TROUBLESHOOTER: Abandoned Children

Modern XCOM meet Valkyria Chronicles - in short, one of the best and most fresh XCOM like game I ever played.

Similar to W40k:Mechanicus, I almost refunded the game, but decided to continue...and the game is amazing!
One thing that doesn't give it the justice, is that it reveal it's true potential in rather long time.
You need 3-4 hours to start unlocking fun things and 30 hours to get to main meat of the game.
To be honest, it's intentional, coz game is DEEEEEP and mechanic rich - you need time and attention to fully grasp what crazy amount of options you have.

Pros:
- All characters seem to be masterfuly handcrafter, with long and deep story, that is interconnected (including side characters and villains)
- Every playable character has unique set of skills and mechanics.
- All levels are very well though and often very robust (especially city ones), unlike modern XCOM, they are very fun to play and don't feel repetetive. Everything, from events and enemy placement make that even generic missions feel interesting.
- in addition to playable characters, you frequently are given police support force (often 5-10 additional units) and they are very fun to play (very useful as proper support force)!
- some missions, like against White Tiger Gang use human avalance tactics and battle are massive (you + 10 police units vs 60+ enemies all rushing at you from almost all directions).
- Music, while unremarkable at first, grow on me and is very fitting and setting the mood.

Cons:
- Mostly GUI stuff, like crafting menu is pain to use, masteries menu taking some time to understant how it work.
- Trading street, while interesting at first, is taking too much time and another loading sscreen to bother.
- Drones lack spare parts/crafting material in general.
- The biggest missions with huge amount of enemies, while extremely fun, take too much time (even at fastest animation speed).
- Crafting is a chore.

Despite some flaws, I rate this game 10/10 and I'm looking forward for sequel!

Almost 50 hours in, here are a few of my thoughts:
It's basically Persona x Xcom.
It's a slow burn to get to the good stuff, so lock in for a good 5 - 10 hours before the game actually attempts to challenge you in any way.
I have tuned in to the story a few times but I've mostly ignored it; it feels like your standard story, but I am not the right one to ask.
If you dug Xcom's gameplay you'll enjoy this very much however, much bigger levels, more enemies and enemy types.
I muted the music after a few hours and just roll with my own as well as having turned off the voice acting as well. The quality of both the acting and the microphone itself varies from Good to Horrible, line by line at times.
Money becomes a non factor (atleast nearly 50 hours in) by around your 5th mission if even that.
There are a few nice quality of life additions to the game but also a few holdovers from XCOM but I think it may just be the engine itself.
The AI can be cunning or absolutely idiotic in it's positioning and target choices.
Has been buggy for me only a small handful of times and nothing game breaking, however there is no retry mission option unless you ALL die or you fail the victory condition which can be kinda annoying at times when you get a bad start and just wanna redo without the penalty.
Plenty of maps and "different" modes, but it all more or less boils down to kill everything before it does X or whatever.
My biggest overall complaint however is the lack of real customization for your party members. Huge miss there.
In any event though, if you dig XCOM, i'd say get it, if you dig Persona, give it a try.

I really understand how this game could go unnoticed by the general populace, but wow (and I mean WOW) it is a fantastic game. The visuals are bright and fun look at for hours at a time. The story feels deep, engaging, and mysterious. Lastly, the Korean tones are highly appreciated since their gaming market doesn't have much representation. Thanks to Reddit for the recommendation!

Great game for the price. The game is more detailed than the price point would leave you to believe.

if you love x-com you will love this game and if you don't get this game well there's no hope for you

Dodge, Block, Dodge, Miss, Dodge, Dodge, Block, etc. It's like a documentary that's 10 hours long with 15 minutes of information.

Holy crap, I never remembered to review this. The problem is, how the heck do I try to describe two playthroughs of the one of the more complex, nuanced and unique tactical RPGs I've played and also one of the rare stories I engage with, yet that is rather multi-faceted and has a TON of threads going on at once.

