Bottom Line: A wildly inventive love letter to Saturday-morning Tokusatsu that welds studio-management sim to grid tactics — brilliant in concept, occasionally thin in execution, and unlike anything else on your shelf.
The Gameplay Loop
The core rhythm is elegant: manage, film, profit, upgrade, repeat. Between episodes you sit in your studio, allocating a finite budget across salaries, gear, and marketing. Then you shoot an episode — a tactical battle — and your performance in that fight generates audience ratings, which convert to fans and cash, which fund the next round of upgrades. It's a tight economic engine, and for the first several hours it hums.
The genius is that combat objectives are directorial rather than purely martial. Some episodes ask you to keep an ally alive; others reward you for finishing within a certain number of turns, or for pulling off a specific dramatic flourish. You're not just winning fights — you're producing good television. That single design decision elevates every skirmish above the "reduce enemy HP to zero" grind that plagues lesser tactics games.
The team-up mechanic deserves special praise. Adjacent squad members can hurl each other across the grid, enabling reach and positioning plays that feel genuinely inventive. Chaining these into a group finishing move — the whole squad converging for a synchronized kill — is the game at its absolute best. It's tactically meaningful and it looks fantastic on screen. Mechanics and theme, rowing in the same direction.
Where the Cracks Show
Here's the honest part. The combat, for all its charm, doesn't have the depth to sustain a full campaign. The tactical toolkit is shallower than genre veterans will want. Enemy AI is serviceable, not cunning. And once you've solved the puzzle of team-up positioning, later battles start to feel like variations on a theme you've already mastered. Players consistently flag the same thing: in longer sessions, the fights get repetitive. That criticism is fair. The systems that dazzle in hour two don't evolve enough by hour twelve.
The mecha battles are the sharper disappointment. These should be the crescendo — the giant-robot finale every episode builds toward. Instead, they're conspicuously oversimplified, reduced to a rock-paper-scissors exchange of blocks and strikes that lacks the spatial richness of the core grid combat. They look like a payoff. They don't always play like one. It's a case of the presentation writing a check the mechanics can't quite cash.
The Onboarding
Credit where due: the game eases you in well. The management layer could have been an intimidating spreadsheet, but Behold keeps the friction low, surfacing only the decisions that matter and letting the narrative carry the tutorial weight. New players won't drown. The trade-off is that the economy never becomes deep enough to obsess over — it's a supporting act, not a co-star.