This game uses a traditional turn battle system. In fact this game is very similar to Final Fantasy X in terms of gameplay. You run around with up to 11 Digimon in your party of which 3 are active in the Battle. Each Digimon has one or two primary move(s) from the Bandai Canon (like Grey Sword and Garuru Cannon for Omegamon) which are fully animated which look really awesome and satisfying. They also have a bunch of secondary moves that aren't well animated and serve more of a utility purpose. The moves differ from different type attacks to simple buffs and heals.
Unfortunately the difficulty curve is really low and outside of boss battles you will one hit kill all random encounters. The Difficulty then makes a huge jump from "yawn" to "WTF IS GOING ON!" during the DLC missions which is very odd. Maybe the Difficulty was kept low so that casuals don't have trouble playing the game? Which would be another parallel to Final Fantasy X since a huge portion of that game is also way too easy. However Final Fantasy X had that certain point in the game where the game became hard or better said well balanced in terms of difficulty, Cyber Sleuth never has this point in the game which is very unfortunate.


The Digimon typing in the game was done really well. Every Digimon has a attribute (Vaccine, Data, Virus, None) and a Element (Fire, Water, Plant, Electricity, Earth, Wind, Light, Dark, None). Each attribute/element is very effective and weak against exactly 1 attribute/element, expect for non-elemental attacks of course. This is really well executed and by far better executed than in previous Digimon Story games where you would just have two elements and no attributes. Having elements and attributes separated allows you to deal heavy damage even if your Digimon doesn't have the fitting elemental attack, which happens way too often in Pokemon. However what I dislike is that if you you hit with both, the correct element and correct attribute, you will deal three times the damage you would normally do. I wish the damage multipliers were smaller. This would made the game definitely more balanced in terms of difficulty. The maps are very simple in design and the puzzle that are thrown at you aren't particularly hard to solve. The final dungeon however is really complicated and the random encounters don't die from one hit. But it would be sad if they did considering this was the final Dungeon. Also this game has by far too little amount of playable Digimon. 240 isn't that much at all and many Evolution lines don't make any sense at all. For example I wanted to obtain Titamon which is The ultimate evolution of Ogremon, lore wise. So I got me a nice Ogremon and then had to start to theorize to which Digimon I should evolve Ogremon into to be able to evolve to Titamon next. I figured "Yeah Death Meramon, big muscular guy, makes sense" but no I had to get Digitamamon instead for some reason. I really dig it that all the Digimon are really well detailed but in a potential sequel I really hope they will increase the number of playable Digimon by at least 100 to prevent such evoline problems.


The game features a fixed camera which is yet another similarity to Final Fantasy X. You can't turn the camera around. All you can do is zooming in and out in certain areas. I suppose this was done to achieve the amount of graphical fidelity that this game has, due to the game having to render only one direction. And I'll talk about it more in the Presentation section. The "Hacking" and "Sleuth" part of the game isn't very challenging either. As a detective you will obviously have to do some investigation. For that you are given keywords that you can ask the NPC's about. However instead of making it into a WRPG kind of dialogue, like in Skyrim or Risen, you just have to find the right guy and use the right keyword on him to proceed. You are given multiple keywords very rarely so it's always straight forward what you have to do. As a Hacker (btw tamers in this game are essentially all hackers) you are given abilities like "Open door level 1-4", "Read data", "Copy and Paste" and "Stealth". Unfortunately only the ladder is utilized in a way that supports the narrative. The other ones are really just there to be used in very simple puzzles.


The Presentation of this game is superb. The great amount of graphical fidelity and cyber punk aesthetic work perfectly with each other. However because this game was meant to play with a predetermined camera angle many textures have a really low resolution because from the distance you would be looking at them they would look good. However in cutscenes you are able to see just how poor some textures look. But that's just a small nit pick. The character models look really good and the animations look really carefully crafted. The attention to detail especially in the real world is very high. Here are some comparison Photos a friend of mine summarized in her Blog. The Music is really good too. It has a wide variety of cyber punk themes that really fit the atmosphere and the mood of the situation during dialogue. However some tracks feature vocals which I found irritating, especially during the parts of the game where the voice actors were speaking but that again is just a small nitpick.


What I really disliked about the story is the MC. It's a silent protagonist that in my personal opinion shouldn't be silent. The character of the MC is relatively fleshed out and the fact that this game is filled with choices that aren't real choices doesn't help either.
At one part of the game it literally looked like the MC is trolling other NPC's by simply not talking at all. And I know that people create silent protagonists to make them easier to connect to the players but like I said the character of MC is pretty fleshed out. It isn't like in Persona 4 where you have a certain control of what your character is like. You could go to a different sports club of your choice, different job, different girlfriend, different activities each day. There is none of that in Cyber Sleuth. Final Fantasy X had a pretty good MC that was not silent and people could still connect with him well. So why shouldn't this game?



You'll be playing the story for approximetly 40 hours. After that you can do the Royal Knight missions, DLC Missions, Colosseum Fights, Side Quests, and filling up your Digidex.
There isn't that much to do but enough to keep you entertained for a few extra hours. The fact that you can't battle your friends online is really a bummer.