Today on hideously overdue reviews, I got video games last Christmas. One of them was Planet Stronghold and it’s…really, really bizarre. You know that thing where fantasy stories are hastily redressed as sci-fi for whatever reason? It’s like that, only even less coherent. There’s a king and psionic powers and hat-wearing alien races, but there’s also actual guns and robots and supercomputers. It’s very, very confusing.

Seriously, there’s a king and he’s wearing ermine robes, because that will be such an important status symbol in the interplanetary empire future. Just look at that. There must be an ermine planet, and he must set aside only the finest ermine pelts from the finest ermines for his own personal wardrobe. Because he’s a king, you see. A king IN SPACE. Because that makes sense.

So. The first thing I’m presented with is gender selection. I was pleased to note that the female option is wearing actual clothes, even if her pose is much less natural than the male’s. So I thought, okay, I’m a guy, I’ll pick the guy, no problems right?

I got to the opening cutscene when this happened:

I have no words, only a gif:

What I discovered is that the developers apparently think that young guys stop demeaning women only to be total jerks to each other. You see, the game frequently gives you a number of dialogue options to choose from at different points; you are free to choose to be nice or polite, but if you’re a guy then the game will ridicule you for it. Every. Single. Time.

Oh, and that “she’s such a jerk but I guess I’ll put up with her because she’s so hot” thing? He will not shut up about it. I didn’t even make it through the prologue before giving up in disgust.

So I restarted and chose the girl instead to see if it was any better. The difference was stark. I was actually allowed to say what I wanted to say without the game berating me for it, the roommate character was far nicer and easier to get along with, and there was not a single instance of her going on about how hot some guy was.

…There is this, though:

So I guess the girl doesn’t actually get to wear proper clothes. I mean seriously, what the heck is that thing.

So yeah. I can choose the dialogue options I want to or I can play as my gender, but not both, and girl players have to make the same choice regarding wearing clothes. This game just hates everybody.

As to the story itself…well. The event that kicks off the plot is the king (because of course in the future we will have kings) summoning you to locate the prince, his only heir to the throne, who has been kidnapped by evil aliens. I immediately wondered if I could rebel and join the evil aliens in overthrowing the monarchy and instituting a form of government that doesn’t suck, but unfortunately the plot veers off in a different direction. It turns out that the prince left of his own free will, and wants to form an alliance with the aliens and overthrow his father, who is a genocidal maniac. O…kay. I helped him perform his coup because he seemed marginally nicer, but this still isn’t fixing the problem of why do we have a monarchy in the future seriously they really suck.

Oh, and though the prince imprisons his father, he grants amnesty to the queen because he’s certain that she didn’t have any involvement in his genocidey plans. Because LOL women, like they can actually do anything.

I then proceed to attempt to unify the alien races through “peaceful” persuasion. Because this is an RPG and everything has to be solved by fighting, this naturally involves lots of murder. The first alien race are a bunch of greedy, deceitful war profiteers who also enslave other aliens, so I didn’t feel too much remorse there, but then the second race are a bunch of supposedly peaceful religious guys who I have to kill because I need to trespass on their holy land in order to broadcast the peace message. You couldn’t have done a modicum of research first and maybe tried broadcasting in an area that didn’t make them attack on sight, guys? Fortunately you can talk some of them down, but there are a few unavoidable fights. And of course if you spend your time murdering random encounters for XP this doesn’t damage your attempts at peacemaking in the slightest.

But let me talk about the first alien race quest, because it’s so, so stupid.

The premise is this: the war is currently benefiting them, so the prince needs to crash their economy. He doesn’t propose a new model that’ll benefit them in peacetime, his plan is just 1) destroy their economy 2) ??? 3) ALL PROBLEMS SOLVED FOREVER. But his plan involves freeing the slaves and I’m down with that, so sure, whatever.

