Homura Hime PC review - Pretty toasty, but a bit too reheated

When I see a spectacle fighter, I play it. I’d been looking forward to Homura Hime for quite some time, as its combat looked to deliver exactly what I want from the genre. Within the first few minutes, I saw that this was clearly the case. The game’s combat feels pretty terrific, with extremely precise, responsive inputs, a respectable offering of combos, and a decently long campaign. Sadly, the game ends up recycling a large amount of its content to get there instead of just allowing itself to be shorter, and the level design doesn’t always play to the game’s strengths, but I still got a kick out of slicing and dicing here.

Homura Hime has a fairly generic anime aesthetic, with a lot of somewhat stock anime characters. The title character, whose name is literally “Flame Princess,” is your standard stoic anime heroine, with her sidekick Ann being the requisite overly cheery, annoying little girl with a squeaky voice. I skipped through her lines of dialogue as quickly as I could. The rest of the cast is similarly tropey, but there is actually a bit of depth here. I didn’t love the story, but the game does try to deliver a solid one, which puts it ahead of a lot of similar games. There are also tons of lore drops to find, which shows how much the devs cared about building their world.

When the game begins, Homura Hime is tasked with traveling to five levels to defeat Archdemons, former humans who have turned destructive due to suffering a traumatic end. The levels are all decent, but the issue with them is that they try to be too variable. The combat here is the star hands-down. Homura Hime has a bunch of combos, some launchers, air combos, and a plethora of skills that make cutting down her foes quite the treat. The levels, unfortunately, aren’t jam-packed with combat. Things are broken up with regular navigation, frequent dialogue sequences, and a surprising amount of platforming to boot.

The platforming is decent, but it’s not nearly as well-made as the combat is. The jumping feels fairly stiff, and Homura Hime could have really used a double jump. She can air dash, at least, plus there are grapple points and other interactables to launch herself off of in mid-air, but these don’t feel all that great. There are even some rail grinding sections that fair better, but only one of these is demanding. The level design in general really isn’t all that impressive either, as most of it isn’t particularly memorable. Outside of the combat, Homura Hime is mostly just decent.

Enemies, sadly, aren’t as interesting as the combat in the Homura Hime gameplay either. Most of them are easy or are of the ranged variety, so you’ll need to dodge and parry your way across fights while mostly quickly taking out weaker foes. There are a few stronger ones, though. The enemy variety is pretty good, at least, even if I wish there were more aggressive melee enemies than we ended up getting. One issue is that the game simply takes too long to build a larger bestiary, so you’ll be pretty deep into the game before you start seeing challenging enemy encounters during the levels themselves. There’s also some exploration to be had, which rewards you with currency to buy new combos, skills, and equippable charms, as well as combat challenges.

The levels themselves are honestly pretty easy, but some of Homura Hime‘s boss battles are where the game’s challenge lies. Granted, these fights mostly aren’t that challenging either, as their difficulty is mostly due to how much damage bosses do relative to regular enemies. Even then, their movesets and phases aren’t too bad, some of them just have sections towards the end where the boss will have a grab that does a huge amount of damage (a third of your health bar generally) or a section that requires some memorising before you can beat it. Even then, most bosses don’t take that much practice.

In gameplay that’s obviously inspired by Sekiro, you have a similar sort of parry. Enemies flash red or show their attack trajectory generally, and a fairly generous parry window results from pressing the button, which allows you to avoid damage as long as the attack isn’t gold or bullet-based. You can really mash the parry button and just not take damage as long as you do, which I feel is too lenient. Parries cancel absolutely everything, too, so as long as you mash the button, you’ll be safe from melee attacks. Bosses and some enemies do unleash bullet hell spam, which can be tricky to avoid, though. Bullets are honestly the most dangerous aspect of the game.

Homura Hime moves along nicely up until you finish the fifth level, and then fight another boss afterward. Each level is unique and has its own boss fight, but once you beat that fifth level, the rest of the game mostly just regurgitates what you’ve already done. The next levels take you back to areas from the first five, plus you’re going to end up fighting all of the bosses again. The boss you fight after beating the boss of the fifth level has to be fought three times in total, which I thought was a bit much. You do get another really cool boss fight along the way, at least, plus the final boss is neat.

The game is kind of janky, but the version I played for review seemed somewhat unfinished. There were some poor translations, misspellings, some untranslated Japanese, and more. I’m assuming some of this will be alleviated with the launch build. Once you beat the game, the only option appears to be to go into the game’s base, where you end up after every mission, and talk to other characters. I made the mistake of going into the dojo here while trying to find a way to replay levels, and when I exited it, all of the characters had vanished, and my save was stuck that way. Suffice to say, there doesn’t appear to be any way to replay levels, do a new game plus, or even unlock a harder difficulty.

The game probably takes about 10 or 11 hours, though, and it still mostly delivers on what it sets out to, so I recommend it as long as you’re okay with the unfortunate repetition. The combat really does have most of what I want out of games like this, after all. I do wish there were more than one weapon and that there was some additional replay value, as there’s a good amount of potential here.