All I can say is I WAS IMPRESSED

I'd give 9/10 for all the bucks I've spent on this game. The genre brought up by BURA is just brilliant. I never thought I was ever gonna play a military RPG based game and I did. The gameplay was smooth, fantastic, beautific. The art and design was amazing. All the mechanic implemented in this game was fun and fantastic.

As someone who came from military background, I was very impressed in the language barrier and conflict you put as background of this game. I would be gladly help if you need translator in my native tounge (Bahasa/Malay). The script was realistic and immersive. Beautifully written and still could use a bit of improvement. The concept of modern military rpg was there and it's one of a kind on this era if i could say that. It was diffrent from others and it was far better. As a game from dev who had 4 people (as i read on the discussion) I was impressed beyond that. You guys did great.

I can't wait to play the full version and see where this going to lead you in future. I expect more exiciting content from you guys (the developer). Perhaps if I could vary the room for improvements:

-The variable of weapons; the mechanics such sniper/smg/shotguns and how it change the effect on each battle
-The varibale of language; as to be use in game background or script
-The variable to create own character such names, gender, nation backgrounds
-The variable to be specialized in military aspect; such medic, mechanic, ammor, comando, paratroopers, intepreter, intelligence and esc
-The variable to have progression on relationship with comrades or people
-The variable to have hero/character skills progression
-The variable to see enemy morale and skills
-More intesting plot

There's plenty room for improvement but still, this is by far the most amazing rpg i ever played since Persona franchise. To all gamers who just love RPG based game, you should gave this a try rather than playing the same dugeon/medieval kind of rpg. This game is fantastic and i cant wait for full game. BIG THANK YOU to the developer for creating a satisfaction that i dreamt for a long time. GROUND BREAKING GENRE!

It's a game with so much love and heart put into it that it rips at the seams and spills out. I've been following the development of this game since the first demo and I feel so happy to finally see it completed.
I loved the story, it feels very topical with the unrest in Eastern Europe at the moment - as a Polish person myself I loved to see an interpretation of my country, haha.
I became very attached to the characters; maybe it's just me, but they were written in a very humane way - you're not always happy with the choices they make, but when you sit down to think about it, it's what a person would do. Morality, ethics and personal drive mixes into an amalgamation of a human being, and it's an incredible experience to see what kind of a human being (or not!) emerges from that mess.
I hope that people who play this game can feel how much this game meant to the devs and people who followed the development. For me it's an easy 9.5-10/10, and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

I really wanted to like this game, so before I ramble on about why I dropped it and don't recommend it I'm going to point out some of the stuff I really liked:

- the artwork is clean, professional and well integrated
- the large sprites are expressive and stylish
- there is a wonderful attention to detail regarding the different cultures and locations
- the RPG elements are present but not intrusive. No random battles or exp/money grinding.

Mechanically the game is very simple. Occasional RPG style combat with pretty animations and UI, very simple block pushing puzzles, a shooting gallery style sniper minigame, and collectathon sidequests that help build out the story. It suffers from a lack of full controller support - you can use one but the UI still shows keyboard inputs and there are a few that aren't mapped at all. Sidequests are VERY missable and will taunt you in the menu for the entire game. It also prompts you that information on the main quest is in the menu but for the life of me I could not find it - maybe I'm just extremely stupid??? but it only had sidequests there and no tabbing for main quest stuff that I could see. Character dialog also feels stiff and unnatural at times.

What really killed this game for me is that it tries to tackle themes that the writing just isn't capable of delivering on. It isn't incompetent, but it does strain credulity. This is a game which explicitly tells you that the protagonist has spent his entire life learning nothing but propaganda, indoctrination, and soldiery, and then asks you to believe that all it takes to break 22 years of conditioning is a single incident where he's ordered to shoot a civilian. The first ten seconds of the game explains how he doesn't know what a family is, has never been to school outside of training for combat, and then 15 minutes of later he's telling his superior that he'd rather die than follow orders he considers immoral.

