Nova Hearts: The Spark has promise, but needs tweaking | Hands-on impressions

It’s rare, but sometimes a game comes along that just feels like it was made for you specifically. That’s what it felt like happened when I first heard about Nova Hearts. A game that blends a dating sim and a turn based RPG and is incredibly LGBTQ+ inclusive: how could I not play this game. Well now I have (the prologue at least anyway) and soon you’ll be able to as well.

Our protagonist Luce begins the game heading back to her hometown after leaving as a teenager. An incident where she “messed up” has forced her to go back and live with her mum, and that means reuniting with all her childhood friends. Immediately she meets up with Will and CJ who are extremely excited she’s back, and they plan a night out they’ll not forget in a hurry.

The party they end up attending starts out great, with drinks flowing and a whole lot of flirting. Before long though all hell breaks loose, as bizarre cat ball monsters appear and start attacking people. When this happens Luce suddenly and unexpectedly transforms into a colourful superhero, and beats up the baddies accordingly. It turns out her two friends also possess this mysterious power too, so they set out on a mission to save the town.

The turn-based combat in Nova Hearts is easy enough to get to grips with, but has a few interesting elements to take into account. Whenever a party member’s turn comes around you can select from their attacks, and depending which you pick it’ll take a certain amount of time to charge. This means for example you’ll need to decide if you want to wait a few turns longer to unleash an attack on all enemies, or if you’d rather just slap one quickly to get rid of them.

When you add multiple teammates into the mix the combat gets an extra level of depth too. By lining up the attacks of two of your party members you can trigger a combo move, which as you can imagine is a powerful ability well worth using. The first of these you get access to involves Luce and CJ attacking and confusing all enemies with devastating effect, so it’s well worth timing your attacks well (or even delaying one) to use it.

When you aren’t fighting otherworldly monsters with your friends, you’re chatting to them either in person or on your phone. The cast is colourful and charming, with a diverse selection of people to befriend or maybe even get flirty with. Choosing the right option in conversations with people will help you build connections, which can strengthen you in battle too. In the prologue there wasn’t a whole lot of this synergy between the RPG and dating sim sides of the game , but you can see where Nova Hearts is going with this system by checking out the astrology app on your phone.

Nova Hearts has a lot going for it that I should love, but I have to admit I didn’t really have a good time with the prologue. So much of the game is just very slow, from the combat to the chatting. Waiting for each individual text message to appear on your phone screen just means chats take much longer than they need to, and every turn of combat dragged out so long that my attention waned almost immediately. It’s such a shame because as a concept Nova Hearts should have me hook line and sinker, but I just found a little frustrated playing it.

It’s not just the pacing either. For the first couple of hours of the prologue you fight the same cat-enemies over and over again with little to no variation. Even powering up my characters didn’t fill me with that magic RPG dopamine hit we all know and love, because the amount stronger your moves get is so tiny. Spending all my hard earned skill points to upgrade an attack with 40 power to an attack with 45 power just doesn’t doesn’t cut it.

I was so certain that Nova Hearts was going to be a game I fell in love with, and that’s why I’m so disappointed that I didn’t. A lovely inclusive RPG with a whole lot of socialising is exactly what I want in my life right now, but the slow paced combat and conversations just means that Nova Hearts isn’t going to fill that hole in heart. That said, the full game doesn’t launch until Summer, so there’s plenty of time, and this is clearly just a small slice of game. Fingers crossed the rest of the game is as good as the idea itself.

Nova Hearts: The Spark is out on January 17th, with the full game launching in Summer 2024.