13 Sentinels has long been on my backlog, as I would constantly hear about how great and incredible the story was. So finally I got around to playing it. I'm glad I did, even if I don't entirely agree with the adoring praise the game gets. I think the story is an interesting "puzzle", but lacks any emotional punch. The gameplay on the otherhand is pretty lackluster and serviceable at best. Let's start with a broad overview.
How the game works.
The game of 13 sentinels is essentially 2 separate games slapped together. The first part is a real-time with pause strategy game, the second being a visual novel where you progress through the 13 different character's storys. Of the two modes, the story mode is by far more interesting.
The strategy game aspect of it suffers from a few issues. The first being that it is simply overly basic. The UI and graphics are very basic. Enemies are abstract pixels, and each pilot is a round green dot with a character portrait. There is no terrain to speak of, just cityscapes, roads and rivers. Each map looks identical to each other map. If there are differences they don't matter at the slightest.
Each mission has the same basic objective, and plays mostly the same each time. Enemies spawn in waves and try and destroy your base. You must destroy all of the enemies(Or in some fights, specific boss enemies) or defend till a timer runs out(I never had this happen, I always cleared each map long before the timer ran out). Your pilots each have various powers that you can level up and unlock, but generally whatever power lets you spam massive AoE attacks is the best. Really the only exception to this is fighting tough armored units, where your brawler/melee pilots become a bit more useful, as they can do significantly more single target damage. But pretty much most missions are, "spam AoEs till out of mana, than rest to regen mana, than spam more AoEs".
The gameplay is pretty easy overall. I cleared most missions with "S Rank" pretty much first attempt on normal difficulty. I only ever had to redo one mission when I sent out a fighter way to deep and they got killed.
Overall, the gameplay felt like a chore to get through, rather than something I ever wanted to do. At pretty much every point I just wanted to get back to the REAL game, the visual novel part.
Which lets discuss that part briefly. I will not be spoiling anything here, as I think figuring out the story is the real fun of the game.
The story starts off quite incoherent and continues that way through the majority of the game. But I don't say that as a negative. The story is initially misleading and confusing. Each character feels like they are almost in their own separate genre of fiction. Is it a time travel story? An AI story? A giant monster story? An Alien story? These are all the questions you will be asking yourself constantly as you play through the game.
The whole puzzle is figuring out what the hell is actually going on. And I think when you do figure it out, it does feel pretty good as each piece slowly starts piecing itself together. Even after finishing it there are a few pieces that I couldn't quite place perfectly, and I think that's a good thing.
As for the characters themselves, I would say they are fine, if a bit anime tropey. I never really connected with the characters, mostly just the actual overarching story. Because of this, I didn't really have any emotional reaction to the story, just the feeling of satisfaction of piecing it together.
So yeah, that was 13 Sentinels. Would I recommend it? I think if you think you can handle a little boring wave defense gameplay, the story is worth it if you enjoy stories that make you struggle to figure out what is going on. I've always enjoyed fiction that throws me into the deep end and says "figure it out from context clues" and I think 13 Sentinels does a decent job of that(Well until the very very end where they spell it out for you).