#but seriously watch-00001 might be plagiarism

[cielhunternorwood]

CounterPAYDAY

So, I think I've played enough of CounterSide by this point to both be hooked and be able to give an honest opinion about the game. I'll go reviewer mode and do some major nitpicking. Be warned, there will be SPOILERS in here, so read at your own discretion.

Bear in mind, I've spent a bit less than a month with the game, but I've noticed some rather big issues with it that should probably be addressed someday. Also, this review is based on the Steam version: no clue how much gameplay is affected by playing on mobile, but here we go.

UI/Graphics: Pretty Neat/10

So, ignoring a Steam review that complained about a recent major change, I feel like the current UI is pretty solid. Things are fairly simple to navigate once you know what's what (though the terms for "main story", "side story", etc are the usual "we wanna be unique" words, so that may throw you off) and the design is simple but unique. The PC version also runs pretty well, though it should since it's running a 2D sidescroller-style game with what I assume are Spine-rigged full-body sprites.

Gameplay: Balance? What's that?/10

So, revisiting the sidescrooler-style comment, CounterSide is an auto-fight 2D sidescroller game where all characters have a basic attack and a passive effect. Most of them also possess a cooldown-based special attack, and a lot of those "most" possess Ultimate attacks. During battle, you get a stock of points that slowly fills up, allowing you to spend those points to deploy folks (with each unit having its own deployment cost).

Once the folks are deployed, they just go at it and your only real input is to either click the purple diamond over their head when their Ultimate is ready or use the skills of the Ship you're using to deploy said folks. If that sounds a bit demanding, there's an Auto setting for deploying/ship skills and a separate Auto for using Ultimates. While the Auto AI is easy to work with, it's not always reliable in more difficult stages, and it's never a good idea in PvP.

Yeah, there's PvP. You know what that means? GROSS IMBALANCE! Yes, units in this game vary in use because of both needing to keep PvP balanced but then also leading to a lot of overpowered units that have to be "banned" in PvP to temporarily nerf them. And in most cases, the best PvP units are those that hit with massive debuffs, enact huge buffs like Immortality or Perfect Evade, or vice-versa say "no" to all buffs/debuffs. Also Joo counterattack. It can be very frustrating.

The division of units is as follows:

There are three types of units -

Counter - Basically Superheroes, they have superpowers and pull off anime shit. They always have Ultimates and Special Attacks.

Soldier - Normal humans who are still pretty tough and do some normal things to help. Some have Ultimates and Specials, but the Passives replacing them can be quite good.

Mecha* - Vehicles, planes, drones, and stompbots. They can have Specials, Ultimates, or just be normal attack with two or three passives.

*The game actually calls them "Mechs", but this is erroneous as "Mech" is short for "mechanized infantry" which are infantry that travel using tracked vehicles i.e. an APC. "Mecha" is the term for stuff like stompbots and so on.

Among these units, there are SEVEN classes -

Strikers - Melee bros, frontline smack-a-dude, good against Rangers

Rangers - Distance bros, might smack face from afar, but mostly mid-range, good against Defenders.

Defenders - Tanks, enough said, good against Snipers.

Snipers - Self-explanatory, super squishy but super powerful, good against Strikers

Towers - They stand there and defend your ship from getting shivved, that's it, really, not particularly good against anyone and pretty niche

Siege - They charge in and aaaargh, that's it, not particularly useful except maybe in PvP

Supporter - They Heal, They Buff, They Debuff, They Shoot Fire/Ice/Flower Petals, They can be pretty busted but also a bit squishy

So, you see that balancing teams is a bit... Weird with the excess classes as well as how unit types don't quite seem to amount to much other than using different upgrade items/equipment. You'll always have a bit of everything (besides Tower/Siege) on a team in order to beat normal content because using only one class is just stupid.

Of course, the rarity of units goes the letter rating route, where the max is SSR... Well, there's one ABOVE that: AWAKENED SSR. These units are OP for one thing in particular and that one thing can either be super useful or super niche, so the mileage may vary in how much they speed up finishing stages.

