As I googled, gacha games have existed for a long time, but the turning point was the release of Genshin Impact, where all players prayed to receive a new girl hero out of "pulls." The success of Genshin Impact cannot be ignored, and many companies, with money on their minds, decided to build their own gacha games with their own castle, blackjack, and waifus. Snowbreak is one of the gacha games with all the good and bad things that gacha offers you as a player.

To explain the main problem with gacha, we need to understand one thing: gacha games are designed to give you everything you want unless it's a crit damage. But why would anyone spend money on a game they just installed? Well, I won't describe the entire process of becoming addicted to gacha, but in short:

1. Making first wins
2. Getting new (mostly powerful) hero which make games more easier
3. Slowly starting loosing games
4. Wanting more of powerful heroes

Once you've started collecting your waifus, you want to make them even more powerful or perhaps even more... attractive. After all, you're dealing with waifus here, so their appeal is a key aspect.

The first thing is upgrading, and this game has SOOOOO many upgrades. Eventually, you'll either throw your money into a monitor or endlessly grind to gather enough resources. So, let's take an example: imagine you've acquired a new 5-star waifu. Of course, you want to fully upgrade her. What do you need?

1. Upgrade the waifu to level 80 by either endlessly playing missions or using boosters to gain experience. The only penalty applicable is the account level penalty every 10 levels, which will be described later.
2. Upgrade gun to the 80 level (every 10 level penalty that required to use additional components to continue upgrading level). Only by using boosters. By the way, if you want max you 5-star gun, you need to roll it TWICE in order to gain best stats.
3. Upgrade THREE logistic officer, that increase stats and give passive effect to hero. (don't know maximum level, can be upgraded only by boosters)
4. Get every skill improvement in neurolink (can be upgraded only by components that also have different rarities).
5. Get maximum manifestation by spending waifu tokens (tokens that are given by getting same waifu multiple time, but also can be received in small amount every day).

Seems to much? But it's only one hero, squad consists of 3 hero, so multiply everything by 3. But even this is not the worst case, but we wont go further in this money stealing hell.

Second thing is a fan service. Ohhh boy, how many fan service this games has, for example, just look at one of waifu in game

Not enough for you? well, maybe you want more attractive costumes? not for free of course

The final chord of this gacha is an account level that required for penalty on waifu upgrades (you wont be allowed to upgrade your waifu while not reached certain level) and follow the "game recommended" path of completing main story.

Now, when i finally spilled out everything i think about gacha games, i can describe what game actually about.

Snowbreak is a session shooting range combined with a visual novel. Missions here, on normal difficulties, should be finished under ~300 seconds (if you want to get the rewards of completing it), in reality it's usually requires half of the time to complete them.

As i mentioned before, it is a normal missions, there is also hard variant of mission where enemies are stronger and multiple missions are connected to one sessions. You might ask, why devs cannot merge missions in order to make them more long? All because of energy. Every start of mission required account energy that is refilled with time or might be bought in shop (GACHAAAAAAAAAAAA). Most mission are single player, but sometimes events appear when multiplayer is available.

Speaking of events, the game has a lot of content, like really a lot. In the meantime, you can visit all your waifus at the base, where a random activity is triggered every day. You can learn more about their stories and relationships between them and the main hero.

One of the good things - everything there has a story: logistics officers has a story, every waifu has a story and memories that can be unlocked after achieving trust level, even guns has a story! I just hope that everything is not written with ChatGPT.....

This game has a story, which i cannot say that actually interesting, but it is here and it will make you spend some time in a game. Two events that i witnessed also had their small story, but for me the concept was always the same.

So, the game surely has some potential, but in my opinion, it will never truly be complete because the whole concept relies on gacha. The game is built to make gamers spend money on gacha, and in order to keep the game interesting, it would need a full remake. The game does have some interesting easter eggs:

Also devs experimented with a gameplay, so there is one mission with optional stealth (which was implemented in a really funny way).

But everything is just wasted for me, because main goal for devs is to make some money rather than create a really good product.

Play good games and thanks for reading.