Circus Electrique is a Steampunk circus-themed turn-based battler. The story follows Amelia whose mother died in an accident involving her uncle who owns the circus. She follows them as a reporter, periodically interviewing her uncle and other key figures in the story. “Madness” has overcome the citizens and so there’s battles on the streets. The dialogue is voice acted and all the characters sound great.
You select a team to “explore” and a team to perform the circus shows, and the rest can be assigned to other tents that do various things.
The exploration team moves node to node on the map, with icons showing you what is there. There can be all kinds of random events, mini-games, and various fights. Some mini games are based on chance and risk reward with your attributes, and others are reactions or judgement. After a fight occurs, a day passes. The circus shows early in the game are daily whereas the higher reward ones later on take a few days. So the usual gameplay involves setting up a show, exploring a few nodes, battling, then going back to the circus area to set up the next day.
You will acquire resources and money from both the circus and exploration teams, but everything you do seems to have some cost. There is a daily food expense, and if you want to rest at the healing tent then that costs more meat. The tents can be leveled up for better gains but it also increases the cost which I would have thought would be detrimental when resources are running low.
I played the game on Easy which restores health after battle but if you had to keep rotating your exploration team to heal then you’d have more expenses, then potentially weaker battle team if you have to rotate, and may have to have lower gains for the circus too.
In battle, it’s 4 versus 4, (although Bosses can be different but they are composed of 4 different attack points instead) and each of your characters has 6 attacks. There's a variety of attacks, some doing damage, others hurting devotion, adding various buffs, debuffs and repositioning; and a combination of those.
With low devotion, a character flees the battle. Low can trigger negative perks whereas high gives a bonus perk, bonus damage and higher accuracy. In battle enemies have attacks that lower your devotion, and some of your own attacks lower it too. Devotion can be restored through certain attacks, items, or increases when assigned to tasks. I'm sure sometimes it didn't change though or is minimal gains. The training tent gives XP but lowers devotion (levelling up the tent gives more XP but also gives you a higher devotion hit too!). Some attacks seemed like decent options but then when I saw that using it lowers your own devotion, then it really negated its use. Sometimes I thought leveling up the move might make it worthwhile, but some of these attacks raise the positive aspect and increase the devotion hit!
The thing is, when many attacks aren't doing damage, it means you are at a disadvantage if a group of enemies can heal, dragging out the battles for a long time. I then thought it's better to min-max. So since the strongman did high damage, I got 2 of them with one at the front doing high damage to one enemy, and the other at the back doing decent damage to the entire group or back 2. Then I had two of the escapists who do the handcuff attack which has a chance to stun, and reduces devotion for one turn only. Since the weaker enemies tend to start the battle with 40% devotion, they are no match for 2 x 20% devotion attacks, meaning I can take out an enemy per turn. Later in the game, the attack was levelled up to 35% which meant I could take out some stronger enemies later on too. Since you have 6 attacks per character and I ended up using 1 (sometimes 2) attack for each character, it led to boring battles but was the most effective strategy.
Each attack requires a position, and attacks certain positions, so your team generally requires a certain formation to be effective. Or your strategy might be to move a character forward or back later in the battle. For example, staying at the back to apply buffs then a few turns later, moving forward to use a strong attack.
Many enemies use Taunt which means you can only attack them if it’s a single target attack. Multitarget attacks still work on everyone though. If you have a certain strategy and want to target the weakest enemies, then you often don’t have a choice. You hit the taunting enemy or use buffs instead. Another way your plan can take a hit is when your characters are repositioned. This can be infuriating because repositioning them uses your turn and you can only move 1 position, so if they moved you back 2 then it’s going to take 2 turns.
When enemies are killed, everyone slides forward which means any attack that only hits the 4th position is then useless, then the next kill renders the 3rd position useless.
This is true up to the final boss who stays in the 3rd and 4th positions in the first 2 phases of the fight (the final stage he takes all 4). The configuration I was using most of the game then became useless since only 2 of them could actually attack the boss, but only one could actually do damage due to the large defensive bonus he has. The fact that it's a 3-phase battle and you are taking lots of damage, then you are basically required to bring in a healer, and probably a character that can reduce damage. So you are then left with 2 attacking slots but have to find characters that can attack from those positions, attack the 3rd and 4th positions, and do high enough damage to get past the high defence. I was using a 65 minimum base attack but showed as 20-30 when actually attacking. It took many attempts but I eventually found a winning strategy.
There are a few weather conditions which influence the battle. During rain, water and electricity are boosted, but fire is weaker. Fire is boosted for the night battles. Fog restricts the 4th positioned character from attacking.
When you level up, you get gains to your battle attributes. You can then manually assign 10 points to the 4 circus attributes, then you have the option of leveling up your attacks but each one costs resources. You can choose to upgrade them any time once that level is unlocked.
For the circus shows, you have slots with better gains if you match the type that it wants. Each character has a positive or negative synergy with certain types of performer. You also need to match a total of the circus attributes. You get awarded some stars based on your Chemistry rating, and Devotion rating. These stars are then assigned to the 3 metrics which are basically circus fame, experience, and money. Craftable items can be used to give you extra stars.
As you play, more tents and concepts are introduced to not overwhelm you. New performers can be recruited from the “Train” but a few are given to you as you go through the initial part of the story. Upgrading the Sleeping tent gives higher capacity to hire more performers.
It will take 16 hours or so to get to the end which doesn’t give any incentive to replay. The game seemed to be at least twice as long as it needed to be.