SENRAN KAGURA Peach Beach Splash

I'll be straight with you: I picked this up expecting a gimmick dressed up as a shooter, and that's roughly what I got. Peach Beach Splash takes Tamsoft's cast of shinobi girls, strips out the hack-and-slash, and drops them into team-based water-gun brawls. The concept is genuinely more playable than it has any right to be, but the shooter underneath is thin enough that you'll feel the ceiling after a few sessions. The moment-to-moment gunplay leans on a water-reserve mechanic instead of traditional ammo. Your guns drain as you fire, but also as you use the water-jet movement system to dash and boost vertically. That dual-use pressure actually creates some real decisions mid-fight: do you push an angle and risk running dry, or hold back and reload? The arsenal covers the basics - assault rifles, gatling guns, grenade launchers, water hoses - and the weapon variety is decent enough that loadout choices feel meaningful. On top of that, there is a card system layered over everything. You collect and build decks of ability cards that activate buffs, cooldown resets, and skill effects in-match. Grinding those cards out is where the long-term loop lives, and it does give solo play a progression hook. The flip side: the grind rate is slow, and the currency economy from five-minute matches is stingy relative to unlock costs. Online modes include a domination type called Queen of the Hills, a flag-variant mode, and Squirmy Showdown, which rewards you for executing downed opponents with a finisher that also cuts your card cooldowns. The structure is fine. The problem, and this is the part that should make any multiplayer-focused buyer pause hard, is population. The online scene was already thin at launch and has only gotten quieter since 2018. You can fill lobbies with bots, but those bots are famously passive - they will plant themselves behind cover and do nothing useful when an objective is live. Survival co-op supports up to five players with AI filling open slots, which at least keeps the chaos moving. If you have three or four friends already interested, you can engineer decent sessions. Banking on organic matchmaking in 2025 is a losing bet. The PC port has its own friction points worth flagging. Mouse and keyboard support is rough: sensitivity options are limited and some key bindings cannot be reassigned, which is the kind of oversight that stings on PC in any year, let alone now. Controller is clearly the intended path here, and it plays noticeably cleaner with one. Steam user sentiment sits at 85 percent positive across a modest review count, which tracks - the audience that bought this knew what they wanted and got it. Critics who evaluated it as a straight shooter came away more skeptical, pointing to repetitive mode structure and thin AI as real weaknesses. Both reads are accurate, they just measure different things. Bottom line: if you are a series fan who wants more time with this cast and can round up a friend or two for online sessions, the shooting holds up well enough to justify it. If you are coming in cold hoping for a live competitive scene with actual matchmaking, the water ran out a while ago.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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