Not a game for everyone to play, despite it looks good and tactical, it become really boring after 1 hour play, Tutorial are cheesy and really long without SKIP TUTORIAL feature at all. You just follow instruction for 20 minutes just for reading all of them and if you wanted reroll, good luck doing it because rates are fake and no pity summon at all. Once you get bad luck, really bad luck happened and no SSR/3* after 50-60 pulls and making new account means you need watch tutorial for another 20 minutes again.
This game by far worse than older Girls Frontline and you just had enough after playing for 2-3 hours watching those idiots do their job while pressing screen once a while for support skills only. Oh, it also combined it Idle system which means game even more boring. Good luck for players who played this game.
A solid and relatively friendly game. Character control is limited to initial positioning, a few combat directives (regenerating directive points, selected loadout) and casting ults. It's somewhat of a roguelike (with temporary upgrade pickups per stage in a branching map in most stages) in a usual stamina gatcha, but they avoided many punishing aspects of roguelike by allowing 10(!) resets per stage, 3 resets a floor, being able to exit for only 1 stamina spent. They also avoided a bunch of stam issues like letting you select rewards for stamina cost instead of forcing it all.
Character building is still expensive though, although easier than most gatcha due to how their shard/dupe system works. They also have a gear+substat grind endgame which is.... at least their system appears to be on the better side of that but stil.... prepare to mald I suppose. Also, with a stamina system, as usual you're flooded early and I hear somewhat limited later, although available nonlimited challenge content will alleviate that for a while I think.
However, the game is entirely PvE at the moment and the friend support system is fairly generous, so a lot can be forgiven.
To be fair, Neural Cloud is a typical anime gacha game like many others. But the main factor that set it different than others is the gameplay wise inspired by TFT (Team Fight Tactic from LoL) which is very indepth additive to both casual and hardcore players alike after get used to it.
Since it also introduces a complete new storyline of what's so-called "GFL prequel", it's easy to pick up by to GFL fans - or even non GFL players (i'm at that category btw) that not able to fully experience Girl's FrontLine game back in 2018 and so on.
There's maybe still some small cons like game-balance or bugs/glitches but gonna say it's much better than many games at release debut of playing for 1st impression.
Medium size of the game however (3GB storage at most), but other than that it can run well on potato phones as well - depend on how Setting you want for smooth experience.
That'll do for this ones, thanks for reading and hope you all love the game :3
very good gacha game and would happily recommend it!
-Graphics: beautiful detailed live-2d animation of pretty girls and boys with a stunning mix of 3d environments. i think the graphics in the games deserve more praise it's all eye candy. the gameplay chibi figurines are really expressive too and all have their own custom movements and custom animated 2d specials, i could just keep adding costume to everything! UI is gorgeous too and how it animates camera movement in environments is so good. game really deserves alot more praise for its wonderful graphics!
-Gameplay: auto battler grid combat with strong Rogue-likes elements in stages i.e getting items buffs planning routes in procedurally made maps, maximizing risk for reward
i absolutely love the rogue side of game and auto battler is enjoyable too, i think this mix of both is perfect balance of easy to play and yet immersive. wonderful work by the devs!
there's variety in stages too and it never feels like i'm playing the same stages or doing same thing nor do i ever feel overwhelmed by variety. the tutorial also does great job at familiarizing players one step at time.
Edit: forgot to add in that the game stamina usage scales with time or length of stages roughly speaking so you never ever run into issue of having too much stamina and not enough time to spend it, most daily mission stages are single fight stages too so clearing dailies never takes longer than 10 -20 minutes, i absolutely love games that value players time like this they're god send
although i would like to see more cooperative modes that dip into the multi-player aspect but just as is i'm not dying for it by any means.
-Music: not much to say here music is great and it really zones you in, never gets old either it's really really well made, although i get the feeling there's more variety to be had. not that i'm complaining hahaha plenty of ost to jam to.
