izigame.me

Mato Anomalies has big potential in its world building but overshadowed to its shallow character writing. I personally has a big hope when i see the screenshots and hoping the story in this world building will be great.
The problem with Mato Anomalies is the pacing that can't be helped. Even i only play for an hour into the story i suddenly realise how bad the pacing was and how it impacting the story and the character. Doe is just as shallow as he is, and what a great deal happened so face with Gram and suddenly they worked together even he (Doe) is a detective under an underground broker which need to be discreet. Some weird choices in the cutscene also concerned me because they wanted to make a stylish comic esque animation but also it has weird slicing and editing. I know they didn't have much budget or talent but style this game suffer on major writing issue and weird creative choice.
The combat is actually serviceable. Serviceable, not great. They have skip button and that's a plus. I admit they have interesting monster design but the level design it feel like for toddler. The way that enemies just block your only way out is just too lazy and there is no reward or system to do pre-emptive strike.
Overall i dissapointed with this game.
I give it 3/10

I wanted to like Mato Anomalies, but it just wasn't all that fun to play. It's a long game filled with cheaply generated dungeons, boring battles and a card minigame that is forced on you, but is very unbalanced and not all that fun.
The game has a cool style and I loved Arrowiz' previous game I played, Heritage, which I found was a very cool visual novel. I couldn't get into this game, though. You play as a Detective who forms an unlikely alliance with a Bane Tide Hunter. You go through somewhat linear dungeons to quell the threat of Bane Tide, which can also be generated randomly for grinding, and hack yourself into people's minds to get information for your cases. The story is somewhat haphazardly told, but understandable. The main problem are the battles and the card game, though. They are both extremely repetitive, only rarely expand in any interesting way and only consist of spamming your strongest skills that enemies are not resistant to over and over.
Even so, the battles get really difficult really fast, as enemies start to deal over 100 damage per attack while you have like 700 or 800 health. Every single item is obscenely expensive, including healing items, so the only way you can really progress at a certain point is grinding the random dungeons for money and gear to sell so you can afford healing potions (which only fill up a very small amount of your total health anyway as they use a flat HP value, not a percentage value). The balance is completely out of whack, so unless you just want to grind forever for better weapons and EXP, you will just be stuck at certain points in the game, which then forces you to fight more annoying, boring battles that can at least be automated, but are still time consuming and annoying nonetheless.
Outside of the dungeons, you are sometimes forced to play the mind hack card game. It's also unbalanced, with some card decks being absolutely terrible while others are much stronger. Enemies constantly attack you with high damage values while you have to juggle attacking not only them, but also their demons which give them additional buffs. It gets out of hand very quickly and often it feels you can win these just through luck.
The music and graphics are fine and serve their purpose, and I really like the aesthetic of everything, but the awful balance and repetitive gameplay quickly become a drag and with the game being apparently at least 25+ hours long, there is absolutely no way I could have pushed myself to grind it out to finish it. Some good ideas, but the game desperately needed a polishing and balancing pass before release. Even for the relatively cheap price, you can find much better RPGs on Steam.

Played this game for about 68 hours on xbox and am currently in a new playthrough on pc.
This game is rather odd, in a good way. I'd say this would probably be like a 5.5/10 on an objective scale, but there are some things that made me like this game so much I bought it twice.
The world itself is just very interesting. A city in noir-cyberpunk-anime style with some weirdly interesting things in it. Really hard to describe. The feeling it gives is similar to the Playstation exclusive Gravity Rush series, if you played that. In terms of that the setting is such a strange world that I was eager to learn more about it.
So you run around in Mato as Doe, a detective that solves people's everyday problems. Generally, the plot is told in visual novel segments, none of which are voiced, sadly. Through rare, there are some really georgeous event CGs.
Doe forms a team together with Gram, who saves him from a bad situation at the start of the game.
Looking at it, it is as generic as it gets: Doe solves some problems running around town, and at the end of nearly every mission he finds out that these monsters - idk what they are called - are responsible for peoples problems. So Gram travels to another dimension to terminate them and thereby resolves the situation in the real world.
Basic anime stuff you might say. Yes, but no. During these missions you get dropped many hints that make all this stuff weird. People in Mato lower class need to buy oxigen tanks to survive. Factory workers get scammed and then start a revolution against the greed company overlord. Weird government research projects. Weird death cults. And so on. not exactely befitting of the anime trope.
On their adventures Doe and Gram gather a bunch of misfits to help them along: the master thief Butterfly, ptsd-soldier Smoker with a drinking problem, a paramilitary/mafia type boss Lady Edelweiss with a Deathwish, and more. A prettly likeable bunch.
Maybe it is due to the translation, but it feels like characters always think three steps ahead, a conversation starts normal and then characters sometimes come to weird conclusions that can easily be missed if you just read the dialogue and dont think about the consequences between the lines.
Not gonna lie, in the end the plot gets really weird introducing time travel shenanigans and other philosophical concepts. However. I really like that? It builds up to the end by escalating further and further. But enough about that.
The dungeon crawling is similar to Soul Hackers 2. The main antagonists all have their persona-like palaces that are similar to the soul matrix in Soul Hackers 2, except less annoying because these dungeons are not overly complicated mazes. And they look prettier.
In combat, the party draws from a single health pool, which is interesting. All characters have specific roles to fill, and every single one of them is useful with interesting skills. Gram is the typical swordsman, butterfly is a thief with poisoning, healing and trap abilities, Smoker is a defender/buffer type character and so on.
The two biggest downsides I must admit are performance on pc with some strange frame drops (including on the steam deck; I recommend high settings with AA off and locking it to 30 fps, yet even then it will drop frames to like 22ish in some hub areas and maybe some endgame dungeons) and the monster design. The monsters are mostly just some wacky shapes, that's it. They could have been cooler.
Regardless. This is a janky and overly ambituous game that only partly archieves what it sets out to do.
But the good things really are good and refreshing. I recommend it for the philosophical, weird story and world, the aesthetic and the cool characters.