Hi there!
I'm one of the 6 judges for this RPG Maker Game Jam 2025. I was one of the 2 judges assigned to your game, and we have been assigned to rate your games according to each metric highlighted on the game's main jam page, and submit these ratings to the organisers, who will then appropriate what happens with that. Please contact them in the Q&A if you have any further questions about the judging process. The judges will work on different time schedules, so even if I may have finished playing your game, the entire process might not be finished as of yet. Many of these reviews I am posting while still judging.
All that aside, I'd like to share my VOD of me playing your game, which contains up to an hour of gameplay, and some final thoughts at the end! Depending on whether I stopped the VOD early or not, it will also contain many of the thoughts that I say to you below, which may cause repetition. So just be aware of that.
I will also attach a review below this VOD. I will not disclose my ratings for each category as of yet, but those will be revealed in due time. Not all judges are required to post a review or VOD to each game, but many will do so even if it's optional, including myself.
Here's the VOD:
Ah, Bravo Assault Team! First, I want to say thank you for submitting a game to this jam. Every game is a gift, and I consider it a form of generosity for you to give your time and effort into creating something to share with us. So please interpret everything I say with the context that I am judging for a contest, and as such, I must be sort of brutal in some ways in order to make sure I'm communicating why I give the scores I do (the scores aren't going to be shown just yet, but in due time they will).
Firstly, I want to start with the positives, in acknowledging that the idea of a "Bravo Assault Team" infiltrating a casino is a pretty awesome idea. I like stuff like Ocean's Eleven and its consequent sequels, and I really do enjoy heist films. This "heist shell" for the story, provides an interesting concept and structure to explore in the game. I really like that idea.
That said, pulling something off like that is quite difficult, particularly sometimes when combatting with the fantasy setting that you have set your game in. So, oftentimes, the game can feel like it's fighting between aesthetics, and here, I do feel like sometimes the story takes its time to find its bearings as a result.
I admire the ambition to set the game in a massive city, and for the most part, the feeling of exploring the city is quite cool.
I must start mentioning my criticisms here, and there are a few things that I consider game design decisions that brutally transformed my experience. The first, and perhaps most obvious, is that the battles were long and punishing for me. In a game like this, particularly with a city that is so massive, and with battles that are largely optional, each battle took me initially around 15 minutes to complete. Until I enabled "autobattle", disabled animations, and just let everyone fight. Most attacks missed, but it was much more enjoyable when I didn't have to slog through extremely long battles that stopped the flow of the game.
There were a lot of skills and a plethora of systems in the battle, but it truly felt like an overlong slog with few strategic decisions that mattered, because most moves missed the target, from both sides. Usually you start small with the mechanics, and introduce moves one by one so that the person playing can learn them one at a time. But such a big roster of moves was difficult to even keep track of, and by the end, I was overwhelmed, and battles were way too long for me to care. The enemies were HP sponges, and it was difficult to care about any of the battle's gameplay by the end, I'm sorry to say.
Additionally, I didn't really even get to get inside the casino because this initial portion was so big. I got quite lost in the city, and I was really looking forward to doing the actual "assault on the casino" part, where you do the heist stuff, and the exciting subterfuge and trickery inside the place... but a lot of it was just exploring the big city and talking to people in a quite low-stakes way, and then I got to the casino door and... there was an invisible event in front of it that stopped me from entering, even when I had defeated the guard! So that's a gamebreaking bug, I believe? Correct me if I'm wrong.
I do think that if we had cut to the chase a little bit, and if we had sped things up, and got to the real conflicts that I think are important (because when judging, the main page did say each judge can only play the first hour of your game), then it would have been a lot more exciting. Granted, your city map is quite cool! But... there is such a thing as story momentum, and I feel like it's the thing that this game lacked. In my opinion, get your protagonists right into the thick of the conflict, have all the battles and the map exploration centre around that conflict, and keep things tight and moving. I know that an open world game can seem tempting, but it actually takes a lot of very, very cunning design to make it work. And oftentimes, it can end up instead feeling quite aimless and lacking momentum. Especially in games that are designed to be short.
So that's a summary of things that I would keep in mind in future. In particular, just keeping those battles short, refining around the edges, making sure you get right to the action, and maybe tightening the dialogue to reflect the actual cruelty that criminals would have. Also, agents would perhaps overexplain their motivations, when in reality, agents don't explain to each other what they do, and they just *expect* each other to be competent, instead of constantly complimenting each other on how good they are.
But yes, with these in mind, if you were to continue to refine the idea, then it could turn out to be a great game, a banger of a game.
That said, every game is a gift, and I am thankful that you made this one. I hope you continue to make games, because you deserve to have the artistic expression, and even if this is a contest, always remain sure that you are doing this for your own artistic fulfilment. Keep that in mind. Thanks for sharing. Cheers!