Planet Stronghold 2

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

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.

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.