Goddess of Victory: NIKKE  is a sci-fi RPG shooter mobile gacha game from Destiny Child  developer ShiftUp. After civilization has been driven underground by a horde of robots called Rapture, a proto-government military commander is tasked with leading a group of gun-toting female android soldiers called NIKKEs to reclaim the surface world.

The primary style of gameplay feels a lot like a mobile entry in the Time Crisis series. Each level is some permutation of “hide behind cover to reload and avoid fire, peek out to shoot back,” and as repetitive as that may sound, in practice, it’s a ton of fun. It’s a refreshing gameplay loop in a mobile games environment filled with Final Fantasy  and Raid: Shadow Legends  clones. While the game has a few “AFK” style attributes, the game neither penalizes you for playing or not playing. You can progress forward regardless, so outside of major events, you never feel strong-armed into picking up the game when your attention should be elsewhere.

As with many other games in the mobile space, NIKKE ‘s main draw is the character gacha. Every in-game military corporation hosts a roster of gorgeous anime girls sporting everything from shotguns to LMGs, sniper rifles, and katanas, each with different targeting bonuses and special moves that buff the character or the entire squad. The extreme variance in character ability and power can often mean one over-leveled squad may still have trouble completing a mission, where a separate under-leveled squad may make short work of it.

The artwork in the game is gorgeous, but it does suffer from one major flaw: consistency. The differences in art styles across NIKKES, environments, and the few male characters that do appear in-game are often stark and hard to ignore. While all are definitely anime styles, the men and women inhabit completely different worlds, visually. That being said, it’s a relatively small issue when in view of the whole project.

Still early on in its life cycle, the game can suffer at times from random crashes and sound issues, but none that, in our experience, couldn’t be solved by just re-launching the game. Once you advance far enough, you may also experience a bit of stagnation, waiting to recieve enough points to level your characters and beat the next mission, but frequent updates and rebalancing have since largely made it a non-issue. And with these updates, developer ShiftUp has not neglected to listen to its community, usually scheduling downtimes for periods of three to four hours overnight when player count is usually low anyways. We only experienced one update that kept the game down for more than seven hours during the day, and ShiftUp included an apology for the inconvenience as well as enough in-game currency to pull another flight of characters. 

All-in-all, NIKKE  has held our attention here at the Nakama Podcast, and that’s not a common occurance for anything, let alone a mobile game. While it’s not a perfect product, if you’re looking for a new game to play on the train or bus – we recommend not playing during school, church, or work hours on account of the spectacular jiggle physics – we suggest trying this game out for at least a day or two.