Gun Gun Pixies

I went in with low expectations and came out somewhere in the middle, which is about as honest an assessment as this game deserves. You play as two tiny alien cadets, Bee-tan and Kame-pon, who have shrunk themselves down to doll size to infiltrate a college girls' dormitory. The entire conceit is built around the micro-scale perspective: furniture becomes an obstacle course, every human in the building is a skyscraper, and your job is to stay hidden while completing mission objectives before the inhabitants notice you. It is a genuinely unusual setup, and for the first hour or two, the sheer novelty of it carries a lot of weight. The gameplay mixes third-person shooting with light stealth and basic platforming. Each mission drops you into one of a handful of dorm rooms where you collect Picoins, eliminate squid-like enemies, and work toward pacifying the resident girl by targeting her with happy bullets. The two playable characters handle differently: Bee-tan and Kame-pon each come with their own weapon loadout, and currency earned in missions can be spent on gun upgrades, extra ammo capacity, and costume unlocks. Boss-style encounters play out almost like a small-scale bullet-hell, with the human girls projecting danmaku-style projectile barrages that you have to dodge while returning fire. That part is actually more interesting than the basic room-crawling that makes up most of the runtime. A Maiden Sensor tracks both your visibility and the noise you are making, and maxing either meter ends the mission, which gives the stealth side at least some mechanical teeth. Posing as a tiny action figure to fool patrolling giants is a legitimately funny evasion tool. Here is where the mixed 67% Steam score makes complete sense, though. The camera is a consistent problem, it clips through furniture, locks into bad angles in tight spaces, and fights you hardest exactly when you need it most during platforming segments. The jumping feels floaty and abrupt at the same time, which is a difficult combination to pull off badly. Controls in general feel stiff, and the PC keyboard-and-mouse defaults in particular were clearly not a priority. The room variety is thin, the game takes place across only three environments, and the mission structure repeats itself visibly by the midpoint. Most reviewers noted that after roughly an hour you have seen the full range of what the game does mechanically. What keeps it from being a total write-off is the character work between Bee-tan and Kame-pon. Their odd-couple dynamic, one relentlessly flirty and impulsive, the other serious and exasperated, generates genuine comedy in the visual novel segments. The dormitory residents each carry storylines that occasionally touch on real subjects like body image and social anxiety, handled with more sincerity than you would expect from a game this relentlessly lewd. Fans of Compile Heart's Neptunia series will also find a few familiar faces tucked in as bonus content. None of that redeems the camera or the repetition, but it does mean the game has more going on underneath the fan-service than its premise suggests. The audience here is narrow and self-selecting. If you already enjoy Compile Heart's brand of ecchi anime humor and can tolerate mechanical jank in exchange for a genuinely odd, charming premise, there is fun to be found. If you need a tight third-person shooter or a polished platformer, look elsewhere, the bones of both are present but neither is finished to a standard that would hold up on its own. Alex, Scout Team