At the same time I would want to acknowledge some of the potential issues - it starts slow, you do have to approach it analytically with a lot of not-immediately-obvious mechanical implications, there's an explosion of secondary systems involving crafting and pets at some point that might trap a more completion-minded player in doing a lot of secondary content, you need to really think about what to do with your difficulty settings (I turned basically everything up to max, but instead of using level scaling I used the option to cap your level to the chapter you're in so that I always get the "intended experience"). You can grind, you can take stuff as it comes, you can build insane killing-spree monsters. There's also a fair amount of details involving the huge amount and variety of content that made me jump between a few guides detailing where to find or how to combine certain things, which I would say is a negative, but it's fair to mention I did play everything on as high a difficulty as possible even going so far as to make it impossible to overlevel content by accident.

Yet in the end the core gameplay is just an irreplacable gem. From the early game, where you use a number of generic allied police mooks to help pin enemies down and buy time for your heroes, to the late game where you'll literally be running around with a dozen heavily-customized murder monsters at once each of whom might have over a dozen unique, intertwined tricks going on that enable them to kill, survive and control in a plethora of satisfying ways. Big marathon maps where you might literally be in a slow, grindy like 15 vs 100 roaming street battle that's just super satisfying the first time you overcome it. I liked the game a lot when I first played it some years back, but coming back more recently with both DLC and extra coat of polish and qol on a lot of mechanics, it actually might be sneaking its way into my top-5-ever games, and I pretty much live and breath video games. This is one of the very few games I ever bought all of the random skins/soundtrack on purely to throw money at the devs. As a tactical game dev I find heart in knowing a game this complex and nuanced can be so well-received, and as a player I just love knowing these people succeeded and I'll get to play more of it someday in a coming sequel.

A hidden gem. Deep tactical combat, lovable characters, and a ton of build freedom. Feels like XCOM meets anime JRPG — and it just keeps getting better the more you play. Only downside: the UI can be pretty confusing.

*This review will contain some spoilers*

After having spent alot of hours into Troubleshooter : Abandoned Children, all i have to say is i wholeheartedly support the Devs and this game for creating this wonderful game - from the combat, to storytelling, to the mastery system (the way characters are geared)!

I absolutely LOVED the troublemaker list and the violent battles! Especially when there are multiple 'boss units' in the same mission , i really hope that this will be in the sequel as well as it really give the challenge to the game where you cant just rush in without proper planning on who you want to fight - urrgh especially on level 40+ violent case Magneta Backstreet, where normal grunts from the enemy Skulls faction have a unique ability 'fire support' that can easily wipe your team if you are not careful xD, and they also have really strong leaders that fulfill the role of an enemy sniper, close-to-medium range (pistol guy), brawler (the tank), and the slasher

Your also allowed to have different builds for the characters and tinkering with the different masteries can make each of your character play a different role (3 classes for each charac) - with each character have their own deep story behind how they got to where they are today (upbringing as well as special characters that have supported them when they were young, etc.)

Truly a solid well-rounded turn-based game and do grab it now as it is on sale, definitely recommend!

(Cant wait for the Sequel as well which would be Troublemaker : Banished Children)

Fantastic game with really good game play. It's definitely a slow burn type of game, but the X-Com mechanics with JRPG character building and a fairly good story make for a solid recommendation.

Worst grind and difficulty spikes I've encountered in a TRPG ever.

Overall good X-COM clone, but so much chatting.

A great strategic RPG, well worth its price tag

bought this game while ago but my laptop wasnt able to run it so i had it on backburner for a long time and eventually forgot about it.
lately i have hard time finding games that captivate me for longer period of time and tend to play online games that last 15-30 min max per round and decide after each round if i am in a mood for another so much so that i thought i cant enjoy offline games.
Luckily i was wrong and again luckily i gave this game a chance as it is becoming my favorite game and i am shocked with how time flies when playing this game.

Game is challenging but it has options to make the gameplay easier for those who prefer story. it gives player lot of initiative and responsibilities in and out of combat. there is lot of management, lots of grinding and numbercrunching and all that but nothing seems too tedious or crucial so if anything is not to your liking you can just ignore that aspect of the game.
Characters are interesting which at this point i cant tell if it is the matter of game being almost decade old or not because 99% of new games especially singleplayer and/or offline game characters all feel like there is little to no effort in making them. every new character feel like a statement rather than personality but not in this game.
It feels like breath of fresh air and i am glad i came back to try it again on new laptop as this game is most fun i had in a long time.

This is a "yes...but" recommendation.

The actual turn-based combat system is extremely fun, on that count it's one of the best X-COM likes I've played in a long time. The music and sound effects are excellent.