Oh, by the way, stages are timed, with 3 minutes being the usual time limit. But, to get 3-star ratings, you have to beat most levels within 1 minute (sometimes 1m30s), so you're more than likely going to focus on farting out as much DPS as possible to win rather than anything else.

Music: A Bit Here, A Bit There/10

So, this is a bit weird to say, but this music seems to be pretty good if only because it's building off other kinds of music. In general, the tone is pretty dark or grim, and the style is a mix of Yuki Kajiura, Go Shiina, and Kenji Kawai. It gets to the point where it feels like a bit of whiplash when you hear something rather normal for a gacha and then suddenly Kajiura-esque choral chanting because the main character is going schwing-schwing in a cutscene.

By the way, it's questionable whether the music is entirely original, as one particular track called "WATCH-00001" turned out to have taken its main melody from a random synth instrumental track and then added a few whooshes and stuff. I would take the music with a grain of salt, seeing as there isn't much here that says "original music" so much as "we're trying to be like that popular music". Not necessarily bad, but after finding out about that one track, it makes anything else a bit suspect in terms of potential plagiarism.

Character Designs: The Whole Spectrum/10

Since the game has super-anime characters, normal people, AND stompbots, it's pretty simple to say that the designs go across the whole spectrum. Some are really good, some are really potato, some are just alright, some are REALLY slutty, some are tastefully-dressed, some are unique, some are generic, there's a Metal Gear, a knock-off Titanfall Titan, the gun nut daughter of M200 from GFL, and Chris Redfield's lost twin brother.

So you'll more than likely find designs you like and designs you won't. It's all over the place, but at least it largely looks to be the same artist, so you know they tried to come up with a lot of variability (even if there are a lot of repeat characters with the Awakened thing and characters from past timelines- we'll get there shortly). It's also got plenty of guys as well as girls, so it's not ENTIRELY biased toward girlservice.

Economy: TOO MANY DIFFERENT CURRENCIES/10

Let's get the biggest part out of the way: you, the player, are a manager. Yes. Which means you're not leveling up characters: you're increasing their pay rate. Now, game-wise this doesn't mean you pay them regularly but the point still stands. You pay lots of money to level them up and make them fight harder using "appraisals" for EXP. This does mean they don't level up by fighting, so they only gain EXP from this.

Their skills can be upgraded with a separate currency of blue books alongside using skill manual-like items of varying amounts based on the skill being upgraded. The ceiling of upgrades is capped based on the star-level of the character, with the absolute max being 5. Their star-level is upgraded through a different Cube-like resource which differs based on the character type- Counter, Soldier, or Mecha.

All of these are obtained via grind. The stamina resource you use to grind, Eternium, initially looks like a huge number (in the thousands) and replenishes 75 every five minutes, but the stages cost so much Eternium that the numbers are largely inflated. That and the best grind stages are locked behind a specific pass-like item that you only get two of every day, with a unique pass for each item type to grind: appraisals, skill manuals, and cubes.

All of this on top of needing to grind for money for everything, as well as parts for upgrading the ships used to deploy your units, equipment for units to use as well as items to craft more/upgrade them, blue books so you don't run out upgrading skills, currency in other modes for their respective shops-- THERE'S A LOT OF GODDAMN ITEMS AND NOT ENOUGH STREAMLINING!

This is one of the parts that bugs me the most, because you're always hemorrhaging on something or other due to the sheer number of things, and it makes progress come to a grinding halt after the initial beginner period where it gives you so much crap to work with. If you don't just blaze through all the available story, then you'll end up with a lot of times just logging in for ten minutes to auto-run stages for whatever you're missing out on the most (which may most often be Cubes or money). It's a headache trying to track all of it, and it would be nice if it was all streamlined into much fewer resources.

That's not even getting into the PvP currency, the challenge content currency, the myriad side story currencies, the Raid/Dive currencies, the shards you gather of certain characters to turn into copies of said character- At least that last one makes sense, but goddamn it feels like they just kept tossing on new things and not putting thought into making it have better flow in acquiring it.

