izigame.me

Figured I'd get this review out of the way, as I spent a little over 2 hours in it, and I'm past the point of refunding. Apologies if the review isn't structured well enough, this is a first impressions based on the time that I've had with it, and I haven't had enough time to sort out my thoughts proper.
I can look at this game from a few angles. That this is probably the best PC port that SHADE or D3Publisher has put out yet (All of their previous ports sucked horribly, although there's still problems with this one that could be addressed in patches), or from the angle that I feel absolutely nothing from the gameplay (None of these Senran Kagura clones, not even NxSK from Tamsoft has filled the void that Burst Renewal and Estival Versus left). And this is even before mentioning how suspect their current localization decisions are (Sorry, using American slang like "Gen Z" in a game that is predominantly Japanese in nature is cringe no matter how you spin it), especially coming from stuff like Gun Gun Pixies a few years ago. EDIT: They have since patched out the "Gen Z" crap, thank god.
This game clearly needed more time in the oven, considering the crashing issues that I've heard regarding the PS5 release, and the PC port also having it's fair share of issues, which I plan on bringing up soon enough.
The gameplay feels like a weird amalgamation of Senran Kagura and Nioh with none of the appeal those games have. Higher difficulty options are locked behind subsequent playthroughs, which really doesn't help matters with how boring the game is to play. You can't chain different types of attack combinations to do different moves, which makes the combat somehow feel more shallow than a Dynasty Warriors game. You can straight up spam heavy attacks on bosses to quickly wipe them out and treat them like trashmobs. The camera feels claustrophobic (and borderline motion sickness inducing at times) in a lot of occasions, but increasing the FOV from 40 degrees to 60 using external tools like UnityExplorer helps out a ton with this.
I don't think the game looks terrible, but there's some things that really shouldn't be used as a crutch to hide character model imperfections. One thing that comes to mind is the extreme usage of chromatic aberration during cutscenes and gameplay. That effect alone make it look as eye-searing as Bloodborne at times when paired with the amount of aliasing that is going on (Unity URP defaults to 2X MSAA, and has FXAA/SMAA as additional options, but nothing outside of the MSAA is being used), I'd love an option to just completely disable that crap. The in-game motion blur effect seemingly being used also decreases in visibility the higher the in-game framerate. The recycling of character poses and animations during the ADV segments come off as melodramatic and even cheesy at times.
The PC port only has the option to adjust the resolution, and those are a couple hardcoded options (luckily including 2560x1080, 3440x1440, and 5120x2160), but you can run the game in borderless windowed mode to luckily force it to whatever screen resolution you are using. Although it's missing fallbacks for stuff like 16:10 resolutions (like on the Steam Deck), as a result, some of the UI stuff crops slightly, and you have to use the resolution options on Steam to force the game to run at 720p with the correct aspect ratio. This could be fixed by also handling use cases of aspect ratios narrower than 16:9, and moving the camera FOV to a Major Axis system that switches between Vertical and Horizontal scaling based on the display aspect ratio. But coming from the previous ports, I'll give SHADE some props, a non-NISA PC port having ultrawide support out of the box (Although there's one issue with the options menu having incorrect anchoring at the moment, which results in the letterboxes cropping it), and a borderless mode that works with whatever resolution you throw at it without mods is worth commending. Especially when you're using an engine where this stuff is RIDICULOUSLY easy to support.
There are no graphics options, and as I stated before, the game is running with some post-processing effects and 2X MSAA by default, with no option to adjust these, or the resolution scale for 3D rendering (Which I have had luck adjusting).
There is a very noticeable bug with camera movement where it is oddly tied to a FixedUpdate rate of 60FPS (Which results in stutter above 60FPS), I have seen plenty of other Unity games with this same problem, and it should be easy on the developer side to move the camera updates to a delta time or interpolation based system. Raising the FixedUpdate rate using UABE isn't an option, as it turns out, the distance from jumping is negatively affected by quite a bit the lower you raise this value, there is one portion in the beginning of the game that can't be completed due to the skeleton trashmob enemies not jumping far enough. This desperately needs a fix, as the game otherwise behaves fine running with an unlocked framerate. I would have investigated this problem by now, but the problem is that the game uses IL2CPP (Which translates C# code to C++ and then to machine code), and this effectively acts like obfuscation which makes viewing or making changes IL code for certain functions extremely difficult. I've seen another game (that has yet to come out), which has this same problem regarding character movement, uses IL2CPP (Although I got my hands on a Mono build by accident), and not only did I not notice any performance difference between IL2CPP and Mono, I patched the problem quickly.
There are weird inconsistencies and some jank regarding how keyboard and mouse support is in this game. You cannot press the left mouse button during ADV segments to continue the dialogue, or the right mouse button to hide the UI. You are stuck using the keyboard to progress. Likewise, in the camp segments of the game, when you go to the options menu, you can't exit using the Escape key, you have to use Q. Likewise in the equipment menu, you cannot use Left or Right to cycle between characters, you have to use Z and X. You also cannot use the right mouse button to back out of these. Luckily a lot of these menus still work with mouse navigation. You also cannot skip past the opening sequences that play before you start a level on a keyboard, while you can press A to skip them on a controller. There's also extremely noticeable mouse acceleration and uneven mouse sensitivity going on (Which makes moving the camera around or aiming explosives to be a massive pain), and an option to have a raw 1-1 mouse input without any sort of smoothing going on would be appreciated. There's some occasions where the main menu refuses to accept any sort of controller input.
The game luckily supports PlayStation controllers without needing SteamInput (Thanks to Unity's NewInput system), but you are still stuck with Xbox button prompts. While I do appreciate there being a separate toggle for KB/M and controller prompts (I.E: When dealing with trackpads like on the Steam Controller, stuff like gyro aim, or analog keypads like the Razer Tartarus Pro or Wooting), it really should have an automatic option, as the default option when you start is controller prompts, even if you are playing with a keyboard and mouse. Keep the option to force prompts, but add an automatic option based on the device with the last pressed input, please!

TLDR: A lack of polish, the gameplay generally not being fun, and plenty of bugs and oversights prevent this from being something that can fill the void that games like Senran Kagura left. Definitely a few steps forward (Going with Unity (Which can do decent visuals and game code is more moddable compared to Unreal Engine) and the PC port being decent this time around), but several steps back (A lot of things about this seem absolutely inoffensive coming from previous games, probably to appease Valve and Sony's draconian content policies).