But it's wrapped in a SRPG layer that's on the grindy side with lots of subsystems, and the pacing and scale are "off." By that I mean you don't get interesting characters until 10+ hours into the game, and some of the missions -- these aren't even boss fights -- drag on and on because of the number of units + map design. TROUBLESHOOTER is one of those single-player games that has several "momentum killers" you just have to push through.

The devs respond to most reviews here, and it sounds like they've taken this feedback to heart. I look forward to the sequel because the combat system is really that good. Hopefully the sequel has full Steam Deck support as this style of game is perfect for it.

fun

very fun trpg with interesting mechanics. story is an anime fan's dream if you like modern shonen.

Just wow, what an unexpected and overwhelming experience. Troubleshooter is a game that just comes out of nowhere and provides a hardcore, x-com-esque experience like no other.
So what is there to love about this game: The 2 best things about this game are they mind-blowing amount of approaches/builds/strategies and the variety in level design. I don't think I have ever seen a game within this subgenre that has this many completely unique setups for levels, you just get into so many different scenarios it is just incredible and that combined with the aforementioned variety in the strategic approach and the amount of different characters you get to control and synergies to think about just creates this one of a kind, insane and "you have to see it to believe it" type of experience.
The campaign alongside the DLCs will take you well over a 100 hours even without doing the side stuff and I am saying side stuff here but in reality the "side stuff" is just as detailed as the main content. I mean, you can collect huge amounts of pets from scenarios or craft drones and even though that sounds like a small little thing you have on the side in Troubleshooters it is almost just as detailed and complex as building your main roster. And almost everything is like that in this game and it is just unheard of, especially from such a small developer. Troubleshooter is also a pretty challenging game if you put it on higher difficulties, I played through the whole game and most of the side quests on HARD but then in the DLCs I did lower the difficulty which I am going to discuss later. Some of the levels even in the main campaign get pretty crazy and you will have to constantly come up with solutions as the odds will always be against you in a huge way. In some scenarios you will go up against like 130 enemies which is something I have never seen in a x-com-like game before, so yeah, strap in. One more thing that deserves to be mentioned is the mastery system (their version of a perk system) which is super complex and unique and it's the main reason behind the strategic vastness. And there's like hundreds upon hundreds of masteries/recipes and mastery sets/combos to discover with some of them completely changing up the whole direction you'd be taking with a given character.
So what is there NOT to like in this game? 1) Well visually it is not that impressive, the animations are also pretty underwhelming and the same goes for enemy design. 2) The story can get completely incoherent with how many new characters get introduced at the same time with the narrative not going back to them for hours and then suddenly dropping you into a flashback of a side character you've seen once and then jumping around in 3 different timelines and etc. it can get obnoxious. I don't think anyone fully comprehends the story and it's nuances, I tried to look for it online and yeah no one gets it fully as it is not possible due to the disjointed and poorly executed delivery. And it's a shame because there are some interesting bits and character arcs here and there. 3) You have to spend insane amounts of time in menus, optimizing your builds, especially on higher difficulties and if you are not okay with that just skip this game. 4) The overwhelming nature of the game which is represented in how much stuff it introduces sometimes which could just exhaust you as skipping stuff in this game is generally not advised if you are playing on higher difficulties. No matter how optional the drone crafting or pet-leveling look to you, you will ABSOLUTELY need them to be as optimized as your main characters on harder missions. And I think all of that can be a bit too much. 5) The difficulty of the DLCs. This is by far the worst thing about this game. What I think happened here is that the developers mostly correctly assumed that the people who would stay for the DLCs of this already niche title would be the ones with the most broken and optimized builds that deal with everything so they balanced this content around that fact which makes it borderline unplayable for people like me. By people like me I mean people who came in late and played through the whole thing as a singular experience. So is it "too hard"? Well, the problem is not that it's too hard, the problem is what can you do to overcome the challenge and in Troubleshooter there is only 2 things you can do when you already know how to play the game well enough. You either have to farm a LOT or craft builds (which sometimes takes a lot of time due to the masteries being treated as items in this game rather than unlocks for some weird reason) for your 10+ characters, pets etc. that would specifically deal with that scenario that's giving you trouble, however if you don't have all the required material then you go back to farming which by the way can also be chance-based meaning you go and farm a scenario for an hour (because killing 100 enemies in a turn-based game on higher difficulties is inherently a slow process) and you might still not get what you need. So if you are not okay with that much farming than you can go ahead and decrease difficulty right? right? WRONG! The DLCs, especially the fucking crimson crow is so awfully balanced that I BARELY got through the final couple of missions on EASY because I just didn't have the energy to farm after having played the game for over a hundred god damn hours. Now you might think I suck at this game and sure I may not be amazing at it and my builds might not be optimized for every encounter and I may not have all the best items but remember I got through the whole game with almost all side content on HARD as well as half of the first DLC so my builds should be enough to finish the game on EASY or SAFE otherwise that difficulty setting is useless. Either remove the difficulty modes in which case I would only complain about excessive grinding or just make them WORK. I had to actually cheese the final mission of crimson crow to win on SAFE because it was physically impossible with my builds and I had to choose between grinding for god knows how many hours vs cheesing the game (I am talking about the turn skip method against the fucking gundams, if you know you know). Holy shit man what the hell. And if you want more proof of this dlc being to much for people just look at its completion rate on steam. Okay rant over.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the main game, was mixed on the first DLC and hated the second one. I think this game (without the dlc) is a must-play for everyone who enjoys this subgenre and I am very excited to see what the developer will come up with the sequel that I've heard is in the works.
P.S Troubleshooter also has a PvP mode, fucks sake man what a game :D