-Story: story is nice too albeit it feels tedious to do story stages when the game just let's you skip them so i just ended up watching through them after finishing most of story which did ruin it somewhat for me hahaha
world building is great and characters are very lovable and believable too. my only complaint is that story feels like a side dish in this game so even with it's ace performance you'd really struggle to care which is honestly sad.
i love the main cast btw they're great
-Value: Game is very f2p friendly, pull currency is easy to come by and rates are good with pity ontop of it too in two forms aswell,safe to say you're getting your moneys worth in this game hahaha, and even for the exquisite anti-pull players most of the free story units are solid some even amazing at what they do too.
there's no jarring power gap between the 1 or 2 or 3 star units here except for how easy it is to build them you'll find plenty of use from your low grade units you build, some even downright better than most banner units too!
if there's anything that i'd really really love to see improved or changed so far is making costume tickets more accessible to the f2p, so far getting any unit costumes is a long gone dream without spending .i'll say though some of those costumes are probably worth it too and we get furnitures very easily as f2p so i'm not displeased or anything just longing for elusive content that's outside my reach
hope this review helps anyone thinking of giving game a try, even if it's late to the release party you'll get a very similar experience to everyone else with the complete lack of pvp available so join in whenever!
Game is great overall, animation awesome.
I will mostly point the faults
Gameplay:
Their mistakes from GFL is repeated in this game.
Gameplay need some QOL improvement and for the dev to think outside their comfy zone or their old design. For example the Fragment Search Stage is just bad by gameplay design and redundant to be played everyday in terms of gameplay.
Progression is old fashioned by design and sucks. Player punished for not sticking to 1 core teams (Due to game progression rush = more resources permanently). Not to mention expensive levelling to catch up to current stage level.
The amount of units to bring to the field are few, which is ironic due to this game is gacha unit collecting game, but it is less incentives for players to invest in other units until late in progress.
But even then you will still want to powerup your core team due to autoplay (you want the simple AI on autoplay to win the stage, so you need team that can pass the stage with ease)
Sound:
Certain characters are not homescreen material at all (hopefully only few of them). Not only their VA voice is limited, they only speak few words and repeats often.
Honestly seems most of the effort only goes to persica (and some others)...
Putting certain characters and hearing the same short voicelines repeated again and again is just.. ugh...
Correction: sounds seems to unlock with affection lvl, still seeing how it will goes. I'm not sure how to trigger it i homescreen.
Value:
Shops are cluttered.
Its a pain getting used to it, and the main screen jumps and shift oftens, but is not a big deal.
They should clean up their shops a bit.
I hope the monthly subs is not more than 1 type.
Let's see what's in their shop next month.
I'll update Value score by then (either +1 or -1)
Story:
Is Ok
First of all if you don't like roguelike then this game is not for you
I played CN server for like 3-4 months so i kinda familiar with this game for early release and i love it
I played as F2P on CN and spender on global so i put review from those both perspective
I'll keep it simple
-F2P friendly
-Gacha guaranteed ssr/*3 : 60 pity and 180 spark for rate up.
-Fair gacha rates i got both rates up dolls and some *3 for total 60 pulls (multiple bannners),if you're not getting *3 means you're unlucky not because of rates so blame urself
-Can farm shards so you can max stars all characters
Overall it's a great game
**Updated my ratings and review.**
TLDR (after review update):
##Downsides:
- IDW (da nyaaa) exists. you cannot escape her. it is your fate.
- Awfully long and hand holding tutorial.
- Lacking QoL improvements, just like GFL...
- I said below that the game isn't too grindy, yes, but the Neural Fragments search is meh. You're limited to 10 attempts per day and it rewards you a little amount of the fragments.
- Voice acting, I forgot to talk about this, not all characters have vasts variety of voice lines, some of them more often than not just repeating the same line over and over again. I feel like only Persicaria that is given special treatment here.
- Only 5 deployable characters per exploration, with 3 as a backup that you can use while at preparation phase, and you're stuck with them until the end of it, which can be punishing if you bring the wrong dolls.
edit (5/12/2022): - the farming is actually hell, just like the original Girls Frontline...
##Story: Great, especially if you've played Girls Frontline before.
##Gameplay and grinding: Super fun! A roguelite that plays like Autochess. Also the game is a bit grindy but not too much, instead it was very easy to grind for stuffs. Some people even already reached Level 60 on their dolls with max upgrades. You really should play the Story mode.
