Goddess review

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:

Flashy visuals and a bumpin’ soundtrack unfortunately cannot distract from a game that’s simply not fun to play