Anime X-COM

The only bad thing about this game is mission type doesnt matter at the end it just fall to kill everyone.

im pretty sure I'm still in the tutorial.

systems deep it seems, will update if it sucks but so far its got tons of xcom style action with an anime wrapper. The story is fun if a bit intrusive but can be skipped if you just want to get to battles (I don't give me all the husbandos and waifus)

THE REVIEW IS THAT THIS GAME IS VERY GOOD KOREAN AUTISM

i'm pretty sure my lengthy nine hour play time is based on the fact that i started this game once but accidentally alt-tabbed out and organized my steam library, which by the way is massive, for 4 hours. also i played this game for 5 hours. the reason i have not played more is because i have learned how to act like a civilized human, the kind that always saves dessert for after dinner, and even though this game is like anime tactical rpg meets excel spreadsheets more formulas edition i have been able to keep my grubby mitts off it for now. also my steam library is so big i have twenty portable hard drives daisychained out of my computer and most of the games don't even play

When I was a kid, one of my favorite games was called Warsong (langrisser) on sega genesis. Another game I played back then was called Master of Monsters. For years I searched for other games that would even come close. I played Xcom2 and it was ok, but I was still searching until one day, I found this. This game is amazing and will always be one of my all time favorites. It may not be for everyone, but it's definitely for me. I remember telling a friend about how I was 120 hours into the game and still hadn't unlocked all of the characters yet and the game was still going strong. I'm so glad I found this game and had time to play it.

Tactical rpg with tons of content and crazy amount of character customization. A hidden gem, highly recommended.
Can't wait to play the sequel

Truly an hidden gem, a great mix of Xcom 2 with a very interesting visual novel, very likeable characters and a captivating art style.
Game is incredibly polished and I wish for a sequel (possibly slightly shorter and with much less grinding).

It's definitely not a game for everyone, but what game really is these days?
A good amount of steam players users just buy and install lots of singleplayers at once and barely finish any of them.

Awesome game, im waitng for the sequel. this game is like Xcom + Ogre Tatics/FF Tatics = Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children.

Buy this instead of X-COM 2. You will actually have fun. Huge amounts of content. Long missions. And some of the most thoughtful quality of life options (you can semi-automate your party in combat). The anime aesthetic and Street Fighter-style combat makes it stand out from other options. This game is silly, poorly translated, endlessly playable, the story is insane, dense and ridiculous. You can afford this since its always cheap.

From what little i've played till now, this game is a vibe. Gameplay is xcom but more vertically complex or complex in general in a good way. Can't say much about the story yet but from what i've seen, there is no romance system (seriously looks like this game could use one with so many cool characters already in it). Hope they add it in the sequel.

Lots of games satisfy the strategy/rpg itch. This one satisfies the initial itch, only for you to find out that you now have worms. Worms that make the itch worse.

Mastery Sets work the same way.

Improving the character from doing barely anything into killing machine through massive amount of mastery makes you feel good.

