Original Release: Love In Space, 2014, PC
Hex-grid strategy meets dating sim in this unique title.
Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius (PC, Love in Space, 2014)
Where to Buy: Free download at GOG or Steam (with optional paid add-on chapters)
Review by: Master-B
Sunrider is something of a spiritual follow-up to Power Dolls, but adds the prospect of romancing the mecha-piloting waifus in addition to blowing stuff up with them. Not only that but you can eventually get a bit of the ol’ slap and tickle in (though only if you pay for added episodes and apply a special patch linked below – the two free chapters available through GOG and Steam offer no dating aspects and only a meager bare boobie to tide you over). Also kinda resembles Pretty Soldier Wars though with more vanilla romance rather than sensual monster cuddles.
It’s a shoestring budget production in the Renpy visual novel engine for the most part, but they added what little flourishes they could to try to make a proper commercial product out of it. There’s a good amount of voice work, little animations in battle for firing/taking fire/asploding, and an almost comically dramatic soundtrack full of gratuitous Latin choir chanting.
The game does make for something of a weird combination. Visual novel waifu fans might be put off by what can be a fairly challenging hex-grid strategy game right from the early missions, and one that requires a fair amount of between-mission micromanaging of resources. Hex grid strategy gamers might get reeled in by the screenshots only to be confused and disturbed by the “I Can’t Believe My Mech Pilot Is This Cute!” stuff. At least for the former group, there is a “visual novel” difficulty setting that makes battles so easy it’s almost impossible to lose if you just want to read the story and make waifu decisions of great consequence.
The default difficulty and higher settings are pretty tough, but it leans more toward what I like to call a “puzzle SRPG.” In the sense that there’s usually one “right” way to approach each map that you’re expected to suss out, and doing anything else gets you run over. Not much room to plot your own strategies and no real responding to dynamic conditions. It’s also one of those games where enemy reinforcements will just appear suddenly in the middle of maps. Not a big fan of either of those things myself, though it is a basically solid and mechanically sound turn-based strategy game that may well engage fans of such things.
It’s also free to try through Steam and GOG, so no cost if anything about this weird flavor seems appealing to you. The developers did take the “crack dealer” approach with this one though; offer up the first two episodes free, then ask for payment for the juicy main episodes (which retail for around $40 all together but seem to be on sale for more like $10 a lot of the time). They also did a pretty sneaky end run about getting flagged for “H” on these platforms by having you download a separate patch that unlocks the goodies (though only in the paid episodes).
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