3.8
Graphics: character illustrations are good. If you've played GFL before, you'd know that the characters' outfit are tastefully done; no over fanservice. That's also true here, although not completely. Characters like Vee and Aki give plenty of fanservice, especially the latter.
The in-game graphics are also nice, though the fight stages do feel same-y as early as going into chapter 2. The battle sprites are chibis; some will get turned off by that for sure, but the chibis are not in any way bad. They're colorful and do a good enough job of expressing the characters' personality.
Sound: I don't really play with sound. This is made even more convenient with the game having a "mute mode" or something like that. However, from what little I heard, there's nothing that caught my interest when it comes to the BGM, although I think I heard some that are a bit similar to the original GFL. The same can be said about the VA. Nothing remarkable.
Gameplay: it's a rogue like. In short, in each stage you'll have to advance through some "rooms" filled with either enemies, recovery room, the shop, or wildcards. After defeating an enemy room you'll have the chance to get a buff for your party, which consists of 5 frontliners and 3 backliners. You can also NOT get a buff and get a currency to be used in the shop. There's a lot of things that simply can't be explained through reviews like this; I suggest trying the game to see it all.
The battle system itself is an autochess. The battlefield is divided into grids and you place your characters to each grid. Some grids can give special effects, such as unlimited range for ranged characters, giving a shield, and even teleporting. There are also player skills, which is additional crowd control skills not tied to characters.
The only similarity this game has with Arknights in terms of gameplay is that they both use chibi graphics. Neural Cloud plays very differently from Arknights, it's useless to compare between them. I'm only including this since I saw someone saying this game is "70% arknights."
Storyline: it is a "side-quel" to GFL. Yes, side, not prequel. GFL spans from 2062 to 2064. Neural Cloud's story starts in 2063. You don't have to know anything about GFL to enjoy the story, everything is explained to you in each relevant story piece. However, these explanations might be too wordy to you, or well, at least it does for me. There are a lot of tech-y terms used that might not make sense to an average person such as "hash rate" and "operands." Despite this, I'd say the story is still good, though a tad generic. There's sufficient intrigue that keeps me hooked on the story, and there aren't many down time between each story events so you won't read too much filler. A downside of this is that character interaction suffer as a result. You only see them interact with each other in high stress environment.
Value: first, the store. It seems standard. There are lots of limited-time offers where the value is $1 per gacha pull. The monthly card is also standard, $5 for a 10-pull and some more.
Now, the gacha. It is very generous. As of this review, there are only 11 characters of the highest rarity (3 stars) and one of them isn't available in the gacha pool (future release?). The rate is 3.6% total with 1% for the rate-up character. They gave at least 30 pulls from launch mail alone. I've pulled 100 times with 4 3 stars to show for it. There are both pity and spark system: if, after pulling 59 times, you still don't get a 3 star, then your 60th pull will be a 3 star. After 180 pulls, you can exchange the points you get from pulling (1 pull = 1 point) for the banner character.
Also worth noting that some of the strongest characters in this game are of the 1 and 2 star rarity. Lam, Simo, Betty, and Sakuya are better than some of the 3 stars. All characters also have the chance to get ranked up. Maximum rank is 5 stars. If you've ever played priconne or blue archive, it's basically like those games. The character shards can be farmed, aside from being bought from the shard shop, so don't neglect the lower rarities.
Almost forgot about this, but there's a one time "banner" where you can choose a 3 star and trade some gacha currency for it. I put banner on quotations since it's not a gacha per se; the only thing you'll get is the chosen 3 star. You're not pulling for anything here.
Extras: although it still has the "girls' frontline" name on the logo, the game does have some male characters in it, though they are a minority (5 characters out of 41). Most notable one is the aforementioned Aki. Dude's one of the best warrior in the game, and once you get him to 5 stars, you'll be treated to his glorious bare abs. Yeah, this is the fanservice that I was talking about. However, dude's also the only manly man type; the other 4 males fall into the pretty boy type. I even confused one or two of them for a girl before reading their background story.
Another thing, the reroll process is very painful since the tutorial is very long while also not being skippable. You'd be better off playing with what you get since, like I said, many of the lower rarity characters are very good, plus you're also given 2 free 3 star characters. The free tank, Croque, is especially good. Sooner or later you'll get most of the characters and you're also able to farm the character shards.
Edit to add: I forgot to say that this game is buttery smooth. Loading screens are minimal, and the UI is straightforward. Another thing that might interest you is that Owl City has a collaboration song with this game. Yes, that Owl City. You might not believe your eyes if 10 million fireflies... and so on.
I guess that's it for now. This game is definitely one of the better releases this year. If you're looking for a gacha game with an unusual gameplay (haven't seen any other gacha with roguelike as the primary gameplay) then PNC would be a good game to try.