Sometimes, when you’re just scrolling through the eShop, you spot a game that seems like it might offer a life-changing experience. Sometimes, it doesn’t pan out the way you’d hoped—but you still share a few laughs along the way. That’s exactly what happened when I tried *Full Metal Schoolgirl*, the second game to launch in October 2025 from former WWE developer and occasional Earth Defense Force contributor Yuke’s.
While *Full Metal Schoolgirl* bursts with energy and sports a dynamite sense of humor, the actual gameplay feels deeply undercooked and fails to stand out in an oversaturated genre.
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### When Even the Work Bots Are Sick of the Boss’s Crap
It’s a shame, because the pitch is perfect for our moment. The world of *Full Metal Schoolgirl* is dominated by corporate ownership, where a labor crisis has been “solved” by cyborgs—an almost fully inorganic workforce happily pushing papers, tapping away at computers, and completing endless tasks without pause.
Unsurprisingly, this has led to all kinds of abuse. Enter two cyborg ladies, far more colorful than their legions of coworkers, who’ve decided enough is enough—it’s time for revenge. To defeat the evil CEO of Meternal Jobz, the “Machine Girls” must climb a 100-floor skyscraper, dismantle the company’s entire management structure, and face off against the man himself.
At first glance, it might look like low-rent, anime-flavored cheesecake. But *Full Metal Schoolgirl* is actually more about chaotic workplace satire than anything else. It’s surprisingly funny—to the point where I favored the dub just to catch all the sad, office-culture-filtered whimpering from enemies I was taking down. The theme song is absolutely unhinged, and nearly every aspect of the localization is on fire. The world-building flavor here is a riot, and I cannot commend the translators enough for their work.
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### I Was Ready for a Blast—But This Premise Deserved a Better Game
I came in ready to have a blast based on the vibes alone, but unfortunately, I walked away desperately wishing this premise was attached to a better game.
*Full Metal Schoolgirl* is a roguelike—because apparently, in today’s video game landscape, everything must be a roguelike. I’m exaggerating, but in a world where *Ninja Gaiden 4* exists, it would be nice to strike a better balance.
That’s not the game’s fault per se, but what *is* its fault is an unapologetically generic and flavorless progression structure. After each run, you collect resources, which you spend to increase your stats. As your numbers go up, you can better survive boss encounters, which unlock higher levels. That’s it. That’s the whole progression loop.
There are a few new abilities to unlock, but they barely change the core gameplay and feel more like tutorialized gatekeeping than genuine upgrades.
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### Gameplay That Feels Half-Baked
The problem is compounded by painfully simple and rarely evolving action mechanics. You get a few basic physical attack strings and weapons that behave in the most textbook fashion imaginable. Everything else you pick up is passive, with modifiers that make minor tweaks to your stats, such as stamina regeneration speed or slight increases to maximum HP. Weapons appear between rooms but don’t add or subtract anything beyond incremental number changes.
In short, it’s the bare minimum of what a roguelike can be—something that the genre has long since surpassed. Today’s dominant roguelikes are focused on new ideas, genre mashups, and deeper gameplay complexities. Unfortunately, this one stays stubbornly in the shallow end.
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### Brainless Battling
What *Full Metal Schoolgirl* most reminds me of are user-made roguelike rooms or islands in games like *Fortnite*. You have a lobby where different weapons float, ready for you to grab, then you trudge through waves of monotonous, generic enemies using basic, uncomplicated mechanics. The goal? To return to the lobby and boost your stats enough to inch slightly closer to the end.
But unlike *Fortnite*, you don’t have a battle pass or any paid incentives. You’re just looping because that’s what the game demands.
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### Final Thoughts
I had high hopes going into *Full Metal Schoolgirl*. My initial pitch for this review was simple: “Hello, I want to play this because it looks insane.” It promised fun silliness and a cathartic, satirical takedown of our creeping, apocalyptic real-life labor structures.
Then the dreaded loop kicked in, and I realized I was in for several hours of grinding through bland, unseasoned combat.
So it goes.
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*Full Metal Schoolgirl* is available as of October 23, 2025, on PC, Nintendo Switch 2, and PlayStation 5. A Switch 2 review code was provided by the publisher.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146472/full-metal-schoolgirl-review-score
