Chroma Squad

Chroma Squad is a tactical RPG wrapped inside a TV studio management game, and it commits to that premise harder than most games commit to anything. You play as five stunt actors who quit their day job to produce their own sentai-style show, which means every fight is technically a shoot, every enemy is an actor in a rubber suit, and your squad's "special moves" are filmed for ratings. The meta-layer is not just cosmetic window dressing. It feeds into the actual strategy loop in ways that keep surprising you. The tactical combat is grid-based and approachable, but it has enough wrinkles to stay interesting past the early episodes. Each character fills one of five colour-coded roles, loosely analogous to classic archetypes: the bruiser, the speedster, the support, and so on. Teamwork Actions are the core mechanic to understand early: positioning two or more squad members adjacent to each other before a move unlocks combo abilities that hit harder and generate more audience hype. Hype translates to in-show ratings, and ratings translate to sponsorship money, which funds better costumes, upgraded weapons, and your studio itself. The economy loop is tight and satisfying in a way that idle-seeming management layers rarely are. Between missions you run the studio: negotiate sponsor deals, upgrade your set, hire a seamstress to craft better gear, and manage your squad's equipment loadouts. The writing here is genuinely funny. The game is packed with sentai and tokusatsu references, but it does not require encyclopedic knowledge of Super Sentai to find the jokes. It pokes fun at TV production, at the genre it loves, and at itself, without ever becoming mean-spirited. The tone lands somewhere between affectionate parody and sincere love letter, which is a difficult balance to hold for a full playthrough. Chroma Squad holds it. Where it stumbles is in pacing. The mid-game episodes can feel repetitive because the enemy variety does not scale as fast as your squad's capabilities. You will hit a stretch where most fights resolve the same way: stack Teamwork Actions, pop your Mecha sequence when the giant monster arrives, collect ratings, repeat. The Mecha battles, which kick in once your squad forms a giant robot, are a fun escalation the first few times, but they simplify rather than deepen the tactics. They are spectacle, not puzzle. The studio management side also lacks the pressure of a harsher economy; once you find a reliable sponsor loop, money stops being a concern, and that removes some tension from the gear decisions. That said, Chroma Squad is one of the few games in this genre that earns its comedy without sacrificing mechanical coherence. The build variety per role is modest but meaningful enough that replaying with a different team composition changes how you approach the Teamwork Action chains. The writing rewards players who pay attention to the in-universe TV show framing: episode titles, sponsor banners, and even your audience reaction stats carry jokes that only land if you are reading them. For a game this cheerful, it has more craft under the hood than the pastel palette suggests. If you want a brutal tactics sim that will eat a hundred hours, look elsewhere. If you want something that respects your time, makes you laugh, and has enough mechanical texture to feel like a real game rather than a visual novel with combat stapled on, Chroma Squad is worth your afternoon. Probably several afternoons. Monika, Scout Team