But you know what the drooling moron protagonist does? She walks into their base and is all HEY IT WOULD REALLY SUCK IF YOUR SLAVES ALL REBELLED HUH and then is all “I’m so awesome I think I intimidated their leader!” No you idiot you just ruined the entire plan! If they know the prince is responsible for destroying their economy why would they join him?! THIS IS STUPID

And just in case you still think this could be salvaged, after they free all the slaves the heroes march back into the base and loudly declare that they were responsible for freeing the slaves and then straight-up murder the aliens’ leader. But somehow this convinces them to join happy peace guy and I’m congratulated on what a fantastic diplomat I am, because.

It’s pretty obvious that the game is trying really hard to be deep and meaningful. There’s a lot of stuff about choices and hard decisions and how war sucks, especially in the optional dialogues, but the rest of the game just can’t back it up. The writing is wooden and there is absolutely zero commentary on the fact that you resolve all your problems by fighting despite all the anti-war messages going on. It’s like the main plot and gameplay exist in separate worlds. Unfortunately, it looks like this is just yet another game that tells but does not show how war and fighting is really bad, you guys, without actually challenging the oversaturation of violence in video games.

Oh and there are apparently romance options but I don’t really care about those. You can talk to your crewmates between missions to learn more about their personalities and backstories – presumably, if you get their relationship meter high enough you can start romancing them, but eh. Judging from the male protagonist’s awful dialogue up there I can’t imagine it’s any good to begin with.

As for the gameplay, it’s…eh. Battles tend to be pretty repetitive, since enemies have a lot of health. The basic strategy revolves around there being three different attack modes: you can aim to have less shots but more accuracy and critical hit rate, do a burst shot for more shots but less accuracy, or attack normally. You can also use psychic powers. I found the powers to be balanced really, really poorly. Virtually all of them have a failure rate, so it’s a complete crapshoot as to whether or not you’ll just waste your points. You can supercharge them by increasing the cost, but the scale makes no sense. There are some powers where you can double the cost and only get a 5% increase in effectiveness, for instance. Messing around with the status effect ones is usually a waste of time, too. For instance, there’s a power that reduces an enemy’s defenses for a few turns, which will translate to maybe like 15 more points of damage overall if you make sure to attack every turn. Instead you could just use the direct-damage spell, which can inflict around 50 points of damage instantly for a smaller cost.

Everyone can theoretically use the powers, but unless they’re a psionic they may as well not bother because without investing a lot of points in psionics the powers are pretty useless. Most powers are actually unusable to non-psionics until they get a lot of level ups because the mana costs are so high. (Ironically, the ones that cost the most are the status effect ones, which are probably the only ones that could be useful for non-psionics.)

The game also uses an aggro mechanic, where characters can become prime targets depending on their actions. Interestingly, healing is included in this as well, which I don’t think is something that aggro mechanics often include. It does make it so you need to be careful using your squishy healers instead of just having the tanks provoke everything and calling it a day. In practice, though, it’s kind of undermined by the fact that special skills seem to completely ignore aggro, which kinda makes me wonder what’s the point? Special skills are the most damaging, so if there’s nothing you can do to protect your frailer characters from them it’s kind of silly to include a mechanic that protects them from regular attacks.

I tended to find battles pretty easy, just really, really long. The game heaps healing items on you constantly so you’re never really in danger of running out. There are occasionally attempts to make things harder by limiting your party size, but most of the time I found I could still breeze through fights by spamming healing items and psychic powers.

The game makes a token effort at being a real RPG by giving people “non-combat skills” that can be used to solve sidequests and bypass obstacles, but the implementation is atrocious. Every challenge is a luck-based affair. Higher levels in the relevant skills give you a higher chance of succeeding, but there’s nothing preventing you from save scumming to try it again. Unless there are some really high-level challenges that can give a success rate of 0, you really don’t even need to invest in the skills at all.

I haven’t reached the end, but I’m not going to bother because it shows no signs of getting better. And the gameplay is grueling awfulness, besides. Give this one a pass.