I’m Not Even Sure What Just Happened. – 100% Orange Juice – Fruitbat Factory

100% Orange Juice is by definition a battle strategy board game, and I say by definition because the game itself (while being fairly simple to learn) teaches you absolutely nothing about it when you decide to start.

The game starts with a fairly easygoing menu, allowing you to choose to play online with other people, or to follow a campaign mode and see where that gets you. Seriously, if you can figure it out please let me know…

The characters used are from other fairly popular games, so there is a nice hit of remembering playing through games like Flying Red Barrel, QP Shooting, and a few others really adds to the flavour aspect, but when a game tells me it is going to give me a campaign mode, there better be some semblance of a damn campaign.

Essentially the game just tosses you into a single player mode with very little story and call it a campaign mode. Some people may be fine with this as the game is classified as a board game, but you should just tell us you have a single player mode, and not try and make it seem like you’ve actually added a story to it.

The graphics are your usual over flashy Japanese style of mange artwork, with every thing being a bit over exaggerated, and always entertaining. I am a fan of this style of artwork in games, as I find it brings me back to when I first got into Manga, so very long ago.

The soundtrack, I was ready to love. I have been a fan of most music in this smaller indie games, and now even have some songs from some of my other reviews qued up for when I am reviewing. My only issue with this sound track is how the music was basically on repeat for most of the game, causing me to get a really bad taste for it. The soundtrack is not a bad one, by any means, but it does grate on you after listening to it for too long.

The game uses a dice based combat system, that if you are passing through the same square as another player, you can choose to battle them. Your goal? To either collect the most stars and complete checkpoints, or to battle the most people, completely defeating them and earning wins.

When you check into a check point, you collect one of your five winning stars, and choose which you’d prefer for your next check-in. Whether you want to collect more stars, or win more battles. Either way it gets more and more difficult the longer you’ve been playing. Adding the fact that if you lose and get knocked out, you lose half of everything.

As awful as it sounds, I wish someone had knocked me out when I had made the decision to play this game. Apparently, it is a huge hit on Steam, but put this under one of my five worst games of all time.