Planet Stronghold 2

What a thrilling experience. The writing was improved tremendously between the 1st and 2nd game. It introduces interesting politics between factions, while doing an amazing job of setting up that the situation is constantly tense and dire. This is a hidden gem and an amazing one at that.

Recommended on sale for fans of the original. Some clunky systems and a strong tether to the first game may make it less approachable for newcomers, but for those familiar it is worth rejoining the cast. However, there isn't enough new or added to be worth full price expectations in light of some stumbling blocks. I would recommend you also check out Sunrider, Our Adventurer Guild, Magical Diary Wolf Hall, Sakura Dungeon, Serment Contract with a Devil, or Cherry Tree High Girls Fight that all have better polish on their systems.

+Art style
+Class/skills customization
+Exploration, events, quests
+Impactful choices
+Continues the story where it left off
+Some good music tracks
+Character alignment, relationships
+Save anytime
+Turn-based battles
+Some battle voice/barks
+Auto battle option
+Variety of weapons, armor, items
+Choices on level up

-Barebones options
-Can't customize appearance
-Lacking tooltips
-Mouse only
-Some hidden controls (H to hide UI)
-No rebinding
-Buggy, some error screens, UI/stat issues
-Tutorial text info dump
-Some areas lack any music
-No voiced dialogue
-Some sound effects are piercing
-Poor volume normalization
-Low quality battle voice
-Lacking backstory for new players
-Unclear what party members approve until after decisions
-Awkward formation, battle, and equip UI
-Unclear direction at times
-Many equipment sidegrades, comparison difficulties
-No skill use on auto
-Severe MP (PP) limits skill use
-'Chance to hit' is very inaccurate
-Lacking/absent animations
-Hidden speed up function (battle menu options circle icon)
-No new party characters, similar story from first game
-Some balance issues

Planet stronghold II is an adventure game, with a fully adult cast. At first glance it might seem to be a visual novel with a lot of choices, but in the native mode fighting enemies and soldier management will take up a lot of time too. Thankfully the combat system is interesting enough. While the game can be played in visual novel mode too, I wouldn’t recommend it for the first playthrough. All it does is auto complete successfully all combat, but without XP and loot reward. It renders all combat skills, all equipment and leveling up useless. Buying/selling, upgrading equipment has no point. Also the fights add a much needed change to the game’s pace.

The graphics of the game is good. The character portraits are aesthetic. In the visual novel parts they will have several expressions and poses. The backgrounds are reasonably detailed, and there will be a lot of different locations.

I liked the music, there was enough variety for it to not become grating. There was only one combat music, but even that was reasonably neutral. In fact most music was surprisingly good for such an indy title. If you finish the game, you will listen to a song, that continues into the credits. The game has ‘voice acting’, but that is mostly a few acknowledgement lines by the various characters.

The game has a surprisingly robust tutorial. While the UI is still a bit confusing, few developers bother to integrate actually useful tutorial hints in their games, throughout the whole game. In special the game will tell you when to save before a major choice, offering an easy option for subsequent alternate choices. Also it notifies you before there will follow a possibly tight timing for quests.

The combat is standard 2D turn based combat. It was more lengthy than in usual RPGs. The damage done is small, exacerbated by the various damage mitigation options. The enemies can heal, or use other damage mitigation options, dragging really out the combat. Than again, eventually your team can learn skills too interfere with those skills.

Speaking of skills, there are a lot of those. Some are class dependent, some are character unique, and some are used only for the visual novel parts, offering at least to start an encounter with an advantage. A useful game function is the full upgrade list, showing exactly what the upgrade levels 1-5 will do with the skill. Each character will have a story skill already started, and each character has a different one. Early on you will miss a few characters for some social skills, but don’t start it on others. Eventually a character will join you with that skill. For your main character I would highly suggest the psychic social skill, as it will reveal the full stats of the enemies. There will be a few case when only reduced number of NPCs will be available, but the main character is a safe bet to be present in most of those situations, and in some cases even required.

