Death is rarely permanent in games, and Grid Force – Mask of the Goddess is no different. In fact, you start off having just shrugged off a recent death, your own, as you — Donna — recover from your recent, failed attempt to topple the goddesses and correct the universes’ future.
Grid Force is a grid-based tactical RPG that impressively manages to look like a turn-based strategy but play like a real-time one. You control a team of characters, swapping between them as you slide around the grid attacking, dodging and deflecting. In this, it’s actually closer to an arcade shooter, or bullet-hell, but that’s enough genre chatter for now. Each of your characters moves around the grid in the same way, but each of them has different weaponry, special moves, attack speeds and stats, they’ve also got — phew — different elemental damage types and can be levelled up, and can each use masks.
As it turns out, there’s quite a bit going on for what might appear to be a simple game about moving around grids to dodge and attack. However, Grid Force doesn’t leave you alone and gives you more than enough room to learn the systems that will come into play. In fact, it’s wild that a game with such intense-feeling combat can slow down so much for the tutorials and beautiful, hand-drawn story segments. It’s heavy with writing, in a good way, and doesn’t hold back on giving you control of the story; giving you a chance to recruit, forgive or provide for quite a few of the characters you run into through its extensive campaign. Most of these characters are heavy with their own mission and bias, in fact, even your starting party are still raw from watching you die as you all recently failed to overthrow the goddesses.
I played through the demo of Grid Force while at Insomnia68 and really enjoyed it. I’ve got to admit that when I first saw it, I actually kind of wrote it off because I was wholly convinced that I’d seen it before at a pitching event. I can’t fully remember the game that I saw at that point, but there was a point in time (maybe 2019) when real-time, grid-based was clearly somewhat vogue. Grid Force is different, though, not only because of the character swapping but because of the well-written story laced around and through each of the chapters. There are over 20 characters (beyond the prologue team) that can join you if you choose to have them, however having them in your team means sparing their lives or giving up items, and this can backfire later in the story due to the interlacing stories of the characters.
The way that combat worked, which has a health system as well as a special system where you’ll need to bench characters for them to recharge their special attacks, really stood out. That said, my favourite thing was the deflection mechanic; which allows you to bounce back enemy bullets at them, dealing a little damage and sometimes stunning the enemies. While the screen gets quite busy, especially in boss fights, if you keep an eye on your enemy’s movements then you can easily manage to dodge and deflect as you rotate through characters to pick out those who are most effective.
Prologue and chapter one down, my time with the demo ended. I didn’t get to see Grid Force’s Mask system — which seems to be incredibly strong magic or a summon system — however, I did get to tinker with the levelling up system. Enemies drop essence depending on their element (there’s an extensive element system) which can then be spent on any of your team member’s stats. Earth, Light, Dark, Water, Fire and Air elements level up Health, Ether, Luck, Defence, Power and Speed respectively, with new skills and buffs littered up the bars that you fill in. It’s a simple but effective system, and it means that it’s pretty quick to bring a new character into the roster.
Grid Force – Mask of the Goddess is expected to launch in Q2 of this year. When it releases it will do so for Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox One Series X/S and Nintendo Switch — although I doubt it will launch simultaneously.
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