09 May, 2023
Limbus Company
Limbus Company is a polished strategy RPG with a neat story-driven campaign, and the most complex combat system I’ve ever seen. It’s also the third game in a popular series by developer ProjectMoon.In Limbus Company, we play as Dante and his team of 12 Sinners as they fight their way through hundreds of enemies and special dungeon-crawling boss encounters across a dark and eerie universe.
Interestingly, the combat system is a mix of real-time and turn-based, which means we first select which attacks to use, and then all units on both sides attack simultaneously. Each hero is also locked to a specific enemy, and during the attack phase, we only deal damage if our hero’s final power is higher than the enemy’s. If not, we take damage instead.
We attack by chaining skills together across a 2x5 grid that represents each of our five hero’s two skills. There’s an absolutely insane depth to this system, with lots of things to take into consideration. As just two of many examples, chaining skills of the same color provides a damage boost, but we may want to pick a different skill to better counter the enemy’s attack.
After combat, all our 12 heroes gain XP – not just the five we took into battle. The game’s gacha system focuses on unlocking new identities for these characters, and we’re bombarded with free premium currency to do so.
The story is undoubtedly good, but there is a lot of it, which led me to eventually skip it. The biggest downsides, however, are the bad menu UI and the incredibly long and very frequent load screens. I let the latter count as a negative for the "gameplay" score.
Limbus Company monetizes via a battle pass, an energy system, and iAPs for more gacha pulls. Thankfully, the game can easily be completed as a free player.
Unlike most gacha games, the combat doesn’t simply feel like a numbers game. The deep level of strategy really makes the game stand out, and I think many hardcore players will enjoy it.
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