The Stop Killing Games folks will love this.
CounterSide is a gacha game. It died on August 26th this year. However, some modders have provided infrastructure to host your own local server, so it can still be played.
You can also use console commands to give yourself however many gacha pulls, other currency, or gear you want. The story is fully playable, so the game can be treated like a single player RPG.
Some of the gamemodes don’t work right (I hear Dive is broken), but the important stuff like the main story, side stories, and combat work fine.
The infrastructure that handles launching the server is here, though you will need to grab the assets (which the infrastructure calls a frozen client) elsewhere. The non-Steam variant seems to work best, though YMMV.
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Anyone played it? Is it a good game?
I played it until July 2023, so I can only speak until then.
The setting is like SCP Foundation, except the latest big containment breach (which happened a few decades before the main story) is being managed, but was never really stopped. There are competing factions who try to offer their own solutions for fixing the SCP Foundation’s titanic fuck-up. My absolute favorite story in this game is the two side stories focused on the Horizon character - basically a story about an unstoppable terminator who wants to personally give a dude who screwed her and her friends over a horrible death.
The gameplay is a line battler. You control when and where your units spawn in, and you control when they launch their ultimates, but things otherwise are left to the AI.
There’s a dupe system and a very punishing gear system, but since there are console commands, those aren’t so bad anymore. You can just grab what you want and get to work.
So if the unwanted grind aspect can be removed from the game, would you say that CounterSide is now better than ever?
I’d say so. The story is pretty good, and you can use console commands to give you whatever resources you want. You can play the game as the biggest gacha megawhale that ever existed at the low cost of free.
The gameplay also requires some tactical thinking in the later stages. For example, if there’s an enemy unit that constantly heals itself to full, you can drop a unit that specializes in healing reflux (Awakened Seo Yoon - any healing causes equivalent damage instead). One of the Awakened characters - Replacer King - has a mechanic I very much enjoy where he resurrects your units as zombies when they die, and he gets an upgrade to his punches (he can then punch across the map) when he performs a resurrection.