izigame.me

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.