Berserk B.I.T.S

I had hopes for this one, as even if it isn't quite there, it felt like it had a vision of a Battle Network spinoff. ...But, I think it has kind of missed the 'point' of an idle game. The amount of mechanically impactful goals feels like it dries out quickly, and the autobattling nature limits how exciting trying to strategize your arsenal can be. Any semblance of greater story or worldbuilding to discover (which could've been a cool alternative), is so brief as to be weightless and basically relies on familiarity with what it's aping.

To boot, there's just a ton of playability stuff that feels off, in ways that were off months ago in demos and leave me wondering how they stayed a problem. The desktop companion style design is a neat idea, but suffers from a ton of things (like the scaling either meaning things are too small, too big for a constant overlay, or stretched in ugly ways). Navigating menus is an active pain, often giving way too little information (eg missions not informing you where they're taking place), and having your attacks come from little wandering monsters is a cute idea until you need to actually manage them to try out new abilities, nevermind the incredibly messy chip encyclopedia and an inventory with only manual sorting that quickly becomes a nightmare. Display settings have to be reconfigured each time I start it up. There's bugs with terrain display desynchronizing in navigation, or the chip load system half breaking, all just the sort of thing that make me wonder how they made it past the months and months thsi game has spent in development.

I want to love it. I'll keep an eye on it and keep giving it a chance, and maybe someday this will become a thumbs up. Idle games don't really demand much to keep up with, after all. But man, for all the love I can tell was put into parts of this project (like the music and art), and for how long I followed it, a lot of it just leaves me thuroughly like "oh, that's it?"

On paper, I should like this - it's a idle RPG dressed up in the vibes/aesthetics of Battle Network. Awesome, I'm in - no problems there. Unfortunately, it ended up disappointing in a lot of ways - both as a idle game with an engaging grind and as a desktop toy. Those go hand in hand with tanking my enjoyment of the game - progression basically halts if you're not actively dragging your main character into zones or feeding your pets, and these blockers happen so frequently that it's extremely distracting to have on screen while working or playing another game, and the pace of unlocking upgrades that automates some of this is glacial. Even then, actively engaging with the game only amounts to just those actions + buying things with the currency you gain - there doesn't seem to be a lot of interesting depth behind the pets you raise and the skills they provide in combat. It doesn't help that doing a lot of these actions manually require going through so many mouse button presses / drags and feels overtly cumbersome.

Tapping into making the combat something you can actively play OR gutting a lot of the menial interfacing you need to do to let the game progress would had helped a lot more here. As it stands engaging with it is too much busywork to be an entertaining desktop toy and too flat of a idle RPG to be worth playing over other games in that space.

Unfortunately Steam rejected my refund request due to the hour count (it's...an idle game? but i get it, it's over 2 hrs) - I think if that wasn't the case I probably wouldn't be leaving this review, but, well, okay.

Don't let my miniscule minute playtime on this version of the game fool you.

I was there for the internal testing, and the demo and have across both 1447.7 hours playing this game.

Even if you think you aren't the kind of person who would put that much time into a game, BITS will make you that person. Mark my words.

I have poured more hours into this thing than the actual developer. I was modding in ways no one had attempted before. This game has alot going on, and I know for sure more is coming. give it a shot and time.