While not immediately obvious, the defend option should be used early on a lot by the psi users – because defending recovers noticeably more mana. Their important skills use mana, and without defense it regens very slowly, realistically only through consumables. That will not be a problem though at late game. Also, if you see the low ammo warning, you should just defend to reload, the character will reactivate quite soon – much better than running out of ammo mid skill.

The game can be played only with mouse and keyboard, but mainly mouse. It didn’t use the controller in any way for me, not even to progress the dialog.

The game is paced by days. The main events will play out on a given day, but the free roaming missions will remain open for several days. That limit is very forgiving, since a whole area can be completed in a single day. At least on normal difficulty I didn’t got overwhelmed by health loss, and even heavy fatigue seemed to have little effect on the players. At the end of the day your team fully recovers. Still, to fall in pace with the games rhythm, I cleared half a zone each day. Eventually each member will get a personal quest, the reward being a legendary item usable only by that person.

The soldiers require proper gear. They will be efficient against enemies in level appropriate gear (though the helmets gave so little stat that I generally just ignored those till midgame). The ones dropped by the enemies will be mostly trash, you get better ones in the shops. Though once an epic, or very good stat item is obtained, it can be upgraded to higher levels – for example Damiens starting machine gun will remain relevant throughout the whole game, if upgraded constantly. In that sense after kitting out a soldier with epic items, just upgrading those will save a lot of headache for item hunting. Eventually I just sold everything to the shops or salvaged them. The only things I bought were consumables, and just kept upgrading everyone’s gear.

The exterior fights take place in zones on the planet map. At first only a few zone will be available at the left of the map, but eventually most of the map will be covered with such zones space at some distance from each other. Each zone starts unexplored. As you explore it, you will encounter enemies or locations. Most of the times you can decide whether engage those, or leave them alone for the moment. The level of possible encounters is displayed in the zone icon. Also if some quest requires interaction in that zone, a yellow star will indicate that on the zone’s icon. At the bottom of the screen you will see the relevant quest’s name. Most quests have a generous time limit, but they will fail if you don’t complete them by then. Some quests don’t have a time limit. One early quest bugged out for me, and due to the events in the game it remained unfinishible. yet still not failed. But I didn’t encounter any other bug with quests, or the game.

The game has a very generous save system. You can save everywhere, even during combat if you wish, or any time during the dialog. Even when a decision shows up, the right mouse button will bring up the save screen. There are 6 slots to save to on each page, and 10 pages. I used only the first page for my first playthrough, and put a few tentative checkpoints on the second page. The last save will have a yellow colored text, so you will always see what has to be loaded to continue from the last save. The game might do autosaves, but I always relied on manual saves.

The game has a free DLC, for the uncensored romances. During each playthrough, without reloads there will be only one romance, towards the end of the game. The full mode took me 42h to finish, and I experienced 44% of the content during that. It was on the empire’s side, I romanced Rumi from the start, was fully friendly, and got the From the inside ending – a bittersweet one, that felt to be the realistic outcome. I tested the visual novel mode with Lisa, mostly for the game mechanics changes, but didn’t progress much with it.

One quality of life function missed was the bulk buy of consumables. Instead of always increasing to the max quantity by click spamming, a buy all button would have made that part that much more convenient. The game can be played full screen or windowed. I chose to play windowed, a small 720p height window was used. I just upscaled that to full screen with an upscaler.

During the visual novel parts you will have to make a lot of decisions. Each decision will have an effect, modifying your relation with the given person into friendly or rival way. Some decisions will affect the relation of several persons at once, some for friendly, some for more rivalry. I was pretty bad at figuring out how to remain friendly, mostly hovered at neutral or worse. Also there is a separate meter which puts the main character on an emphatic-egoist meter, mostly for the sake of role playing. There is a still minor combat bonus depending on that.

The game was stable, it didn’t crash for me.

Cudos to the team who made this masterpiece! I remember the Loren princess, enjoyed it ages ago, have a good feeling about this one too :) Now I only have to persuade Steam to always show me the titles from the devs I love ^^

As an RPG, Planet Stronghold II is mediocre: The combat is decent, but grindy, and too dependent upon having characters and equipment of the highest possible level. Also, there's too much damage reduction and healing (and enemies have it too), so combat is often a slog.