I regret buying this coming from both an Anime fan and an Xcom fan, but not a huge JRPG fan. Compared to xcom and a lot of other 4X strategy games the combat is just really simple. I think the thing that really stopped me from playing though was I had a complete lack of interest in the characters from both a gameplay and story side of things.

The game did nothing wrong but its really not for me.

Very Solid game. Definitely a bit of a slow burn, especially in unlocking new things. Allows you time to get used to basics before opening up into a deep, rich game that, dare I say, is better than XCOM.

My Rating: 9,5/10

Recommended, looking forward what that Dev team is bringing to the table next. Well worth the money, I bought in during a steam sale.
Someone in the comments called it "Anime-X-Com". I think this is the best description for the game.

Notes:
- The game is story-driven/streamlined. You can repeat certain missions, but the main story is set.
- Voiceover is Korean, I played it in english (text). Worked well for me that way., i liked it.

You may like it if...
- You like X-Com-Type of Games
- You like anime stories and characters
- You are fond of crafting/ experiment with builds
- You are prepared to invest time into it and dive into games rather than casually play a bit and then switch to the next one.

The good:
+ The game is fun and drew me in. I liked the characters, the possible builds and to follow the story. Even some enemies got background stories and cutscenes
+ VERY good Level design in my opinion. I played on "Normal" and without knowing the missions, they felt challenging yet fair and doable. I think this is very hard to balance and really well done.
+ Once you get a grip of it, the Mastery system is a really good game mechanic allowing to customize your character and feel the growth in experience and new skills. Fun system.
+ It is HUGE. One playthrough without the expansion took me about 90 hours, so you get a lot for your money.
+ Lots of game mechanics to discover, experiment with and optimize
+ No technical difficulties, game is very smooth, no crashes (Windows 10)

The bad:
- No manual save. It autosaves and lets you continue. No fan of this mechanic
- Can be a little overwhelming at first, not for too casual players. It took me some hours to figure out what I am doing
- Lots of Game mechanics, some of them don't seem to add much to the game or feel overly complicated. I feel those mechanics who are not very impactful could have been cut back a bit.
- Story parts can feel a bit lengthy (text to read in between missions)

It's like X-COM with a vastly superior character based story and magic/super powers instead of tech, criminals instead of aliens, and a whole lot of mastery customization options instead of base building. It does what it does very well.

Amazing game, very glad i picked this up and will be grabbing the developers next game as soon as it releases

Korean Webtoon XCOM with a lot of jank, a lot of heart, and an insane level of depth/scale that occasionally misses its mark but in large part delivers. Suffers from a lot of filler and wastes a lot of time but has one of the most engaging, complicated, fun class/attribute customization systems I've ever seen in a game. Every time my characters leveled up I would spend an hour moving points around, every single time, to squeeze a little extra utility out of 1 more attribute slot, and it never got old. At some point halfway through the game it completely locked in for me and the absurd, ridiculously fun combinations of skills/effects you could give characters was the most fun I've had in so long. One of my favorite things was that I never had a favorite/strongest character because every couple missions I would move skills/attributes around and a character I thought was useless for 15 hours would suddenly start killing 80% of the enemies on a mission by themselves because I found the right combination of traits for them. It was a little grating at the start, and it definitely took a while to really get going, but there was a point where I was going around telling people that this was the best game I'd ever played and it was a crime that it wasn't better known lmao, and there's a part of me that still thinks the first part is true and I KNOW the second part is. There's definitely a lot that this game could lose but honestly in a time where new releases tend to be pretty mid and I get sick fast with a lot of the games I was really excited for I sunk 100 hours into this game in a month after buying it knowing nothing and I don't regret any of it. I'm making this review now because I saw they added workshop support and I see people are monkeying around with the skill/level up system and I got so excited that I'm contemplating dropping my playthroughs of MHW, Avowed, and others to restart this game and play it from the beginning again. Also the story is a little out there but I was really endeared by it towards the end. Maybe it was just because I played it for a hundred fucking hours lmao but I did get attatched to these guys, even if most of the time not a lot makes sense they really try to make their own world here and while it is a little out there its more engaging than most of the bullshit a lot of games are trying to do now. If you're a fan of games that have a lot of jank but also really wildly ambitious/confusing/amazing upgrade systems and a ton of heart this is game is like smoking straight fucking crack, this game scratched an itch that I hadn't scratched since like EYE Divine Cybermancy a decade ago, pick it up and spend $90 on all the costumes so that these guys can make the second game and hopefully become millionaires because they deserve it.