##Sound design: Good, the perfect balance of not beig too loud or too weak.
##Music: Actually great! it's soothing and relaxing, sometimes can makes you feel tense.. and... ahem, OWL CITY DID A MUSIC COLLABORATION WITH NEURAL CLOUD!!!
##Gacha: Free to play friendly, but it still depends on your luck. Don't worry though, the lower rarities here are actually broken (some of them) or viable to carry you through Chapter 3. If you aren't satisfied with your first gacha, you can just reroll away~
*Update: After playing more of this game, it's actually very fun. This is the most fun I've ever had in years of playing gacha game! The story is, oh my god, it's good, some of the Dolls' names are a reference to real life objects or characters (example: Hubble was based from NASA's Space Telescope, Simo was probably a reference to Simo Hayha the White Death, and obviously Banxsy was a reference/a nod to Banksy the famous Street Artist), and the chibi models are so cute! Also, as of writing the update for this review, the game is giving away a LOT of resources for you to level up and do gacha, now's the best time to play Neural Cloud!
Neural Cloud is a spinoff game that takes place in the Girls Frontline timeline. This game is a roguelite gacha game about you, the Commander going undercover as the "Professor"leading the dolls in the Neural Cloud to survive and try to finish your mission to uncover the truth behind the incident happened in the Neural Cloud three years ago. was made by the same developer as Girls Frontline, MICA Team and was published globally by Darkwinter Software (formerly Digital Sky).
##The Biggest Letdown:
The elephant in the room, THE TUTORIAL. The tutorial is VERY handholding, it took me around 30-45 minutes to finish it. While I get why they decided to do that, they could actually just provide an option to skip it and add another option to view the tutorial in a log book or enable it as a toggleable hint in the options menu.
##The Gacha:
The pull rate for 3* (the highest rarity in the pool) is 3.6%, the game have a pity system, at your 60th pull you are guaranteed to get one 3* if you didn't pull any 3* before the 60th pull. So far I only did 30 pull on Aki's banner and haven't got him yet, but I got some good 2*.
There are two form of premium currencies, Quartz sand and Quartz. Quartz sand is obtainable through playing the game from achievements, dailies, weeklies, and other missions. Quartz sand can be exchanged with a advanced search ticket (the gacha currency), 1500 quartz sand can get you 10 advanced search tickets. While the other one, Quartz, so far can only be obtained from the shop which means you have to buy it. Quartz can be used for gacha too, there is a specific banner for it which contains all of the current banner dolls in one single banner (probably have higher pull rates too), it can also be used to buy skin/costumes.
So is it F2P friendly or is the gacha generous enough? I'll say it's kind of F2P friendly, but it will depend on how people see it, and for the gacha... as long as you're doing dailies, weeklies, and finishing hard modes you will have more than enough to hit a pity in a month for a banner.
##The Gameplay:
Gameplay is more akin to Auto Chess rather than Arknights, Alchemy Star, or Blue Archives with an exploration system that offers you branching paths that you could select to progress through, kind of like Ceobe's Fungi Mists from Arknights if you know or played it. While exploring you will of course engage enemies in a combat, and the combat goes like this; You select your dolls (before entering the stage/exploration), adjust their formation, deploy them, watch them do their own thing, and you just tap the screen providing supports in the form of activating dolls ultimate and some active skills to turn the tides of the battle.
Furthermore, this game is a non-linear. Which means if you enter a stage for the 2nd time and so on, it will be different from the 1st time you play it. Especially the exploration, it will be randomized, much like Ceobe's Fungi Mists. This game plays out like a roguelike for most of the part.
Sounds boring? yeah it does on paper.. for some people. This kind of gameplay is not for everyone, especially for people who doesn't like not having any control over their units. But for me, playing this is actually a blast, I always liked roguelites and I liked games like this, I can play this game while working on other things.
##Graphics and Sound Designs:
The graphic quality itself is good, it's nothing special but it's there. The colors aren't as bright and saturated as any other 3D anime games out there so it may look less appealing to some. The texture quality is good given you set it to high or medium, the lower you go the crappier it looks, but it runs smoother and less hot on your phone. The 3D chibi model may not be as expressive as Blue Archives', but hey they're still cute!
