FULL METAL SCHOOLGIRL Review

Corporations are bad, we all know this, and yet in the future they get worse! It’s 2089, and Meternal Jobz is the largest company in the world, working their employees 24 hours a day. How does a person work a full day? By opting for cyborg enhancement, of course! Ryoko and Akemi are schoolgirls looking for their father in this third-person roguelike hack-and-slash game across 100 randomised floors; they are the titular FULL METAL SCHOOLGIRLs!

After all, if your enemies are cyborgs, it only makes sense that you’d want to get yourself some upgrades too, so how’d you like a chainsaw and a Gatling gun embedded in your arms, and jump-jets in your legs? A former employee of Meternal Jobz, Professor Hakase, is responsible for your alterations as she knows first-hand what kinds of horrible things the company is up to. For example, they change the floor layout constantly, so that even if you want to quit, you can’t find the way out. That’s as good an in-universe reason as any for no two runs being the same.

Each floor is made up of multiple connected rooms and hallways, and since the elevators are card-based, you need to take the stairs. After you clear a room of enemies, one or two cases will appear, giving you a random weapon or drone upgrade, a health battery, or a passive mod. As if to prove how random they are, I had one run where I got a single battery, and the very next run I had seven.

There’s a variety of weapons, with swords, axes, and chainsaws for melee, and four options for ranged. My go-to choices were sniper rifles and Gatling guns, but there are also shotguns and grenade launchers, though I found the former to have awful range and the latter to be dangerous at close range. Each weapon has variations, such as sniper rifles which can do charged shots or shotguns with a higher ammo capacity, so just because something is more powerful doesn’t mean it’s suited to your playstyle.

The drone can perform different functions, either attack or support. It can fire explosives, snipe, shoot at random, fire at your target, or spin with blades. The support is either cheering, which boosts your attack power, or defense, which taunts enemies away from you.

The crates (also occasionally found in hallways), in which you find these will usually offer you something of a slightly higher level, but not always. Then there are different rarities, so you have to decide (for instance) whether you want something five levels higher, but it doesn’t increase your critical hit rate.

The mods increase something, such as movement speed, but decrease something else, like maximum energy. Also, you can only attach a certain number of them, though this can be increased between runs by augmentation.

Throughout each run, you’ll obtain materials from destroyed enemies, and Yen from your viewers — of course you’re livestreaming your attack on a megacorp — and retain only a portion of that if you’re defeated. You can then go to Hakase, who will be quite inappropriate towards you, chaining you to a workbench and creepily reaching out to work on your character. So long as you have the materials and cash.

Hakase and one of the bosses are where the game focuses its sex appeal. I mean, it might also be in one of the 50 DLC, but I’m not leafing through all of those cosmetics. Hakase and said boss both have a lot of cleavage on show — some might say that it’s so much bare breast that it stops being “cleavage” altogether. But your characters are fully clothed.

However, it’s worth noting that one achievement is given for trying to look up the characters’ skirts. They literally hold down their skirts at every floor transition to stop you from seeing their underwear, and the drone dutifully blocks the view as they crawl through ventilation ducts. In addition, there’s a black fog which hides their panties if ever the camera gets low enough due to jumping or in photo mode. So the achievement is an odd inclusion, right? Did the dev team intend on there being more fanservice and have to pull it back?

As you progress through the tower, bosses will drop one-use elevator keycards upon defeat, allowing you to start higher up. Since a run can take between one and two hours between boss floors, these can literally save you a lot of time. Luckily, some levels will have the aforementioned ventilation ducts, which cut through levels, putting you close to the exit door. However, you can only reach them via double jump (which is an early unlock if you can afford the upgrade).

While the randomised levels mean you’re not literally playing the same areas over and over, you will see the same things over and over again. Sure, some floors might have more rooms inexplicably filled with hippos than others, but layouts repeat. Sure, you’d expect it in any real office building, but once you’ve worked out a way around one bottomless pit, you can deal with any of them. Long hallway? Probably got a trap coming up just here. Two routes and one is full of gas? There’ll be turrets down the other way. Even the boss fights pretty much boil down to “get behind them to hit their super obvious weak point”.

To reach the end of the game, you’re looking at 10–12 hours, depending on how well you do. Some runs end automatically, so you have to restart from a lower floor unless you’re happy to burn a keycard. I wasn’t always happy to do that, so my playthrough might be longer than yours.

The graphics and music are both pretty good, and they complement each other well. Slashing through enemies and getting covered in oil deserves a certain kind of soundtrack, you know?

Honestly, I want to like FULL METAL SCHOOLGIRL more than I do. The satire is on point, the voice acting is great, the gameplay (while repetitive) is decent… But every time I had to force myself to load the game, because I knew that I wasn’t playing for over an hour because I wanted to, but because the game was forcing me. Sure, I could have died on purpose, but that would have used up a keycard, then the next session would have been even longer!

FULL METAL SCHOOLGIRL is a fun, if flawed, hack-and-slash roguelike. The randomised nature makes it difficult to do builds with any reliability, and each run takes a long time. However, combat is fun and the character interactions are enjoyable. If this genre from D3PUBLISHER is your kind of thing, then I’d recommend it. If you’ve never heard of them before, then you should skip it.