Science Girls

Very basic JRPG with a silly story

Science Girls is an older game from 2014. It's a venerable 10 years old at the time of this review. It's a hybrid E-book and turn based lightweight tactical RPG (which makes it sound much better than it is... it does a terrible job of both).

There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time.

We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. My gaming rig is not a Kindle.

Disregarding the garbage, badly written E-book components (the majority of this product) and reviewing the actual "game" components that remain will disappoint... it's very badly made and unpleasant to play. Let's go into why.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The game component features somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 2D graphics, and it's hard to say if this is due to the age of the assets used, if it's a deliberate attempt for the game to look bad/retro on purpose, or if the assets are just, well, terrible looking. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game in 2024, such poor quality 2D graphics in the 3D era just aren't good enough, whether it's a deliberate design fault on behalf of the developer or they just couldn't manage to do any better, this is a compromise gamers shouldn't have to put up with.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the video game construction kit/toolset, Ren'Py/PyGame. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur/unskilled developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

Science Girls didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is "Dough, Not Whole", for retreiving a box of donuts (happens early in the e-book), trivial to get, but less than 29 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, even the people who own this game weren't interested in it.

The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Science Girls has the pathetically optimistic price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.

For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you real games (not E-books) like "X-Com: Enemy Unknown", "DOOM" or "Payday 2". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

Blinded 'em with science.

fun on the steamdeck.

Nope.

Its heart is in the right place but there are a lot of flaws that can't be overlooked :

- It's technically very weak. I'm pretty sure making it in RPGMaker would have been better. I mean travelling through the second part of the game in the swamps is a chore. You move by clicking around with the cursor and you watch the map scrolling slowly and not very smoothly as if the game had been coded in GW-BASIC
- Too many fights. Most of them aren't difficult but there are so many that it quickly became tiresome.

However the story was well written and funny (not taking itself too seriously). If you really want to play it lower the difficulty and be done with it.

It legitimately hurts to give something from Hanako Games a bad review, and I enjoyed parts of it despite its many faults, but I can't recommend most people play this pile of jank. If it had ended on the first new map after the school, would've recommended glowingly. If it had ended before the miserable wormhole garbage, or even right AFTER, I might've recommended it if you liked charming but flawed indie jrpg's like I do. But instead you get a 4 hour game that shouldn't have been half of that.

Yes I know it says 11.4 hours, I was playing late at night and accidentally left it running mid-fight. I went to bed in frustration when I escaped the portal maze, got to what seemed like the end, and it pulled ANOTHER "Surprise it's not over" ending out. this one involving you tediously checking every room of the first act of the game to find the one unmarked area you need to go. I personally have a big soft spot for the developers,so despite it all I at least see a lot I like in the mess of what I hate. but I'm trying to be objective here, and for the majority of people I just can't recommend.

Seriously, some of these decisions are baffling. You made "S," the standard movement key, a screenshot with a popup that needs to be dismissed. But you didn't make a map binding? and SP is needed for every attack but INCREDIBLY hard to restore. You basically have get into a junk combat, get them down to one creature, then spend 5 minutes guarding every turn to get it back 2 points at a time. And you do need to do this, it's the only way to heal outside consumable healing items...which are limited in number and in hidden holes...and most of which are 2-5 points restored. The last healing item in the game is "heal everyone for 5 HP." My main 2 girls have 80. Well, main 3, but you just straight-up took one of them away for the last few sections in a row. And you know what? We never did find out why the monsters wanted to steal hair, you know, the whole plot.

Disappointment All Around

I was hoping for a burn based tactics, what I got was a game that felt like it was designed by a high school Game Development class as a final project. It's like a collection of game parts that sound OK on their own, but never come together at all. The setting and characters work fine, but they try the slap on a flimsy explanation that wasn't fully hashed out and never amounts to anything.

Next it the combat. There is no strategy and the closest thing to tactics in the game is the Hypnotize-Defend loop to regain SP (more on that later). Once you get out of the school, basic attacks are useless, and high cost and low return.

Next comes the RPG elements. Stat scaling is a joke. With each level, you gain 1 stat point you can use to improve a base stat or unlock a new rank on your skills. This means you have to choose between stats or skills. Choosing stats is a waist because your skills will be worthless. But leveling up skills makes them cost more but not that much more effective. Then then there are the recovery items . When the average SP cost of a skill is 10 and your strongest SP recovery item give you 5, you may as well not have recovery items. Thus the only way to gain SP in a meaningful way is to have a single opponent, stun them and use Defend (which grands SP to the user and bonus SP if all front row party members are defending at the same time) over and over until you have replenished your SP then finish the fight.