The sound design itself is mediocre at best, it doesn't feel to impactful but it doesn't sound too weak either in a combat scenario, just don't expect Arknights level of sound design in this game, you're asking for too much. Though, the button clicks and other menu sound effects sounds pretty good in my ear.
##The Music:
The music is done by Vanguard Sound, the studio behind Girls Frontline and Punishing: Gray Raven soundtracks so you know what to expect. it mostly consists of electronics, rock, j-rock with vocal (opening), and some synthwave or electronic ambience. Almost all of it was composed by RabbitJ and some by Polyblue, they used a lot of piano and guitar instruments, they even used bass guitar for some of the soundtracks and boy they really slaps, they also used some string instruments too. Some of the soundtracks are also a rendition of the original Girls Frontline soundtrack, the easiest example is the victory screen song.
Overall the music is pretty great, but I haven't find one that makes itself lives rent free in my head, still I'm satisfied with the music.
##The Story:
The game takes place in the Girls Frontline universe in the year 2063 inside a virtual space or neural cloud called Magrasea. You are playing as the Commander (presumably the same as GFL) and going undercover as the "Professor" who is missing in the neural cloud. you are tasked by Persica to investigate what actually happened inside the Neural Cloud and uncover the truth behind the incident that took place 3 years ago in the neural cloud and find the real Professor. While it takes place in the same universe as GFL and almost the same timeline as GFL, I really cannot say if the event that took place in Neural Cloud (game) is canon or just an alternative reality from the GFL story. You still have Svarog, Sangvis, and 42Lab and IOP mentioned in the game but I really don't know if they are the same as GFL's.
This game story is very interesting if you're following GFL's story especially about the neural cloud environment that the T-Dolls always working with. This game provides you with in game glossarium (you can only access this during text cutscenes/visual novel section) explaining the lore and some background stuffs, so you don't have to worry about not able to follow through the story!
That's all from me, sorry if my review have bad wordings or hard to understand, it's my first time writing a long serious review like this.
Alright, here goes.
Graphics: character illustrations are good. If you've played GFL before, you'd know that the characters' outfit are tastefully done; no over fanservice. That's also true here, although not completely. Characters like Vee and Aki give plenty of fanservice, especially the latter.
The in-game graphics are also nice, though the fight stages do feel same-y as early as going into chapter 2. The battle sprites are chibis; some will get turned off by that for sure, but the chibis are not in any way bad. They're colorful and do a good enough job of expressing the characters' personality.
Sound: I don't really play with sound. This is made even more convenient with the game having a "mute mode" or something like that. However, from what little I heard, there's nothing that caught my interest when it comes to the BGM, although I think I heard some that are a bit similar to the original GFL. The same can be said about the VA. Nothing remarkable.
Gameplay: it's a rogue like. In short, in each stage you'll have to advance through some "rooms" filled with either enemies, recovery room, the shop, or wildcards. After defeating an enemy room you'll have the chance to get a buff for your party, which consists of 5 frontliners and 3 backliners. You can also NOT get a buff and get a currency to be used in the shop. There's a lot of things that simply can't be explained through reviews like this; I suggest trying the game to see it all.
The battle system itself is an autochess. The battlefield is divided into grids and you place your characters to each grid. Some grids can give special effects, such as unlimited range for ranged characters, giving a shield, and even teleporting. There are also player skills, which is additional crowd control skills not tied to characters.
The only similarity this game has with Arknights in terms of gameplay is that they both use chibi graphics. Neural Cloud plays very differently from Arknights, it's useless to compare between them. I'm only including this since I saw someone saying this game is "70% arknights."
Storyline: it is a "side-quel" to GFL. Yes, side, not prequel. GFL spans from 2062 to 2064. Neural Cloud's story starts in 2063. You don't have to know anything about GFL to enjoy the story, everything is explained to you in each relevant story piece. However, these explanations might be too wordy to you, or well, at least it does for me. There are a lot of tech-y terms used that might not make sense to an average person such as "hash rate" and "operands." Despite this, I'd say the story is still good, though a tad generic. There's sufficient intrigue that keeps me hooked on the story, and there aren't many down time between each story events so you won't read too much filler. A downside of this is that character interaction suffer as a result. You only see them interact with each other in high stress environment.