But as a VN, it's excellent: There is a rich sci-fi world, with interesting, original aliens, deep, compelling characters, and a complex, engaging storyline with decisions that feel meaningful and important.

You'll find yourself wanting to finish the combat quickly so you can get back to the story. (There is an auto-combat feature that helps with that.)

I may just be me, but I found the story to be slow and boring and the graphics / artwork amateur, just not my cup of tea.

i hated for the bugs, then after complaining it to the dev they fixed it within 3 hour. would recomended the game. good dev. but i still hate forced to play other character than my own. i'm here to be a hero, not babysit hitler face guy with drinking problem.

I did a run-through of the original before playing this game, to remind myself what happened, and it took me 16 hours. One (completionist) play-through of this game took me 40 hours. In both cases, there's a whole other narrative side of things warranting at least one more play-through. In summary: it was fun!

There were issues, though: there was the typical rpg problem where you're struggling at the beginning, and roflstomping everything by the end (I was 2-shotting bosses by the endgame), there were a number of bugs - all minor, like I had text from one window not clearing on moving to another once, at another point 2 characters were superimposed on top of each other, small things like that. Nothing big. Another ... not quite 'issue', but 'strangeness' was that at one point there was this whole new mechanic involving splitting the party, with a whole new interface ... and it never comes up again. At least, it didn't in the route I took. Oh, and I could access a teammate's personal quest at a point where it referred to main plot events which hadn't quite happened yet. Not a major problem, but again, just another small thing to add to the pile. Your relationships with characters move a slider between 'friendship' and 'rivalry', and I never got the impression that anything mattered in the relationship other than that bar. Maybe it does, it's just hidden, but the only thing I *noticed* being checked was the slider. Encourages a rather 'gamey' mindset, and you have to have self-discipline to not just roll-back if you made a decision which makes the slider go a way you don't want.

The combat mechanics are decent - nothing too complex, but there's enough there to avoid boredom, for at least one play-through. But really, you play it for the story and characters. And they're good, but not brilliant. The characters are entertaining enough to sustain interest, but they're not particularly deep or complex (edit: actually, there was one character who had a bit of development which pleasantly surprised me, as I did not see it coming, so it's not entirely shallow). There are factions you have to deal with, but a main antagonistic faction felt rather under-developed. Maybe their background is explored more in another route? (There is a sidequest I somehow missed, so it is possible).

In summary: it's not going to change your life. But if you enjoyed the first one, you should definitely enjoy this one. If you haven't played the first one, I'd start there. As I said at the beginning, it's not a particularly long game, and you can probably grab it cheap. This one has entertaining enough characters, a good enough story, and - very important to me - a satisfying ending (at least the one I got, there's a load others). At the price we pay, there's a lot of content value here. Good enough to get a 'thumbs up' from me.

Yall just had to make this game huh. Well i am happy you did but mad because now i have to choose. I hate Choosing there is so many Romance Options i want to do and i dont exactly feel like playing through the entire game. 12 times or more... Not including playing through the first one.... I will probably do these things i am just saying that it makes me upset.... I am Indecisive as all heck how dare you give me choices...

All in all the game is awesome the only complain i have is well how the MC personality is... It is honestly just two ways and that is kinda well boring. THough with all the choices you get the make it makes this less of a big deal by quite a bit. The only other complaint i have is well why cant i be with Cliff as a female. All in all this is such a great game the story and everything is awesome. So yea i recommend this game.

Very fun game, and a good sequel to PS 1. Lots of different choices to make, different plot paths to pursue, (optional) romance quests, endings, and of course Achievements. A good marriage of RPG, visual novel, and (again optional) dating sim. For the dating sim part of the game, there's an optional censorship DLC so you can toggle off what you may or may not want to experience.

The developer is friendly and responsive, and I had a lot of fun w/ the game. I didn't care necessarily for the backup (don't mean that in a cruel way) artist, though some subjects came out better than others. My only constructive criticism would be this game needs a lot of proofreading. Typos are somewhat rare, but grammar and syntax (and missing small articles & words) show up as infrequent issues. Not enough to ruin my enjoyment, but there's room for improvement there.