But wait, there's still the VN elements in there. I don't just mean how the dialog is presented in a VN style. The girls have profiles that list likes and giving them a recovery item that fits their likes, they gain double the bonus. Still not enough to be worth it though so why have such a random mechanic in the first place.

This game feels like it had a Character/Settings designer, a game play designer and an RPG mechanics designer that were all making a game on their own, and they just patched them together. I don't think I will bet buying another game from this developer.

This is a surprisingly charming and fun game, as long as you don't take it too seriously. It's a pretty standard Japanese-styled turn-based RPG with a visual novel style of narration. I'll admit I haven't finished it yet but I'm liking what I'm playing so far.

The plot is very simple and quite silly: aliens that look like plants from another dimension are invading Earth and it's up to the girls from the school's science club to stop them. The writing is mostly decent, each of the girls has a somewhat superficial but recognizable characterization, and it's all potentially funny, aside from those few moments where it's trying to be... educational? It just comes off as kind of out of place, but sometimes it's played off as a joke so that's fine.

As for the gameplay and mechanics, it's pretty standard: classic turn-based combat with sort of an emphasis on formation and SP management (basic attacks are mostly useless; you get to place the girls on a front line and a back line, the latter can't be attacked except by AoE moves, but only the girls on the front line get to act), which is made easier by the fact that walking in the overworld seems to gradually restore SP (and it's honestly a saving grace, since recovery items are pretty hard to come by). Each girl has their own role, sort of, and they all manage to be very useful, so it's mostly balanced on that front (though I find myself using Heather and Andrea the most due to their low-cost and decent damage AoE skills, which become basically a requirement at a certain point). Then you also have the standard gaining EXP and leveling up deal, and with each level up you get to decide what skill or stat to upgrade, which makes for a fair bit of customization. Upgrading a skill will give you a higher level version of the same skill, with higher damage and/or stronger effects, but it will raise the skill's SP cost; luckily you still get to choose to use the level 1 version of any upgraded skill, so it's not a big deal. After a certain level, you will obtain powerful high-damage skills called "finishers", that will increase the amount of EXP earned by a character if she kills an enemy with a finisher, pretty handy for helping with grinding but some finishers are way better than others, which makes using the others effectively to level up everyone a bit of a hassle. Battles are mostly pretty easy even on normal difficulty, at least for me; the ability to save at any point helps a lot too. Outside of battle, moving in the overworld is pretty straightforward, as it's the usual overhead view where you can just move the character around by either clicking on your destination with the mouse or just using the arrow keys, and this is where I think I have my only real complaint: if you move with the arrow keys (which I find to be much preferable compared to the mouse) and hold one direction, instead of just walking normally in that direction for as long as that button is pressed, you'll basically speed up uncontrollably, which basically forces you to tap the direction rather than holding it, and it's kind of annoying honestly. Also the sideview sprite for the protagonist in the overworld looks pretty ugly.

Speaking of which, let's talk graphics and sound. This game only uses 2d sprites for the gameplay and hand-drawn anime-style graphics for the visual novel segments and backgrounds. The sprites look pretty cute, at least for the girls; the aliens' sprites have a fair bit less care put into them, but they don't necessarily look bad most of the time. The graphics for the overworld tilesets and stuff look pretty rough and give off a sort of amateurish vibe, which isn't a great thing but I believe just adds more to the game's doujin kinda charm. The hand-drawn portraits for the characters and backgrounds are nothing special style-wise, but they're cute and well made so nothing to complain about here.
The game's music is pretty decent, you get a handful of random battle themes for every basic encounter which I'd say helps a lot with not making it feel to repetitive, although the quality greatly varies from track to track. I'd still love to find a way to listen to the game's OST separately cause I find myself liking a couple of them a lot. Music for the overworld is also mostly pretty decent, atmospheric enough in a way. There's a little bit of Japanese voice acting during battles and when healing characters from the menu, which is cute and all, even though it gets kind of annoying after a while, especially because all of the characters have to say "nya" everytime and it honestly kinda drives me insane. Unfortunately the voice acting can't be completely disabled (can only disable the voices for when you're attacking, for some reason) and the mixing leaves a lot to be desired, with loud sound effects often blowing my ears out and muffling some of the other audio stuff (like the voices for example, since the slider for the sound effects also includes those you can't really do much about it if you care). That aside, sound's decent I guess.