Value: first, the store. It seems standard. There are lots of limited-time offers where the value is $1 per gacha pull. The monthly card is also standard, $5 for a 10-pull and some more.
Now, the gacha. It is very generous. As of this review, there are only 11 characters of the highest rarity (3 stars) and one of them isn't available in the gacha pool (future release?). The rate is 3.6% total with 1% for the rate-up character. They gave at least 30 pulls from launch mail alone. I've pulled 100 times with 4 3 stars to show for it. There are both pity and spark system: if, after pulling 59 times, you still don't get a 3 star, then your 60th pull will be a 3 star. After 180 pulls, you can exchange the points you get from pulling (1 pull = 1 point) for the banner character.
Also worth noting that some of the strongest characters in this game are of the 1 and 2 star rarity. Lam, Simo, Betty, and Sakuya are better than some of the 3 stars. All characters also have the chance to get ranked up. Maximum rank is 5 stars. If you've ever played priconne or blue archive, it's basically like those games. The character shards can be farmed, aside from being bought from the shard shop, so don't neglect the lower rarities.
Almost forgot about this, but there's a one time "banner" where you can choose a 3 star and trade some gacha currency for it. I put banner on quotations since it's not a gacha per se; the only thing you'll get is the chosen 3 star. You're not pulling for anything here.
Extras: although it still has the "girls' frontline" name on the logo, the game does have some male characters in it, though they are a minority (5 characters out of 41). Most notable one is the aforementioned Aki. Dude's one of the best warrior in the game, and once you get him to 5 stars, you'll be treated to his glorious bare abs. Yeah, this is the fanservice that I was talking about. However, dude's also the only manly man type; the other 4 males fall into the pretty boy type. I even confused one or two of them for a girl before reading their background story.
Another thing, the reroll process is very painful since the tutorial is very long while also not being skippable. You'd be better off playing with what you get since, like I said, many of the lower rarity characters are very good, plus you're also given 2 free 3 star characters. The free tank, Croque, is especially good. Sooner or later you'll get most of the characters and you're also able to farm the character shards.
Edit to add: I forgot to say that this game is buttery smooth. Loading screens are minimal, and the UI is straightforward. Another thing that might interest you is that Owl City has a collaboration song with this game. Yes, that Owl City. You might not believe your eyes if 10 million fireflies... and so on.
I guess that's it for now. This game is definitely one of the better releases this year. If you're looking for a gacha game with an unusual gameplay (haven't seen any other gacha with roguelike as the primary gameplay) then PNC would be a good game to try.
update rating, wow glad keep playing this game, the stage become better and more challenging especially the event stage...
great gameplay needed a great timing and position when fighting boss, sometimes got frustrated when lose my retry due pressing wrong choice lol. maybe because im f2p and my character still 4 star but i definitely love the boss fight n the progress.
still in my standing, story is boringggg. both event and story mode are boriiiinnnggg.
It's from the same family of arknight & alchemy stars.
Unfortunately, my neuron isn't activated.
Graphic: Chara design is pretty good with adorable sd/chibi version. There is nearly no fanservice, so it's for the intellectual instead of cultured one.
*Edit: some charas from ultilife are very cultured. Tasty
Icon (chara & effect/buff) is so small for smartphone version. There are too many description words plus the small font, so the UI related things need so much improvement especially the usage of icon language (instead of word explanation), 'imagine the player must read the buff cards description for every stage'
Sound: VA is good & music genre is kinda like space sci-fi or sus labs
Gameplay: It's a strategy game where you need to pick the optimal buffs (rng based) for your party along the stages, yeah it is roquelike. Also there are chara skills and tactical things, all with cooldown. Battle starts with pre-positioning deployment of your chara units. In summary, it has a bunch of tactical features you must learn.
*It's nikke, but only the simulation part*
Storyline: Send your brain to cloud
Value: It has free chara selector which needs to be claimed with some currencies that you can collect by accomplishing the missions.
2 days and it's painful.
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