Looking forward to another game like this from WW.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED Ratings : 9/10

Planet Stronghold 2 is another excellent game that I enjoyed tremendously. Although it is a bit expensive, I felt that it is worth it, because it give me 100+ hours of fun and enjoyment. This game also have great replayability as I played it more than 10 times to get the 75 achievements.

This game is a wonderful blend of both RPG and VN; both genre that I loved very much. As for RPG, you have the option of choosing 4 different starting classes (soldier, guardian, scout, psionics), and 2 different factions (empire, rebels). You can also choose either male or fema You even have the option to toggle nudity and erotic text too, without the need to download any special patches, as in most other games.

Another strong point of this game is the 11 different endings, all of which are totally different, exciting and enjoyable to read. There is also the thrill of finding a different ending depending on the choices that you made throughout the game. Unfortunately, most of the time I get the same endings, so I feel a sense of triumph whenever a totally new ending occurs.

You can play this game in 4 different difficulty settings. There is also a "Visual Novel" setting that allows you to skip all the fights if you are just seeking different endings or different romances.

Planet Stronghold 2 is a game that I wholeheartedly recommend. This game is so good that after finishing it, I bought Planet Stronghold 1 and am playing it right now.

I love this game, it's been an absolute joy to read from start to finish. So I'll do my best to leave a detailed review for those who want more information than "It's great just buy it already". (But for those of you who don't want detail, JUST BUY THE GAME IT'S GREAT!)
Below I'll list some things I noticed as I played, both good and bad:
I just recently finished my first run of the game as Joshua romancing Milo and I honestly just loved it. There were a couple moments that made me go "oh woah, okay, oh my god!" but that was mostly due to me downloading the optional DLC that makes things more risque, so I asked for it, and how could I possibly complain! (It was great)
The PROS:
- The romances are not rushed, they take time to develop and feel more natural that way.

- I didn't expect to enjoy the grid based world exploration or even the combat system, I bought the game primarily to read the story, but as I progressed I found myself actually LOVING the combat. And the grid based exploration is a good way of displaying a larger world in a very simple way.

- I played on normal difficulty, and I found myself actively seeking new combat encounters simply because I thought they were really fun. I grouped up my MC (a Psionic) with Damien, Tom, and Milo and it was an incredibly fun combat experience the whole way through.

- The Romance is very fun, but the combat and world building of the storytelling are just as great if not better.

- Less of a pro/con but more of a recommendation: Character levels and especially GEAR levels makes a HUGE difference in this game even on normal difficulty. If you want to go through this without insane difficulty in combat you need to upgrade your gear, and make sure to engage every enemy you can to gain experience. Unless of course you're playing on easy mode, but I highly recommend normal as the bare minimum for your first play through.

- I can't attest to the other romance "lock-in" scenes yet (no spoilers) but Milos was hilarious and adorable. He says a bunch of meta stuff while playing a "dating holodisc game" by Galactic Wolf or something like that, and references things that the Winter Wolves Dev has experienced or gone through. I thought it was really silly and enjoyed it a lot.

CONS (mostly just critiques that you can take or leave):

- I'm not sure if this is a bug or something on my end but through a vast majority of the game I couldn't scroll up to review the chat log of the conversation I was in. There were times that I was able to so I know it's implemented, but more times than not I was unable to and it became frustrating. Sometimes I read super fast and click without really thinking and then realize during the next panel of dialog that I don't remember what they said to me 10 seconds ago, and I'd appreciate being able to scroll up to see it at any given time.

- There are times that in order to gain approval with one of your companions you HAVE to flirt with them. The other dialog option makes you sound rude, and you lose approval with them. I'm primarily reminded of dialog with both Rumi and Rebecca where if I wanted to increase their approval of me I HAD to be flirty. Now not a big deal obviously if you play a Joshua that's into women, but the plan for my Joshua was for him to be into men, so him flirting with Rumi/Rebecca just felt really weird. But I wanted high approval with every one of my teammates so it felt necessary. I'd really have liked a neutral option like... Heeey, yeah you're beautiful and everything but uh, I like dudes.