It's like I'm playing a Korean action drama about super heroes that aren't super heroes in a cyberpunk 20XX style city while a cult of wildly weird guys plot a take over. All done to a really catchy sound track and overwhelming amounts of charm.

I adore post modern rpg's and tossing in one of my favorite kind of battle systems makes this a subjective yes.
Mentally you have to come at the grind in the game like a NIS game. So many systems. So many. But that nuance is fun.
I enjoy this over Xcom for theme alone and I love me some COMMANDER TO THE READY Roo---.

Also the humor. It doesn't take it self so seriously so you find all kinds of little jokes and funny points.
Make more games like this.

Final Fantasy XCOM.

Feels like a bootleg game at first blush, and it's certainly not very polished even once you do know what you're doing. The translation can be... a bit hard to decipher sometimes, and it makes the interfaces a lot harder to navigate than you might be used to. Even after you've got it figured out, which may take some time, you're probably still going to have a few gripes.

But, pushing through the early game, once you unlock subclasses and your mastery options start to get a little less cramped, you have a pretty fun system to empower your characters. You don't NEED to grind to progress, or even to feel powerful, but if you want your characters to be mission soloing fighters of legend, then you certainly can help yourself to as many repeatable runs as you like. Playing on Hard (highest difficulty for first playthrough) and I only need to run 1-2 "repeatables" (it's more like filler missions at that point) between main scenario missions, if any.

Also, the game frequently gives you allies to control, but there is a preset list of auto-commands you can issue for them to follow and it's super nice. You can keep focus on microing your own personal stuff while working with the AI, and the extra bodies save so much time that would otherwise be tedium in trying to explore and loot the map. There's a mission around level 10 that is a full blown firefight, which, while it does make the turns a little long, is really fun when you don't have to micro every single body present.

Buy on sale if you're iffy, but it's definitely a solid game with a lot of content.

The gameplay is solid and had great customisation but the progression systems as a new player were confusing. I wish the systems were introduced slowly and have each mission highlight what each one does. Perhaps when the systems were introduced it wasn't too bad but the new player experience is rough with so much overwhelming things to do. I recommend getting this with the caveat of being prepared to be overwhelmed.

very fun fresh and engaging, good build depth
a bit repetitive in the late game
and TOOOOOOOO LONG TOO MUCH GRINDING VERY SLOW, be prepared
definitely gonna buy the sequel

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

Jumping through hoops just to play this game is not fun. If you know, you know. This bug (Game wont start) has been around since 2020, and the fact that the devs still haven’t fixed it is beyond frustrating. It’s honestly laughable at this point. How can a game with so much potential still have this kind of issue four years later? It’s clear the developers aren’t competent enough to address the problem. I really wanted to enjoy this game, but it's been an absolute headache. If you’re thinking about buying this, do yourself a favor and wait until they fix their mess — if they even do. They won't.

how do i best contend with the fact that momwife giselle will never put a bullet through my [skull], killing me instantly?

Cool game, I really like the gameplay. It's pretty fun making the characters deal 10 billion damage and instakilling the enemies. Although there were parts of the story where I got confused. I'm referring to the fight with the black guy, cool assasin, uncle and the chainsaw niece. The uncle said how he'd kill the assassin and I thought for sure the assassin would die yet he's alive.

First, using "Mastery" as the skill system is awesome to play. Instead of grinding "experience" only to make your advantage, you can use your creativity to create your advantage from what you have as the second choice to do. Second, your advantage also can amplified from both "Mastery" and "Status" ( like burn, bruise, poisoned, etc.).

The playable characters in this game is awesome. they have unique way to play alone and also synergy with others.

In conclusion, The way to build Characters is like JRPG and the way to play is "XCOM"- ish.

Solid game mechanics who use the TBT genere in a fresh way, an insteresting story, charismatic characters and A TON of content (the main story is huge) made this game a very easy recomendation for strategy games fans. Don´t let the art direction fool´s you, this is not a generic Anime game by any means, it has a lot of quality content to give.