Long Gone Days suffers from an overly structured plot without enough meat on those bones. They knew they had to get from point A to B to C, and wanted to move through those points as expediently as possible without enough character moments in between to tell us why these people are sticking together at all, let alone willing to mount an armed assault on a prominent political party's base of operations.

In the end LGD is pretty, but fails to tell a compelling story.

tl;dr- If you like games with a good story and characters, and also don't mind reading and exploring, check it out. The gameplay will not woo you in any way, but I'd still say it's worth the full price.

• The art. The pixel art is both charming and unique; the detailed portraits and still images look gorgeous.
  
• The characters. Everybody has their own hopes, dreams, and motivations. I want to learn more about them all, and the game gives that to me as I play. Nobody feels cookie-cutter.
  
• The story. Cool setting, interesting and mysterious situation. The main reason to keep playing.
  
• Translator mechanics. Those people and signs speaking garbage you passed earlier? Now that you have an interpreter, you can finally go back and find out what they were saying. Really neat. Will be interesting to see how multiple foregn languages come into play here.
  
• Lynn. She pegs. Love her.

• The soundtrack. Everything works and fits well, I guess.. but it doesn't do anything special, and I couldn't hum a single tune from it right now for the life of me.
  
• The combat. Real standard RPG stuff. It seems a little silly to shoot someone in the face many times, only to have them fall unconscious.
  
• The fetch quests. I really don't mind them, but the walk speed is kind of slow, and, once again, nobody's reinventing RPGs here. This entry was bumped up from awful to lackluster when I figured out holding shift could make me walk faster, which, admittedly, took me way too long to discover.

• No button to quit the game. I know it is early access, but I'd like one of those soon, please. Or am I missing something?
  
• Little time spent developing the Core. In a story sense. I feel like most of what I know about the place I've spent my entire life in I read online, outside of the game. Did I really have no friends there, either? I get that quickly diving into the actual game beats tutorials, but I feel like I'm missing the history of the most interesting part of this entire fictional world.
  
• The stolen clothes. I stole some clothes from a house, then talked to someone who lived there the same day. She really didn't notice? Sure, alright.

Petty things to gripe about, sure, but I currently have no other complaints.

Cute polish anime boys question their morale when confronting russians on a one sided battlefield leading to a pretty engaging story.

Also you can interact with cats and dogs and they make cute sounds.

Weirdly underrated game.

I went into this game very much hoping that I would like it. I won't lie, the visuals alone were enough to sell me on it but ultimately after reaching the end point of this version I can say that it had little bearing on the efficacy of the game.

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So, what went wrong? Let's start with the gameplay. The combat works like this: You can either hit the enemy with a % chance to miss, or you can hit the enemy guaranteed at a cost. Like, a cost that only has an unreliable way of being renewed. The simplicity of the skills really, really leaves a lot to be desired. Apart from the distinct lack of strategy in a turn based military RPG (use multi-hit attacks on multiple enemies and heal allies who are dying does not count), this feels like an awkward way to handle combat.

It's a subtle pressure for you to not use your abilities as much as possible because you never know when the next morale (MP) boost will come since it's tied to major story events, but at the same time, the game is easy enough that you can just regular attack your way through the entire game save for a few instances those AoE attacks become relevant. Personally, I kept missing chest shots and pretty reliably hit head shots so it gave the impression that it didn't really matter that much which one I picked. If I'm going to miss anyway, might as well chance it on the higher damage option, which worked out pretty swimmingly.

The slowness of the combat combined with being generally unstimulating leaves it feeling very much like an afterthought. Seems late in development to revamp the combat system, but if there's still room for hefty change I'd strongly recommend it because as it stands, the gameplay is a chore to sit through.

The fact that I can't distinguish who can equip which armor whenever I pick up new gear is mildly annoying...

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For a game that tackles some serious subjects, it certainly doesn't feel like it takes itself very seriously. Okay, sure, maybe a missed opportunity but not a deal breaker. What does it have to offer instead? Well, not a whole lot. Because of its wishy-washy, half-serious tone, any kind of grim or otherwise dramatic scene that is presented is undercut by non-committal platitudes that lacks any weight or emotion. Rather than provoking feelings that are genuinely moving or rousing, we get these sort of... deflated anime speeches that feel like they don't have anything real to say.