- Playing as female Nelson (Lisa) after my first playthrough as male Nelson (Joshua), I couldn't help but wonder why she has NO muscle definition at all... Joshua is freaking RIPPED! Yet Lisa, who has the same level of training, looks soft and squishy. I get it, that's the normal female body that people find attractive, but it just felt really unrealistic. A military commander should be VERY STRONG no matter their gender. I'd have loved a more defined muscle tone on Lisa and even Rebecca seeing as her shtick is that she is constantly working out.

-There's no way to "lock" items in your inventory so you don't accidentally sell them/salvage them. Not a big deal, but I'd have liked it at later points in the game especially.

- There are some minor grammar issues, they occasionally took me out of the moment a little especially in dialog between me and Milo (the one I was romancing on my first playthrough) but nothing game breaking.

- I found most of the female voices to be very annoying as they are all kind of high pitched and overly stereotypical "girly" sounding. That being said, I am a woman and perhaps I just don't like the overly girly sounding voices, and you don't hear characters voices all THAT often so take this with a grain of salt. But every single woman in this game has a high pitched girly-girl voice except for Shiler, so it got a little old.

SO there you have it, if you read this all than I hope it helped, but in all honesty you shouldn't even debate about getting the game or not. It's so great, just get it and enjoy it. My expectations were blown out of the water. Thank you Dev for creating such great stories, your visual novels are by far my favorite of any I've seen.

I played the first game a month ago and was disappointed about the writing and character development. Then I saw that a sequel was being released and I decided to give it a shot. No regrets, this game was so much fun to play, the writing has greatly improved, the romance scenes were lovely, the characters have been nicely fleshed out to the point where you get attached to all of them and even Philipp's sacrifice really hit me in the feels. I was legitimately sad and I love the background story that was given to him.

I played -and loved- Planet Stronghold 1 back in the day a lot.
So, needless to say, I was thrilled when I found out that PS 2 was finally out after years of development.

Currently, I'm about half way through - at least I do hope so, since I don't want the game to come to an end just yet. And I love pretty much every minute of it.
Everyone who played PS 1 will recognize the art, characters, gameplay (for most parts) and the humour - though, I have to say, with Milo on board the "humour" spiked quite a bit. His humour is not necessarily always appropriate but he does get reprimanded for it.
Something else that spikes in a weird (but already known) way is the difficulty. Especially after main events and/or venturing into new areas, it's quite possible to get your ass kicked. Especially if you either didn't buy new equipments or upgrade the current one.
After that it can become VERY easy during certain fights (playing in Normal) but the old source of frustration -that is, enemies healing their allies back to health even after they got K.O.ed or having a group of enemies who all use 'Protect' on each other- is still here. Boy, did I miss that. Well, maybe not but it does make it challenging at times while still being manageable in Normal mode.

The story so far is quite intriguing, having me wonder how things would have played out if I had chosen the other starting point. That alone is incentive enough for me to go back and replay it in full length. Even though I would probably feel bad to have sided with King Oscar.

A very big "problem", however, is the fact that a certain former "gangster" has stolen my heart and will quite likely be the reason for me to break up with Tom. Especially because I was reminded soon enough why I had my fair shair of trouble with that handsome white hair in PS1. I should've just chosen Damien or no one as a transfer romance looooool VN Mode for the rescue I guess.
To put it in other terms: I really like how the characters get some more backstory and their share of fleshing out in the second installment. In particular Damien since he had not much screen time in PS1 and neither was he a playable part of the team.
I AM worried that Avae and Lakadema will suffer a similar fate but I'll see how that goes.


Tl;Dr: Just go and buy it, you won't regret this if you are either a fan of VNs and/or the certain battle gameplay.
And the OST is great, too. Probs worth picking that up as well along the way.

Tl,DR^2: Thanks for that wonderful game, Jack. It really made my whole week to learn that it finally came out.
Stay healthy, keep up the good work and I'll look forward to play Loren 2, whenever that may be.

fantastik game haven't finished the story yet, but the UI is one of the best Winter Wolves have ever made, the characters is looking good, I mean there is nothing more to say beside it is a fantastik VN/RPG/SCI-FI game.