So overall I'd say this is a pretty nice game, it feels incredibly indie in its own way but it's part of the charm. So if you want a decent JRPG with some tactical gameplay that doesn't take itself too seriously and embraces the anime silliness, I can recommend this one.
Also I'm convinced Nicole is gay for Heather, and that's epic.

I was really enjoying Science Girls. It has a great turn based battle system; a good variety of skills the girls can upgrade to; and until the end was a well balanced game. I say until the end because the final boss fight was far and away vastly more difficult than anything you encounter before it which throws the difficulty curve into the shredder. You lose whoever your most powerful girl is right off the bat and it goes downhill from there. I didn’t finish the boss fight as I just became annoyed at it. I found myself getting steamrolled rather quickly and no strategy I was trying was working. The game just stacks the deck against you in a way the rest of the game didn’t and it felt unfair and sadistic. The story was decent as was the art.

I played Science Girls on Linux. It never crashed on em and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. You can’t change the difficulty level after starting the game which is something I really felt was a terrible choice once the final boss fight showed it’s ugliness. Alt-Tab didn’t work. You can manually save whenever you want and there are 54 save slots.

Game Engine: Ren’Py
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 104 MB
Save System: Manual

GPU Usage: 0-44 %
VRAM Usage: 631-652 MB
CPU Usage: 1-3 %
RAM Usage: 2.6 GB

I am conflicted because up until the final boss fight I would have given this game a glowing review and a good score but I can’t bring myself to do so anymore. I spent 11 hours and 42 minutes on this game and paid $5.49 CAD for it. Outside of the final fight this game is worth it but as a whole it was an uneven annoying experience.

My Score: 6/10

My System:

AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.1.2 | Manjaro 21.0.7 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.12.9-1-MANJARO

Become a science girl and save the world from aliens! I have yet to play a Hanako Games/Spiky Caterpillar game that I haven't enjoyed, and I always really like finding good games with female protagonists.

Gameplay
Science Girls is a standard turn-based RPG. For the first portion of the game, when walking on the school map, you won't see where enemies are. In the 2nd stage of the game, you'll see enemies on the map, but they'll only move when you move on the map (so if you stand still, they won't continue to creep towards you, great for if you need to step away for a moment, or pause to look as your map).

You can set your difficulty level between three settings. Normal setting was reasonable challenge-wise, and I only found the final boss to be any real difficulty. In the final battle, one of your girls gets taken (unsure what the determining factor is - in my case it happened to be my highest-leveled character), and her abilities used against you, apparently I "lucked out" with the hardest combination here, with Nicole being taken and my points being put right into her all-group attacks when I leveled her. One of the Steam Achievements can only be acquired through playing on the hardest difficulty.

Battles are on a "3d" style map, but characters don't move forward or back, except in your rank. Back row can never attack (and similarly, you can only attack the front row of monsters, excepting for multi-target attacks).

Audio
The music frequently had an old school RPG style battle music feel to it. The battle call voiceovers are icing on the cake.

Audience
I think this game would appeal to a wide audience. Despite it being a "school girl" trope-y setting, I don't recall any inappropriate jokes that would make this game unfit for a younger audience.

Game Time
I played through in about 5 hours, and I think I did a decent job of scouring the map.

Bugs
The only bug I encountered was some strange moving glitch on the alien world map. It primarily occurred when using a controller. The character would get perpetually stuck trying to move in one direction. Usually if I managed to work my way into an enemy battle, the encounter repaired the move glitch. When I used point/click with the mouse to move, I didn't notice any issues.

I found it fun till the game just devoled to a big, dull maze with repetive, mindless encounters

So this was different yet familiar. It has vibes of a visual novel, along with an old PC or SNES game, along with an RPG Maker kind of feel. The tactics battlefield and RPG character growth have always been my cup of tea. The skills in battle are enough to have some fun tinkering with.

The plot kind of feels like a straightforward parody of anime, complete with tentacle monsters (but not that kind). A little sappy, a little moe, the plot might be suitable for younger people as it addresses how to get along and cooperate with friends. The characters also live up to the "Science" in the title, as they address their problems rationally and use some basic scientific reasoning.