This could be salvageable if the game decided to lean more heavily into comedy or other more light-hearted avenues to make up for this, but it doesn't do that either. Instead, it sits in this awkward middle of the road space where it's NOT serious enough to be a properly gripping tale of injustice and revolution, but it's TOO serious to be a fun adventure about friendship and growth. I think it's possible to do both honestly, but the writing is much too timid to actually push for it.

The actual dialogue feels quite stilted as well, falling short of giving players the impression that these are believable characters, or even that we should be invested in them. Their speech patterns are just barely distinct enough to not blend together, and it's all kind of robotic overall. This is not helped by the fact that the personalities of these characters suffer the same problem as the story writing: Too serious to be fun to read, not serious enough to be compelling.

I can't speak for the entire plot, but of the roughly seven hours I've played so far it's been serviceable, with some hiccups and questionable moments during cutscenes here and there. The story is fine, if a little boring, but certainly not remarkable.

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The art is very good, and aesthetically pleasing throughout. The music, not as much. The soundtrack used in this game isn't memorable or particularly even enjoyable to listen to most of the time -- it's just kind of there to fill in the background so it isn't dead air. But rather than fading out of mind, it pulls me out of the experience a little. Not much else to say here, the game would benefit from tighter direction of the music.

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Right now, this is not a fun game. It is an okay game at best, and sometimes that's enough for the average player to squeeze enjoyment out of it. If this is you, don't let this review discourage you from at least trying it out yourself. Otherwise, I find that it fails to deliver quality on many fronts -- but not so much that it can't be redeemed. In my opinion, there IS a base of a good game here, somewhere. But it would take much reworking to transform this into something memorable. I can't say it's something I'm holding out hope for, but hey, anything can happen.

Really tempted to jokingly label it as "Metal Gear Undertale". This is an indie JRPG that combined a pretty grounded for a JRPG scifi plot involving modern war... and also a story about friendship.

Generally it sticks very closely to this older JRPG canon of having parties, equipment giving stat boosts, taking turns using abilities or attacks or items, travelling trough locales and engaging in dialogue, all that. It's faithful to older 2D JRPGs to a fault, despite more modern art style it can be pretty slow with animations, transitions and prompts to perform actions. During certain dungeon crawls there's a lot of air vents to crawl and each gives confirmation prompt if you do want to do it where a single interact would have been enough. A lot could have been done smoother, really. New ideas are playing safe too, like ability to pick where to aim in JRPG combat, avoiding armor at chance of missing or reducing damage further to hit a painful weakspot and make enemy skip turns. It's interesting but under-utilized, and the limited hit spot variety is sad, could have had stuff like shooting specific equipment to disable specified abilities or induce greater variety of effects.

Now, the story: a naive but principled rookie soldier, fully raised in a militarized society of The Core subterranean state deserts after discovering he's tasked to kill innocents, convincing another soldier to flee with him, on his way encountering other characters he teams up with to survive and then confront Core's ambitions. It's... not too sophisticated and you can see quite some twists before the characters do so to be fair everyone feels lowkey naive. But it kinda feels like an anime, young adult adventure sort, so it works thematically? Personally my favourite bits in this one were the towns you visit and roam relatively free in, full of things to discover, tiny quests and scenes spent with main characters. There's even an aspect where you need a specific language speaker to actually communicate with anyone else which doesn't have major impact beyond "can only meaningfully interact after X joins you" but it does add believeability to settlements.

This is fine. I guess if you wanna play a JRPG but wanna go for more martial theme this will do well. It's nothing revolutionary though.

Technically sound and beautifully presented yet irreconcilably dull. It desperately wants to be a topical war drama and a feel-good cartoon at the same time, ending up doing neither convincingly.

Characters seem to have a devil-may-care attitude even when their entire way of life unravels around them, which wouldn't be a problem if the game wasn't hellbent on reminding you this is a serious game, with serious themes like false flag operations, minority persecution and child killing.