I personal have something i don't like ,but it is minor things, like the map when you in the hovercraft, I cant really tell on what box i am in, and I just prefer the front row back row combat, there is in Loren and SW.

But it is so small thing that I don't like, that all the good things just push it away.

I can't say much about the story haven't finished it yet, soooooo....

Edite: just finished the game, I can not understand how people can hate on this game the story OMFG it is good, the choices, the thinking, who is should you help and who would smack your ass. I love it

Planet Stronghold 2 is an amazing game. This is everything I expected and wanted from a RPG/Visual Novel hybrid. Really I think that giants like BioWare should learn, that you don't need unlimited amount of money to create something deep, fun and replayable. I might be old timer, used to play on PSX so Amazing graphics isn't important to me, but honestly, if anyone has any doubts, don't. This game is worth it!! I'm moved by story and characters. Battle system is not boring, it's fun. Classes are customisable. Many skill to learn, but it's not overwhelming. Romances takes time to build, like in real life. Great job Winterwolves!!!! <3

Planet Stronghold 2 is a solid sequel, having a captivating story while maintaining the gameplay from their first game (since it's been a long time since i played PS1, i really can't point if something changed, but at the very least it is similar).

While it is not needed to play the first game, it is fun for those who like to know the details of the whole story. The reason it is not needed it is because at the beggining you can choose a few important decisions that were made at the first game, and if you romanced anyone or not.

I have been waiting for this game for a long time, and after playing enough to give a better review, i recommend for all who like both VN or RPG games (there is an option for those who like to read VN only, where the battles are all skipped). If you have doubts about buying even so, you can wait for a sale to buy it.

I've played quite a lot of Winterwolves games and can say that a lot of effort went into this one! Great job! Compared to other games from this developer PS2 feels more mature, robust, more detailed. If you played the first part, you'll clearly see the evolution. The plot is more serious, humor is more strategically placed, characters feel more flashed out. Especially the old cast! Gotta say, I didn't expect to like Rebecca so much with her hot chick stereotype. I'm still angry at her though - she got all the hot guys before me! Avae being the exception and that's only because he lived in a cave all his life... lol
I've played all the male romances and several endings and I mostly liked them all. Damien still being my favourite (even Tom looked nice. I'm against smoking in real life, but his "camp talk" picture looked sexy with the cigarette). I guess the old romances finally blossomed in part 2 so they feel more complete compared to new ones. But Milo and Avae just look so cute...
On the side note, I was pleasantly surprised by the soundtrack! The level up screen totally rocked xD
The CG art was gorgeous! Both explicit and "modest" in my opinion. I like the anime\cartoon blend artstyle here.
Hope you're reading this, Jack! Thumbs up!

My early opinion is this a solid role playing, visual novel hybrid game. The game gives you agency to customize your experience, and while you are free to enjoy it as a visual novel you would be missing out on a solid role playing experience, including thoughtful turn based combat, multiple ways to accomplish tasks (including non combative options), area exploration and a detailed gearing system. The story is compelling and riddled with twisting branches of choices that have impact. It is all packaged together with a pleasant art presentation and a fitting soundtrack.

If you are a fan of Winter Wolves' prior works than I can recommend this as game for you, if you never tried any of them, then this a great game to start with despite being a continuation, it can easily be enjoyed as a stand alone game.

Clearly an inferior version of the previous Planet Stronghold, both gameplay wise and graphically.

Edit: Fair enough, it looks the same as Planet Stronghold 1, from 2011. The character and backgrounds are the same, fine. Still it's reused stuff with a 30$ tag price.

Come on, you did way better with Planet Stronghold Colonial Defense, Cursed Lands and Amazon Princess.

I love your game, but this is just Planet Stronghold v.2.0.

Usually I don’t write a review without going through at least most of the game, but Planet Stronghold 2 has become an exception: interesting story, original world, nice graphics and good gameplay. In addition, this is the third game in the series and a direct successor to PS 1, allowing its story to continue.
Of course, there is an official "patch")
Highly recommend!