I'm not sure who exactly I would recommend this to besides myself, but I personally had fun with it for awhile, even if it's not revolutionary or deeply moving and memorable. It slogs a little around the middle with the random battles, but it's not too bad as JRPGs go. The price tag is about right, and if you like simple, retro, anime-esque RPGs, you can easily get your money's worth.

It's a cute little game if you like stuff like this, the RPG mechanics weren't very compelling so I got bored. I prefer games in this style with mechanics more like Long Live the Queen. Science Girls just didn't do it for me.

Science Girls is a nice RPG that manages to pack quite a bit into a little package. Each of the main characters are unique and have their own personalities and I personally enjoyed the way the overworld map of the school was done (reminded me of a Clue board). However it is very bare bones as grinding is the only way to get stronger there is no equipment you can upgrade your characters with. With that being said it is also a bit on the easy side as I'm playing on graduate difficulty without having too much of a problem. Overall its a nice game if you're looking for a light RPG but I would try something else if you want a serious game/challenge.

Watching attacks miss on both sides of a turn-based RPG battle system for turns on end quickly turned any enthusiasm I had for this game to nothing very quickly. This is one of, but not the least of, many deep flaws that Science Girls has. Let's get some positives out of the way first, though.

Pros:
-The idea of female protagonists in a video game is always a welcome change for me. That I can respect, even moreso when it's done right and holds up to other "good" games. I can't fault games for trying, and won't overlook that for a second. More on that later however.

-Within battling itself, each character has a specialized role that they basically fill, akin to a class in most other RPGs of this nature. Giving attacks and spells to each character's "class" in this case allows you to find a relatively niche use for probably five of the six girls, the sixth only having a scan ability and not much else of use. The rest, however, are all viable picks for battle. Which is good, because you have all six of them within the first hour and will need a good balance to survive this game. Additionally, each girl learns a "finisher" skill at level 6 that will grant them extra exp at the end of the battle if they killed an enemy with it. All of these help phenominally with leveling and the idea itself is unique and pretty cool. I wouldn't mind seeeing it in other games, at that.

Unfortunately, that's where the positives stop for me. Let's move onto cons.

-Everything about this game feels so slow. The pacing of the game itself, the movement, the progression of the plot, and especially the battling. I would go through one battle and it would feel like fifteen minutes had passed. In one instance of a boss battle, it actually did take that long and felt more like half an hour. More on why battling is bad in a minute.

-The plot itself is tolerable at best and hollow at worst. You follow six girls fending off an alien invasion who seem to be after...people's hair? For some reason? That's really all I got. There isn't any more than that. It's weird, kinda creepy, and probably isn't taking anything seriously in the least minus the scientific concepts. Speaking of...

-This game throws around scientific concepts and the like like there's no tomorrow. Expect half of them really feel like there's no meaning to them. They talk about wormholes briefly, except nothing about wormholes is ever explained. They come up with different ways to cross paths that might be dangerous, but who cares? I just want to cross a fucking bridge, I don't need some complicated solution on how to do it carefully. I most certainly didn't learn anything from it, and it just didn't feel like it went outside the box to make it really interesting or even remotely fun.

-The art and sound are absolutely atrocious. I played the whole game with my sound muted because it was driving me up a wall to hear one of the characters cry out like a stereotypical anime girl every time they attacked something. Every. Single. Time. The music is lackluster and carries no sense of urgency. The school is the most generic school you could possibly see, consisting of empty classroom backgrounds and occasionally a storage room or cafeteria. The alien homeworld is no better, just feeling like an empty landscape that I have to trudge across for minutes on end in between the constant battles I have no chance of avoiding. The only thing you can do to tell the girls apart from one another is their hairstyles; oftentimes I would confuse them, even though I've been staring at them all for the past five minutes in battle. The only other NPC in the game is a bald teacher, and the entire cutscene he was in just made me cringe. Just...take my word for it.

-The characters themselves are also bland, uninteresting, and have little personality. Each of them is a student in a specific scientific field and... ...well, they do scientific things related to that field. In their profiles, each of them have three "likes" of completely mundane things, like horses, or pizza, or movies. That and their interactions throughout the game is all you get on them. Their humor isn't even cheeky. It's doesn't make me laugh, or even giggle. It falls flat in every instance. The protagonists here are one-dimensional. This isn't what I want when I say female protagonists. I want female protagonists with depth, an interesting personality, and a valid reason for doing what they do. "Let's save the world with the power of sicence lul" doesn't count. It's insulting.

