Planet Stronghold
A choice-laden narrative and attractive soundtrack are minor positives for a game let down by an immature story, horrible dialogue, and boring, badly implemented / balanced combat. Avoid unless frustration is your preferred form of masochism.
First the choices. There are a lot of choices, and they do branch convincingly: if you wanted to romance a certain character and screw it up, there’s no way to charm yourself back into their good graces. Find a save, and re-load. The choices aren’t just about romancing: every single member of your party has dialogues and side missions that will unlock if you talk to them enough and make the right dialog choices. Even faction alliances are contained within mutually exclusive dialog choices. Full marks for a branching narrative.
– Real player with 20.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Aliens Indie Games.
I had long wanted to play this game, as well as Winter Wolves' Loren The Amazon Princess, mostly because I was curious as to how well an RPG made in a visual novel engine would work. Now that I’ve finished this game once, I can say that its value lies mostly in being a curiosity, an example of what is possible in Ren’Py.
Unfortunately, whether I look at it as a visual novel with RPG combat or as an RPG with visual novel storytelling, as a game Planet Stronghold falls short.
The RPG part alternates between dull and irritating. The battles themselves fall into predictable patterns. I’ve seen the threat mechanic before in other indie RPGs, so it wasn’t particularly impressive to me.
– Real player with 17.4 hrs in game
Planet Stronghold: Colonial Defense
First of all this game is a pretty unique mix, it has some flaws yes, but its strengths definitely outweighs them.
The card game, while unusual for such a game is actually really good. Compared to the standart rpg fights in similar games where you have 3 or 4 different spells or attacks and you just have to see which type of elemental damage does the most harm and spam that and throw in a heal or stun from time to time, the card battles feel more challenging. On the highest difficulty level you actually have to think about which cards suit in which situation. Also it kinda suits the theme. While in fantasy settings I prefer the party of heroes wandering around fighting its battles itself, here it feels more like you are the base commander managing troops and resources of your colony and thinking strategically.
– Real player with 33.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Aliens Card Battler Games.
One of the worst Winter Wolves' games out of the ones I have played. It has very few redeeming qualities and while I usually like WW games despite their flaws, I had a hard time enjoying this one.
Characters
Unfortunately, the characters were very weak in this game. WW can create some interesting characters and I know this, but in this case, I think they missed the opportunity to do so. The good news is that there are many characters you can choose to romance (with the free DLC). The bad news is that the characters felt shallow and unrealistic. I know you don’t play these games for their realism, but one would expect them to at least have some common sense. Instead it seemed like they were doing the most irrational things. For example at some point
! the rebel guy implied that he has assassinated people. Why would he admit that in front of people who are military officers? It makes no sense.
– Real player with 18.4 hrs in game