An underrated masterpiece. A hidden gem. Criminally overlooked. A diamond in the rough. How a small Korean indie studio managed to knock it out of the park on their first try, price it at a humble 25 USD, and support it over the years with free content (a whole extra chapter and new characters!) and an extra DLC chapter is nothing short of amazing. Better wordsmiths than I have put into words what makes it such a thrilling, addictive game, but I will try my best to do the game justice.

The Mastery system is a game-changer in all aspects. The game encourages you to create absolute monster units by applying creative thinking and by mixing and matching the right masteries and set bonuses. This also means you have clear, definite progression, since the next level-up unlocks more slots on your mastery board, and new classes and enemies unlock new masteries.

The other neat thing about the Mastery system is that it gives you plenty of freedom in how to build your characters and how you tackle the encounters. Enemy casts a party-wide buff that cause knockback and burning upon death? Equip anti-burn masteries, ranged skills, or inflict bleeding on them and kite them out. Goons have a skill that maxes out the damage they take at 50% of their max health? Invest in some multi-hit skills, give your ranged attackers the Fire Support mastery so they can follow-up on attacks, or create a dodge-counter tank to lure them in and finish them off with one AoE. This gets pretty crazy in the late game, but I genuinely enjoyed going back to the drawing board and coming up with ways to deal with new threats. Another thing that doesn’t get mentioned as much, but all playable characters are great and none of them feel underpowered, even on the hardest difficulties. Genuinely, a crazy feat.

Another great thing about Troubleshooter is Quality of Life features. Big fan of games that go “Yeah sure, we got a Super Fast animation speed setting for you”. Researching masteries sounds like it’d be tedious and bothersome? Nah fam, we got that auto-research button for you. Wanna see if your sniper’ll be in range to hit that enemy over there if she moves to this specific tile without having to move and reload? Just hit that V key, brother. Have to retreat from a mission? You still keep your levels, some of the loot you got, and most importantly, retain intel on the enemy for the ingame Pokédex. Difficulty? Adjust it on the fly, whether you want to fight harder enemies for more loot and experience or want to have less mobs on the field so you can get past a tougher mission (I recommend starting on Hard and eventually veering to Cruel Mode around Chapter 5, going back and forth between the two as required).

I think the story is just there for the most part, but it’s the characters that really shine in Troubleshooter. I love the way that characters (both protagonists and antagonists) have their own backgrounds and relationships with one another (some very neat twists/surprises) that we come to learn through both flashbacks and over the course of the story.
There are certain parts of the game I’m less fond of, though. I understand why the game relies on quantity over quality when it comes to the amount on enemies per map (an average of 40-50 on Hard Mode, which dwarfs XCOM 2 numbers, for comparison), as your characters are just that strong, but I do think the curve is a bit uneven, as missions in chapters 2 and 3 really ramp up enemy density, but your clearing potential isn’t quite there yet, resulting in mission times ranging from 30 to 45 minutes. I would much rather the game have gone with more frequent use of stronger elite enemies, which A) provide more challenge; B) require less time per mission. The “Jigsaw” story mission is a good example of this done right: lots of unique bosses, backed by one or two minions each.

The backup provided by police forces is appreciated in the beginning of the game, when you don’t have a full crew yet and your characters are meek, to say the least, but they quickly become liabilities and fall behind (literally) your actual crew. I think having more police unit types (like an ESP user for AoE damage, perhaps) or the ability to use your own masteries to upgrade or keep them up-to-date could be considered.
Lots of other miscellaneous things I noted that bug me: the animation for going up and down stairs, boxes, ledges, etc. needs to be sped up becau—oh, their latest update on the sequel mentions them fixing exactly this. Nice.

Things like certain types of equipment being dropped by enemies (why even have baseball bats and pistols and whatnot be in the loot table if no characters can equip it?), the quests all being three variations of the same concept (pick up crates, rescue the trucker, capture Javier), the arena mode being locked behind quests and barely being mentioned (which is a shame because it’s an excellent way to grind unique-exclusive masteries) are what I’d love to see ironed out in the sequel.
But the biggest, and frankly, main problem with the game, is the English localization. Yeah, the dialogue is not idiomatic, but at least you get the gist of things, even if the whole Spoonism thing sounds exactly like you think it sounds. I’m less forgiving of mastery descriptions leading to ambiguity or tutorials on game mechanics going on for ten paragraphs and only creating further confusion. Improving the translation would make everything else about the game shine even further.

An underrated masterpiece. A hidden gem. Criminally overlooked. A diamond in the rough. Go get ‘em Dandylion, I’ll be rooting for y’all.

Really liked X-COM's game play but disliked the time limit the campaign imposed, as well as losing characters I spent a long time building up. Then I found this game. It ticks every box I could ask for. Level up and class mechanics. Team synergies. The VAST mastery system. And all with X-COM style combat. It has an insane amount of content for the price and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a great value game to sink tens if not hundreds of hours into.

Amazing game with tons of content for a super cheap price. Loved it. Be aware, that it can become quite complicated to setup a good mastery board/build. But that also means a ton of options and oppurtunities.