Full Metal Schoolgirl

Genre: Third-Person Shooter / Action / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This review has been directly sponsored by a kind donation from Jamie and His Cats. Thanks again for your generous contribution!)

Full Metal Schoolgirl, released in 2025 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch 2, is an Action game with Third-Person Shooter gameplay and Roguelike elements where players take on the role of one of two android schoolgirls who are looking to take down an evil corporate overlord who is overworking his android employees.

So I’ll start by saying that there’s clearly an attempt at social commentary being made here, one with all the subtlety of a robot schoolgirl with chainsaws for hands, and one that falls apart upon even the slightest bit of inspection or thought. For example, one of the little quips your character can speak as she slices through hordes of enemies and getting splattered by black oil from their robotic guts is “I don’t think you’re social distancing!” and forgetting how very 2020 that satire is… you’re a robot, the enemies are robots… so why is social distancing even a thing in this setting?

I wouldn’t think too harshly of the dumb satire if I could just ignore it, but these moments are frequent and so in-your-face over-the-top that you can’t really ignore them. And yeah, it all gets old really quickly.

The rest of the presentation here is good but nothing truly spectacular. The game’s 3D characters are designed with an anime style and cel-shaded, and there are some nice destruction effects, but the enemies are pretty repetitive, and the procedurally-generated environments are extremely repetitive. The fast-paced anime-style soundtrack and voice acting (in both Japanese and English) is decent in that its over-the-top nature meshes well with the rest of the game’s style, but I can’t say much beyond that.

Well, okay, I can say a little beyond that. The framerates are inconsistent and the repeated loading times are irritating on Nintendo Switch 2.

When it comes to the actual gameplay, Full Metal Schoolgirl offers a satisfactory Third-Person Shooter with melee combat, but it’s not anything more than that. It’s shallow and repetitive, and it makes things worse by constantly making you wait – guns take a while to reload, and melee attacks expend energy that require you to wait for a cooldown every now and then. You can swap back and forth, but it’s irritating to be made to do that if you’re fighting a bunch of nearby enemies and suddenly find yourself forced to use the sniper rifle you’re currently carrying, or fighting a bunch of distant enemies and then forced to use your melee weapon.

Sadly, the Roguelike elements don’t improve things much either, basically just boiling down to swapping out a handful of weapon types, getting stat-based upgrades, and “Roguelite” permanent stat-based upgrades. Ho-hum.

I think some players may find themselves enjoying Full Metal Schoolgirl, but for the most part this is mediocre in every sense of the word. Mediocre gameplay, mediocre Roguelike elements, mediocre story, and very mediocre graphics given that this is running on Nintendo Switch 2. The Nintendo Switch 2 library is only just now starting to grow, but you still have a massive selection of Nintendo Switch games to choose from, including multiple games with similar elements to this that are far, far better. Go for one of those instead.

tl;dr – Full Metal Schoolgirl is an Action game with Third-Person Shooter gameplay and Roguelike elements where players take the role of robotic schoolgirls fighting through hordes of robotic enemies in a bad satire of toxic work culture. Everything here is mediocre – mediocre Action gameplay, repetitive environments and enemies, lackluster Roguelike elements, and unimpressive graphics and performance. You can still find some fun here, but you have countless better options.

Grade: C

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