Even after a couple of hours with Full Metal Schoolgirl, I'm not entirely sure what it wants to be: a shooter, a roguelite, a campy yet lewd robo-corpo hack-and-slash? It's a little bit of everything, and doesn't particularly excel in any aspect. Yet I'm weirdly endeared to its bizarre late 2000s jankiness.
It reeks of a hornier Earth Defense Force, which makes sense—developer Yuke's and publisher D3Publisher are at the helm here, swapping out aliens for cyborgs and a towering office building that serves as the core of Full Metal Schoolgirl's roguelite elements.
There are two machine girl protagonists to choose from—I opted for the dark-haired Akemi Minamiazabu—with the goal being to ascend floors of the Meternal Jobz tower, shooting and slashing my way through rooms of robots before facing off against a big bad every 10 floors or so.
Wiping out rooms spits out a nice reward for my troubles: a battery to replenish my health, a slow-but-strong axe to swap out with my lighter, quicker katana, or a new gun type to blast away with. There are also MODs—giving me a small buff in exchange but an equally small debuff—or upgrades to my drone and shield that can give me the edge in combat.
There's a lot, quite frankly, so much that I didn't even realise I could use my drone as a support tool until I was a good hour in. There's a surprising amount of room for experimentation, though. I swapped out a gattling gun for what I assumed to be a far stronger grenade launcher, only to find its slow attack rate and reload times to be a dud against the first fast-moving boss I encountered in the tower.
That is to say, however, that the combat I've engaged in so far has been painfully simple. For the most part I'm able to gun everyone down with an additional few swipes of my melee weapon to catch stragglers, freely charging into every optional room without having to think too hard about my resource management.
It makes it even easier to tackle so-called "listener requests"—ah yes, also, I'm a livestreamer for whatever reason, parading my The Raid-style excursion on not-Twitch for an ever-yapping chat to witness—which sometimes pop up when I enter a room. It's mostly basic stuff I've encountered so far: clear the room in a certain amount of time, don't use health packs, all the classic stuff.
I'm able to up the stakes for a tougher challenge and double the monetary reward, which almost always the best option as they're easy to complete. I'd like to think the challenge gets a little more intense as I continue to scale the tower, but things have been pretty hunky-dory for my first few hours.
If I do cock up and die, I'm zapped right back to the start, but with a pile of cash and materials in hand. All my accumulated weapons and accessories are gone, unfortunately (those pesky roguelites) but I can spend whatever I brought back with me to augment my machine girl and try all over again with a little more power behind me. Granted that augmentation involves, I assume, being fondled by a large-chested doctor-slash-mad scientist while my character is chained to a table, but you know.
I was surprised how quickly I fell into the fight-die-gear-repeat of it all, like a neverending version of that scene from the end of Scott Pilgrim. I did get a little frustrated with the monotony after a couple of attempts, and the game controls awful clunky at times—for some reason the camera sensitivity skyrockets when trying to navigate over certain platforms, meaning I would sometimes try to turn a corner and veer right off into the void.
But that kind of tomfoolery feels so reminiscent of late 2000s gooner jank—hello Lollipop Chainsaw, Onechanbara et al (endearing)—that I was still enjoying myself despite it all.
Am I turning a blind eye to every time Akemi holds her skirt down as she ascends stairs, and am I still reeling from getting an achievement for accidentally upskirting her while trying to shoot a spider cyborg crawling along the ceiling? Of course, but am I also going to play more Full Metal Schoolgirl? You bet I am.
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