A promising celestial journey through love and danger | CBT Review - Love and Deepspace
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✨Overview
Love and Deepspace is an upcoming atome game featuring high quality 3D graphics, dating sim elements, real-time ARPG combat, and gacha mechanics. Unlike many mobile games where its mostly tailored to male audiences with their attractive female characters, Love and Deepspace stands out for its unique focus on a female audience, offering an otome experience where players can embark on a space-faring tale filled with love, danger, and adventure.
The game is currently on a closed beta test (CBT) in limited regions including Indonesia and Philippines, from Dec 15 to 21. It doesn’t feature any in-app purchases, and progression will be wiped out.
⭐️Score: 8/10 (For the CBT)
📖Story and Premise
The game's premise revolves around the Deepspace Tunnel — a spacetime anomaly that appeared in Linkon City 14 years ago and spawned creatures called Wanderers that started to invade Earth. This phenomenon also significantly advanced technology and kickstarted a boom in space exploration, with humanity spreading to the stars. Players take on the role of a newly recruited character created female Deepspace Hunter, tasked hunting the remaining Wanderers and investigating deeper into the anomaly.
🎨Visuals and Sound
Love and Deepspace features ultra high fidelity graphics with almost CGI-like quality during narrative scenes, as well as in the gameplay. The art style is visually appealing — especially for female audience — and creates a seamless blend of futuristic aesthetics and character design that complements the sci-fi theme. In the character creator, the 3D rendering technology not only allows players to customize their avatars but also offers the unique feature of uploading a photo to create a 3D replica of themselves.
The soundtrack is also mesmerizing and feels something you would hear in an asian telenova series with its melodramatic and relaxing tones. It’s a very immersive game, particularly during story scenes that are presented in a first person view. It really feels like you’re in the character’s POV.
🎮Gameplay
Love and Deepspace introduces a mix of gameplay elements, including combat, personalization, and relationship building. The sci-fi world of Love and Deepspace unfolds through carefully crafted storylines and missions, allowing players to build connections with three romanceable male leads: Xavier, Rafayel, and Zayne. The narrative is enriched with immersive cutscenes, dialogue options, and real-time combat against the Wanderers.
As a Deepspace Hunter, players must utilize their "Evol" abilities to engage in combat, unleashing finishing moves, combo attacks, and strategic upgrades. This works similarly to any traditional mobile ARPG game, moving the character in real-time, dodging attacks, and using abilities in battle. You can bring one male companion with you, equipped as a “memory” with different tiers of quality and power level. Gear and cosmetics can also be customized.
Beyond battling Wanderers, a huge part of the game about players deepening their relationships with the male leads through side stories, activities, and Dating, fostering a sense of connection and intimacy through high fidelity 3D-rendered interactions. It’s really immersive. You can hang out with any of the three male leads, text them (with pre-made dialogue options as text replies), or even visit a Photo Studio together to take pictures and pose together.
The first two hours of gameplay seems light on combat — I only played three combat missions for the first two hours — but it gradually picks up pace as the story unfolds. The CBT only allowed access to chapter 1 to 4 only, but access to chapter 3 and 4 are gated with a high level requirement that requires more EXP grinding.
⏫Progression
The game's progression is intricately tied to the unfolding narrative and the relationships built with the male leads. As players navigate through the chapters, they progressively unveil more layers of the overarching story. Simultaneously, players will build relationships in separate storylines with each of the three male leads, increasing their “Affinity” rating. You will sometimes go on dates together, reminisce memories, and at times it will intertwine with the main story.
There is a high degree of personalization via the initial character creator, subsequent cosmetic customization, allowing players to express their style and identity within the game. You can even change the characters female voice to your exact liking. Yes, your female character is voiced for most of the dialogue, which is pretty neat. You can turn it off though at any time in the options settings.
💵Monetization
I can’t say much about the monetization of Love and Deepspace yet, but what I do know is that it will feature gacha mechanics to acquire different cosmetics and memories for the three male leads. More powerful memories to equip means more powerful companions. As the game progresses towards its official release, the approach to monetization remains a crucial aspect to watch for, as it can significantly impact the overall player experience.
📊Technical Performance
The game features impressive 3D graphics but the optimization is equally as impressive. On my Snapdragon 888 device, the game recommended a max (Ultra) setting which is surprising, and the game delivers. There was never a framerate option, but the game felt smooth to play, both in real-time combat and especially during first person cutscenes.
The game primarily runs in portrait orientation by default, encompassing the game menus, dates, otome elements, and narrative cutscenes. However, during combat, it switches to landscape mode, which can be disorienting and potentially annoying. The occasional transition between landscape and portrait modes may disrupt the flow for some players. Personally, I would have preferred a consistently maintained orientation throughout the entirety of the game.
⚖️Conclusion
The CBT only offers a taste of its potential but I can already see that Love and Deepspace is a very promising title and offers a celestial journey through love and adventure. While predominantly tailored for female audiences, Love and Deepspace can easily transcend gender boundaries, appealing to a diverse audience with its unique blend of dating sim element, captivating narrative, immersive presentation with high-quality graphics and art direction, and engaging ARPG action.
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