Reverse Collapse: Codename Bakery enters a long line of games that have atrocious names, although fails to take the crown from void* tRrLM2(); //Void Terrarium 2.
Codename Bakery is a turn based tactics RPG on PC set in the Girls Frontline universe. This is a series I have actively and loyally avoided for years now but I was pleasantly surprised by what I got in practically every regard. After my last review I didn’t fully comprehend the mental toll the bad translation of Ex Astris had had on me, so being immediately presented with yet another anime game with a hint of mobile origins low key gave me PTSD. Fortunately the translation is rock solid and well written and the story makes sense right out the gate. Apart from a fairly easy to follow lore dump In the intro It starts small and grows from there giving you time to get to know each character. The cutscenes are low budget, but the game is polished where it counts in the gameplay.
Fights take place on decently sized grid maps with scatterings of environmental props to be used and abused. We’re talking high ground, regular ground, forest cover, chest high cover, houses the same size as people cover, all of these mess with hit chances and defence. It’s nice and snappy and bad positioning can mean a swift end to your units if you aren’t careful.
One thing I wasn’t expecting was stealth sections avoiding unit alert ranges as well as environmental effects like fog which can occlude units from view. A sneaky kill will result in AI going to your last known location, giving you a bit of time to sneak off into the woods.
Scenarios are couched with a preparation phase where you can use the materials won during the last encounter to level up character abilities and forge new equipment or upgrade to do more damage. There’s no free roaming, it’ll hit you with a story beat and immediately chuck you into the next encounter.
Characters have a pool of action points each turn to blow through and the variety of kit available gives you ample amounts of strategies to fiddle with. You can roll back a turn if you’ve messed up so misclicks aren’t the end of the world.
Each mission has a number of subgoals to be achieved for a perfect clear, and glowing points around the map contain bonus gear to be used at the next preparation. There are also documents dotted around. You’ll need to collect all these if you want more game later. I won’t explain further.
There’s a deluxe edition with some bonus art, soundtrack and outfit.
A completionist run for full collection + getting to all ending completion, is around 100 hrs.
So should you get this game? I don’t know who you even are but I will say that this, I feel like this games marketing does it no favours, but if you get past that there’s a pretty great little story based tactics game to be found.
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