The sidequests are asinine and so is the translation gimmick - what's the point?

I respect the effort that went into it but I didn't enjoy LGD so far and I don't plan on finishing it.

This game is about war, but more importantly, it's about the cost of war on civilians and those that get caught in the cross-hairs, in front and behind the gun. This game touched many human experiences, and I could tell that this game was a labor of love from its developers.

The story is very engaging, and I would personally say its strength lies not so much in the (sort of sci-fi,) alternate universe plot, but in its snapshots of how war, and elements surrounding war, affect people. The game briefly touches on some very real topics, like trauma, human trafficking, propaganda & misinformation, homelessness, and xenophobia, to list a few. Unfortunately, the game doesn't go in-depth into these topics, but I also believe doing so would detract from the pacing of the main story line. What also struck me was the beauty (and challenge) of the story spanning many different countries and locations. I got to meet characters of different backgrounds and different values, and it wasn't long before I fell in love with them.

The elements of the game are quite engaging. Unlike other video games about war I've played, the art is bright and saturated, which for some can read a little too cheery, but for me, I loved. We got to see the vibrant colors of the cities and their people that are affected by game events. The music and sound design is fantastic throughout as well!

The gameplay for the most part is smooth. Combat has changed a bit over early access and has improved, though the turn-based combat still needs a few tweaks to its balance, in my opinion. If I had to suggest something, it would be to have a speed x2 mechanic for combat, as the status change messages are quite slow. Puzzles in the game are a bit too guided in my opinion, but I'm mainly here for the story and characters, so it's no big flaw for me.

There is a morale system, which some other reviewers mention, but to be honest, I haven't paid too much attention to it yet, as I've only played through the full game once. I think it's best not to think too hard about whether or not you're increasing/decreasing morale your first playthrough and just select answers to your heart's desire.

Overall, I do recommend this game if you're looking for a story-based game with great characters and a message about hope and action in the face of adversity. I enjoyed it a lot, and I think many people will as well!

Honestly, I bought this game just for fun, since I actually enjoy indie games.
I didn't expect much, since many studios actually claim to be the most innovative in terms of indie games, but it usually boils down to indie games which already existed with a little twist.
This however really surprised me. The story is what was driving me forward at first, but then I started to enjoy the characters (even though they could use a little more polish, example: Adair loses his straightforward character about 30-40 minutes into the game and changes to a whining know-it-all).
The only frustrating experience I had was the combat system. Now let me explain: The sniping is boring. You swipe over to an enemy and press the shoot-button. Here's how you could actually implement strategy into the mix: Let the enemies be alerted after the first shot and let them go for cover or even shoot at you when they find your location or give the player strategic approaches i.e. shooting something like a generator to cause noises to cover your future shots (like in Sniper Elite, for example). It would give the sniping part a little bit more spice.
The turn-based combat on the other hand is purely rng-based. While I don't dislike this concept I would love to see more polish in this than just the standard "hit the head for most damage but they are more likely to evade it", since more often than not all characters I had missed their shot in all turns. Try implementing status-buffs next to morale to give them higher accruacy and make morale a bigger buff than just more damage through critical strikes. And for the love of god, show me the exact percentage chance of hitting the selected part of the body, since I didn't buy the game to guess my chances in an rng-based combat system.
This brings me to the next topic: Conversations. The goal of every conversation is to basically farm morale through selecting the right options. For the first Act which I played, it didn't really bother me all that much, but if I had to play, say, 10-20 hours or even my second playthrough of this, I would just skip dialogue like I do in 90% of all games except for the blatantly obvious "good" answers. Make the dialogue options count like in actual Visual Novels so that the replayability is actually there.
I know this review makes it seem like I hated the game. Not at all, I actually loved all of it. I just understand why it is in early access and I wanted to do my part in showing the developers how I would improve this game. If all of this were to actually be implemented into the game I would easily declare this one of the best games I've ever played. Right now though it is "just" a game I genuinely enjoyed playing.