The combat system in Troubleshooter is usually a good balance of fun and challenge, backed by strong art direction and a cast of unique, mostly likeable characters (even if they can sometimes grate on your nerves). Unfortunately, the game's other elements significantly undermine these strengths.

The first major issue is the game's storytelling approach, with constant appearances of overpowered NPCs who either solve missions for you or taunt you before leaving. While this trope can work well to establish a sense of progression (think Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII), Troubleshooter overuses it to the point of tedium. Yes, you're supposed to feel like a small fish in a big pond, but when every third mission involves some godlike character stealing your agency, it stops being effective storytelling and becomes frustrating.

The progression system seems deliberately designed to be grindy, either requiring repeating low level missions or taking a risk on higher difficulty missions for better rewards. This would be fine, except the difficulty scaling is wildly inconsistent. You might face two missions with similar ratings where one is a quick 10-minute skirmish against 20 dogs, while another is a 45-minute slog clearing 100 enemies across 8 city blocks. The lack of clear communication about mission scope, combined with the game's slow pace, makes failures especially punishing - losing on a bad LOS push feels awful not just because you screwed up, but also because you now have to grind your way through those 15 low level patrols again. This is further complicated because as alluded to above with the deuses ex machina, raw stats mostly trump skill. When a difficult level has a surprise miniboss, you probably just lose. And again - the alternative is just spending more of your time on low level missions, so why not just have those give a bit more XP in the first place (or accurately convey difficulty).

Even with the above issues, I probably would have pushed through the rest of the game. The straw that broke my back is the world management system. Character customization offers complexity without meaningful impact - you'll spend ages navigating a clunky UI to combine masteries and adjust builds. The mastery system is particularly egregious: to craft high-level abilities, you need to manually craft each prerequisite ingredient, one at a time, with no way to see what you're missing or craft from the top down. You'll constantly bounce between menus just to figure out your crafting path, only to find each choice changes your output by tiny percentages. Maybe this is less painful if you are playing with a keyboard and mouse, but on the steam deck it is tedium incarnate. You can undo these choices (which is good, given how little information you get about their effects), but you are going to have to go back to the grind for more masteries. The entire process feels like turning 300 different knobs that each make a 3% difference, all while knowing there's probably some hidden, poorly-documented combination that makes a 50% difference - but good luck finding it without extensive trial and error or a wiki deep-dive. It just does not feel impactful enough to justify the effort.

I really wish this game had mod support. The developers have made a solid core combat system, but everything surrounding it feels designed to waste your time rather than enhance the experience. I'd love to play a streamlined version that respected my time, but the design philosophy here seems to be from the Monster Hunter "grind for grind's sake" school of thought.

This story is filled with overly used anime tropes, that could be charming to others. To me it just feels slow and boring.

The combat is heavily inspired by XCOM but lacks any of its tactical depth. Charging in recklessly doesn't punish and careful planning doesn't reward you. Base management is convoluted yet simplistic.

If you're looking for a casual lighhearted RPG where choices matter little to nothing and love railroaded anime clichés, go for it. If not, better stay away.

Troubleshooter combines XCOM style combat with a JRPG style story and upgrades. It's wildly and uncontrollably ambitious, with a flood of side systems and mechanics that don't always serve much purpose, but which can be easily bypassed or ignored at will. There are rough edges everywhere, particularly in the translation, but nothing detracts from an engaging story, really solid combat, and an immensely rewarding upgrade and skill system.

The world building is strong, with the concept of a minor nation overrun by gang violence that reaches out to mercenary groups to support its woefully undersized police force. As one of these groups, your team regularly fights alongside nameless police forces, which while mildly tedious at times, really adds to the atmosphere. There's a huge variety in mission types and as long as you don't get too bogged down in the optional areas, it all remains very engaging. Some of the battles towards the later chapters get very long and flooded with enemies, and some battles are small with more preset units that raise the difficulty unexpectedly, but it's worth experiencing in full.

The best part of the game by far is the fact that it has over 800 abilities (called masteries) from which each character can equip upwards of a couple dozen with time. There are numerous hundreds of four mastery combinations that you can find that provide added benefits and mixing and matching to identify and optimize these combinations is fantastic. All of the characters have unique playstyles and classes, so there's strong reason to diversify.

This is clearly the indie SRPG/JRPG to play and I'm eager to see what the sequel is going to look like once they have had the opportunity to streamline and focus their design.