Story: Surprisingly Okay/10

So, here's the basic background: the world exists alongside a place known as the CounterSide which is full of Corruption Rays that turn people into monsters known as Corrupted Objects or C.O.s. It occasionally opens holes from the CounterSide to the real world and spreads the Corruption Rays in the real world.

So, to combat this, the "Administration" employs paid mercenary companies filled with Counters capable of harnessing superpowers fueled by CRF (I forget what it stands for) to fight back. You know someone's a Counter because they wear a watch as a symbol of both their status as a Counter and as ticking death: if it reaches zero without an Eternium recharge, they turn into a special C.O. called a Shadow.

The main story itself begins with the arrival of Hilde, a petite woman who is a member of Coffin Company, a well-known but shit-outta-luck PMC that is on its last legs financially. She is greeted by her old apprentice, Joo Shiyoon, who you can immediately tell, due to his constantly-closed eyes and his voice actor being Lelouch, is not really as happy-go-lucky as he lets on (and equally tell by the CG that Hilde feels guilty about something related to him).

These two chuckleheads come together to go on a mission alongside the new hire, Yoo Mina, the love child of Squall Leonhart and Satomi Rentarou who, of course, uses a long revolver rifle with a little surprise and is obsessed with making money (in order to pay for her sister's hospital bills). The story isn't very subtle about just how these three are not so average folks, and that lack of subtlety is a bit refreshing, but it also does subvert expectations here and there. I digress...

So rookie's first day is rescuing the new owner of Coffin, a monolithic robot that is the avatar of... Well, you, the player, the omnipotent manager. What follows is a chain of events that reveal ye old rookie has her own secret power she's awakening to. Oh, and her revolver rifle has a rune-covered sword inside that she can use to slice through big-ass enemies so long as there's a huge choir chanting in the background. No "power of friendship" stuff going on, just "nah, I'm splitting this thing in two".

A few chapters in, there's a reveal of a group of enemies trying to use the CounterSide for some supposedly nefarious purpose, and it devolves into a rather whirlwind series of events which I will not detail further because this review is getting WAY too wordy. Needless to say, the story does a fair bit of hop and jump, and it doesn't spend too much time hammering in sad moments or make you empathize with enemies like a certain other dev's games hoyo. It does what it sets out to do, and at least the characters aren't so two-dimensional that you actually can guess them from the get-go. Besides maybe Hilde, but I think that's because (as far as I've seen, at least) her story's barely been told since it might be too spoilery.

With that said, the main story does proceed with certain characters becoming involved without explaining why in itself. That's where the side stories come in, where they do detail these other side groups either before or after they get involved in the main story. That, in particular, I appreciate A LOT, especially when the Guide Mission progression has you hopping between Main and Side so you don't miss much along the way. It doesn't ruin the pacing of the Main story if you're just plowing through that, having to cover that stuff, so it works out well.

Overall: Bretty good/10

I mean, it must be doing something right if I feel invested in playing (and spending), right? Eh, I can't honestly say that. Arknights didn't do much right, and I played it for months before dropping it. Well, SilverAsh exists, so that was most of why I stayed... But we're not talking about that crap. We're talking about a rather up-and-down game that's imperfect but kind of enjoyably imperfect.

It's very obvious it has balance issues out the wazoo with characters, it has far too many currencies/upgrade items, hard game modes, and the special "gem" currency for rolling gacha is better spent on upgrades to your dorms or buying the OTHER currency for rolling the Awakened gacha. And yet the gameplay can be hands-off enough that you can just sit and watch your employees do all the work for you, the story bits come together pretty well, and there's plenty of little twists that, while some are pretty obvious, can catch you by surprise just for being different from the norm.

I'd recommend it just for you to judge it accordingly and because the beginning is pretty easy with how much stuff it throws at you. By the time you go through all the beginner prizes and stuff, you should be able to tell whether you'll like the game or not. Once that's all used up, though, you'll be in the grind section of the game, depending on how many not-good units you end up raising without realizing they're not good. But such is life in the gachas...