-Oh boy, the BATTLING. Battling is many things. Battling is slow, unrewarding, trudging, and the worst part of the game. Maybe, possibly, it was because I was playing on the harder difficulty, but let's still go over every little thing that contributed to me wanting to throw my computer out the window in detail. First off, attacks will miss. A LOT. On both sides. Battles will drag on and on because neither side can land a hit on the other for possibly turns on end. Damage is always between two numbers, a low end and a high end. So when you finally do connect, you could do fifteen damage! Or you could do two. To get a higher low end, you have to level up a skill when you level up. However, that also increases the amount of SP you need to use the skill. It is ridiculous how much some of the higher level skills will costs. Upwards of 2/3 of your total SP.

Items are finite. The only HP and SP restoring items you get are the ones you find on the map. There are no places to fully restore your health, except through level up. If you run out of SP, you have to defend to gain two back per turn (that character's ENTIRE turn) and an extra bonus one if everyone in the front row is defending. Characters in the back row do nothing, not even gain HP and SP back, unless they're brought into the front. Yet, they're still susceptible to attacks. Why? You can't attack their back row. Enemies will always have stronger attacks than you. Certain enemies will counterattack EVERY attack you throw at them, miss or not. Bosses are extreme damage sponges unless you've invested a lot into your attacks or exploit the system in very specific ways. It's impossible to tell how much of a chance you have to actually hit an enemy unless you raise your accuracy stat, but then you're wasting skill points. The amount of exp you need to get even past level 10 merits battles and battles of grinding even with the finisher moves. And you know what? Those aren't even guaranteed to hit. One character in particular, had a 9/25 success rate of hitting random battle enemies with her finisher. That's nearly a third. Yes, I counted. Strangely enough, in every boss encounter, she seemed to hit every single time.

I am just. So worn out over this game. I didn't expect it to be great, but I figured it could be worth the time playing. It wasn't. Hardly any of the game was enjoyable to me, and if I was so tenacious in getting all the achievements, I wouldn't have bothered. Spare yourself the purchase. The people that made this have made much better games than this.

I came into this game with an open mind and I ended up with mixed feelings with the game. I enjoyed the corky storyline and goofy characters in this game, however I found the battling system to be very frustrating at times. Often I ended up hitting the wrong button because of how close together the list of options was and I don't think there was a way to change the option you picked...or at least I couldn't find it. I also feel like the enemy to player damaged/defense ratio to be unfair. The characters did not really do a whole lot of damage despite me putting skill points into almost everything and the characters didn't dodge quite as much as the enemies did which made me rage quit a few times and it also drew the battles out too long. However I did still enjoy this game over all even though I found it frustrating. I wouldn't recommend this for everyone, but for those who are looking for a short rpg and for those who are willing to work around some wonkyness you should try it out just don't expect something amazing because this game is very far from amazing.

I actually don't understand why this game is so highly rated.
It is an RPG that tried to do things in a Visual Novel style.
What I have garnerd from my limited time playing it is this:
The VN portion of the game is pointless and has no agency within the game. It's their because they wanted to do an RPG/VN. It serves no purpose.
The RPG protion of the game is sloppy. You have no way to gain consumables outside of combat. You have no place or way to rest/heal. The combat is slow, tedious and poorly designed. The basic attacks are worthless, so you end up in a ring of defending and healing just trying to get your party ready for the next fight. The character sprites could have used some variation other than hair.
Even on the hardest mode, their is no challenge. It just requires you to spend more time in the defend/heal/use special loop.
Moving the character on the map works best with mouse. Using the kyeboard is clunky.
Going through combat is best with the keyboard as using the mouse get tiresome quickly and you can accidently misclick quite easily.
Controller support might as well be yanked. Moving is sluggish, accessing menu's is unintuitive, and using special attacks sometime breaks it so that you can't do anything until you use the mouse/keyboard.
And finally the biggest question for a game: was it fun? The anser is no. It was slow, had no real story to speak of, troped characters and tedious combat that monopolizes the majority of the game.
I loved other games by the publisher, specifically LLTQ. So this game came as quite a let down.

