(WARNING LONG COMMENT)
Alright. I'll be honest, while it said that the average playtime was around 1 hour, I've played Frozen Soil for 5 to 6 hours and I think I can provide a decent feedback.
About the Story
From what I understood we play as a human who's part of a team of space mercenaries who came to earth which is now in a permanent ice age and filled with eldritch abomination. We got 2 mission: help someone's named Gorro and meet up with a compagny of Soil Hunters who wants to dig up some soil of Earth since it's great to farm...
Wow. Honestly I really like the plot and while we know Earth's been invade by aliens centuries ago, all of this raises so much questions and it's fantastic. Personally, I'd love to see how Earth's climate changed and what remains of human civilisation, That's an amazing plot and I can't wait to learn more about it.
Gorro's quest serves to introduce some other characters. I'm not going to spoil it if someone is reading this.
Landscape, arts, music and design
Personally, I love snow so I'm biased here. Even tho snow is fantastic, the fact that all maps are made on RPGM is honorable. The parallax mapping on some maps is well done and so is the static background in the garage or the ship (I'm curious, how did you manage to add a static background?)
As for the character design... Well, it's just furries and fan service for the most part, but it's relatively soft compared to what's already existing and most importantly, it's not everywhere and enjoyable. As for the non-furries it's well done. For ennemies, I their design is horrifying for the most part and that's cool, nothing more to say about that.
Musics, same things... I LOVE SNOW LANDSCAPE WITH PIANO. I don't know if theses musics are already in RPGM or if you/someone made it, idk but it's good.
Lastly, animations... It's impeccable, specially the special combat skills (repairs, healing, 9mm shots and that damn eating animation wich feels like you made it a 24fps animation just for it).
Game mechanics
Exploration in the snowy landscape is standart. Nothing new really. As for the frozen forest, the events where you jump to an elevated ground and use it to dodge ennemies is really well made, hope you'll find some more exploration mechanics like that (maybe switch from deployed character to perform special movement skills ? That could be cool).
The combat mechanics are the weakest aspect in the game in my opinion unfortunately. Not saying it's bad, but weird. In combat you got the special habilities which cost consummables to perform. That's in fact a clever idea, but we get so much ammo for everything that you got no ammo managment to make and just spam the same attacks over and over again (only exception being Yarunna since she got a special attack that cost TP and not consummables). There are ways to balance it and make special abilities more special than just being regular attacks. Here are some ideas :
1 – You could add an ability usage limit for a fight and remove the ammo consummables (it can make inventory managment easier with less items).
2 – You can add a cooldown for each ability while keeping the consummables system, so you can't spam it at all time.
3 – Add the ability usage limit, not removing the ammo consummables but adding a rearm ability to make the fight be more intesting and adapting your tactics for each fights (maybe even bound the rearm capacity to a new support character?)
The second issue I have with combat is the scaling and how weak the player character (PC) feels like. At the beginning of the game you got the PC and Yoyo. Both are at the same level but Yoyo is just better at every stats. This does not make any sense since the player is in a tank which is geared to withstand the hardest the ennemies smashing at it. It should have more HP than anyone else (and for god sakes, it got an energy shield! Give it at least a support ability to increase global defense of the party). At the opposite, you got Yarunna. She got decent abilities that consist not to lobotomize yourself and keep attacking and that's the only reason I like her... definitively... I swear.
The issue is her scaling. I understand that everything in her physic means STRENGTH, but she currently act as a damage dealer and a tank even tho her defense is below average and can't be increased. I see that he vision was to make her some kind of a glass canon. This is unfortunately unbalanced due to her HP scaling and her regeneration per turn capacity that overshadows her ability to eat during fight. What I would do is :
- decrease her HP scaling
- remove the effect of her extra equipment that heals her each turn and turn its effect into an HP bonus
- modify the eat ability by adding the regeneration bonus for X turns
Overall, this game is fantastic and I hope to see more of it :)
I hopped my feedback helped you in any ways. If it is, I might do multiple feedbacks for the next updates.