Troubleshooter changes a lot of the parts of X-com that people had issues with. Instead of a macro-level campaign with irreparable consequences and game overs, we get a JRPG-style story and repeatable missions. Instead of generic soldiers with simple builds, we get up to 12 (with DLC) unique characters with fully fledged out builds and storylines. Instead of permadeath, we get a mostly ignorable "stamina" mechanic. It's far from a perfect game, but I've had a great time with it thanks to it's incredibly deep Mastery system for character builds and it's mostly decent approach to difficulty settings.

Players really do have to know what they're getting into, though. Whereas X-com had mostly pretty good graphics and presentation, Troubleshooter is very much an indie game and it shows. The drawn art is pretty good, but 3d models are pretty ugly. Both the game itself and the story have a very slow start, and the shonen-style writing and translation could use a lot of improvement. There's a bunch of difficulty spikes, but they're not incredibly punishing as long as the player is willing to either optimize their character builds or lower the difficulty. The presentation and controls are just a little jank, but I didn't encounter too many major bugs during my playthrough.

The game itself though? Really good for those who like the "RPG" side of tactics RPG. Character builds are extremely deep, there's always something to grind for if the player wants it, but grinding is by no means required. Besides the campaign, there are a ton of side quests and missions to complete, each with a tiny (and mostly skippable) bit of dialogue.

Great game, recommended for fans of the genre.

Disclaimer: I played on Cruel + Always Challenge + Limits to Growth.

+It has the deepest character customisation I have ever seen. 600+ masteries, multiple mastery sets, some of which completely change the way a character plays.
+Even minor characters get dialogue talking about completely irrelevant things like talking about what they're going to do when they retire.
+I liked that there are sometimes third parties involved who will fight against both you and your opponents depending on who they see first.
+I also liked that you sometimes play as your enemies, it's a good way to learn about their abilities.
-Difficulty is completely schizophrenic, I would breeze through ten very easy missions in a row and then have to completely rework all my characters masteries to deal with new threats. This happened multiple times.
-The beginning is a very slow burn, it's about eight hours before you're out of the "tutorial" and they're constantly giving you guest characters who are powerful enough to solo the entire map.
-I don't know why there's a limited inventory. You can buy more inventory space but it doesn't actually get added to your inventory, it just makes a separate inventory pool that you have to go to the online area to access.
-Some masteries are locked behind achievements that are things you would never do naturally, like exhausting all of Kylie's protocol uses while a hacker.
-They introduce a Pokemon gotta catch 'em all monster taming thing and drone crafting thing 80 hours into the game. Really, they couldn't have let you do this earlier?
-Some missions have absolute clown cars of enemies, 100+ to the point where they can't advance towards you because they are being blocked by their allies.
-The police units you get assigned on most missions are just bad, they can't keep up with your units and their AI is really bad if you set them on the automatic modes.
-The camera sometimes gets distracted and goes off the interesting thing that is happening in favour of looking at an ally that has given support or cover fire.

How do I even start?

This SRPG has so much methods to go about playing it. Each character has unique classes and gearing to make every character has a particular role just like any other strategy game but what makes this different is the mastery system which are passives and skills you can apply to characters that you collect off "arresting" others, having a wide variety of decision making on how you wish to build your characters. These masteries can change the whole game from taking whatever damage you receive and throwing it back at the enemy tenfold, sniping across half of an entire map as a reaction, and even just saying no to death; the choices are all yours.

Then comes the unique gear obtainable from crafting/certain enemies that all have an interesting ways to tackle the problems you will face as you encounter more and more enemy factions. It starts off simple, a few guys are tankier than others so lets use a tool/set to ignore block, oh snipers are introduced lets dodge their responsive fire and reduce their critical/exposed damage then ramps up a ton like people breaking your armour and as you can be placed in worse positions than the criminals which really needs you plan ahead. Not to mention the environmental status and how it affects combat like Night and Rain making you reduce your Sight and take more Lightning Damage, there's plenty of status and stats to keep in mind of.

Story was a cute good guys versus evil kind of deal with reasonable motives albeit some of the plot lines felt rushed/not explained properly, I still enjoyed how it was presented and I know there's more games to come to explain this game's universe deeper.

Overall, a great experience that I loved and hope other people see this hidden gem of a game.