Science Girls is a cute but short game about a girls science club whose school gets attacked by plant-like aliens. The story is at times funny, imformative and also a little slice of life. Well, as slice of life as one can expect when there are aliens involved. I would have liked a bit more of a solid storyline regarding all the science involved but on the stuff it does touch on, I can't complain. It plays like your typical turn based RPG so pick your attacks and level them wisely. Speaking of leveling, it has a really cool system in that it allows you to pick any aspect you want to upgrade. It could be a move or your stats. It also has good music, a random assortment of food items, and replay value.


I definitely reccomend this game.

The characters are fun both in and out of combat and each one has some compelling abilities though some are much, much easier to justify than others. The battles threaten to become a grind before you're quite able to unlock something else or run into anything new. A fair amount of the game's length is fake - walking around running into repetitive mob packs. There's also a bit of a balance issue in that there's no renewable source for items so you fashion your party in such a way as to have enough sustain to farm battles for SP. Not surprising then, that of the people who played the game long enough to get back the box of doughnuts (~25%), only slightly more than a quarter (~6.4%) bothered to finish the game.

There isn't all that much of a story either - just a few lines of comedy and simple decision points stuck along a linear narrative. The alien overworld art is conspicuously ugly. The recorded character sounds are actively offensive even if you watch anime. Fortunately, there's an option to turn off the yell-on-attack sounds, but you'll steal hear them screech every time you get hit.

At $5, borderline purchase. Wait for a sale.

I kind of have a soft spot for underdog games so this one drew my attention. The characters are fun but the further you go the more leveling your characters seems to punish you by greatly increasing point requirements for performing actions while doing nothing to accelerate recovery of said points or providing much in the way of recovery items. The gameplay responsiveness is unreasonably crunchy, and shortly into the game battles just become increasingly numbing repeats of your team against armies of self-replicating enemies that just take too long to clear only to get into another same-same-same fight only moments later, taking even longer as it becomes more costly for your characters to perform their actions. If the repetition doesn't sound like a big deal to you, you may well enjoy it.

Maybe we'll get to see these fun characters in a different game at some point.

Short version: Good characters, but slow and repetitive gameplay that gets slower and more repetitive.

If you enjoy smaller scope RPGs with cute girls, talking about science, give it a try.
The game itself could need some design polish and makes a couple of mistakes that makes it a little less enjoyable than it could have been.

Depending on how you level some abilities, they end up costing loads of skill points to cast, while gaining points back is pretty slow and boring as your standard attacks also cost skill points to use, you may end up forced to sit around defending several turns to build enough skill points to attack, not to mention the ton of turns you have to wait until you can cast a high skill point cost ability again.

As it is an indie game, it is understandable that graphics are re-used in many places and doesn't bring a whole lot of variation.

Overall, the price is fair and if you're an RPG enthusiast with a day to spare, check it out.

Short game, with a quirky plot that doesn't bother to take itself seriously. If you're into psuedo rpg/visual novel/japanese school girl uniforms, you'll probaby enjoy it.

Instead of classes, you have majors of study, which was nice take, credit where credit's due.

I'm on the fence with this one; the game feels... unfinished, certain elements of the game feel unbalanced: Heather is practically your designated hitter the moment you get her, and Jennifer is the only healer you've got. Missy's tooling didn't seem to matter much, and Nicole should be renamed Hiroshima, she does one thing and one thing well.

I'll leave you to guess.

Pro tip: go sparringly on the consumables, they're extremely finite, and you'll need them for the last boss.

A little buggy (crashed on a boss fight - seems to be fixed now).
The voice acting could be better (ears hurt, so turned off calling out attacks).
Some of the battle tracks get repetitive (normally to be expected, but two or three of them become repetitive almost immediately after you hear them the first time).
The controls are a little rough (lagged response & hard to tell which choice is selected when using gamepad, have to move long distances back and forth during battle if using the mouse).
The enemies have an all-too-amazing dodge ability (like a 75% dodge rate on hard).

Despite the flaws and annoyances, the graphics are charming, the game has interesting characters, and the battles can be challenging until you get the rhythm. Also, from what I've seen so far, the story has remained consistent with the title.

The school has been invaded by alien monsters, and it is up to six heroines to save the day. With the power of science, of course!

Science Girls is a classic turn-based RPG, where you explore the map, fight the enemies and gradually uncover what is going on. It also features extensive dialogues that often let you pick protagonist’s response. And not only the girls have distinct personalities, each of them specializes in a particular scientific field, which add to their uniqueness not only in battles, but during the conversations as well.

In short, if you enjoy turn-based RPGs, Science Girls are most definitely worth getting.