Goddess of Victory: Nikke

Goddess of Victory: Nikke is a cover shooter built on gacha RPG scaffolding. Earth belongs to the Raptures, what's left of humanity lives underground in the Ark, and you command squads of five android women, the Nikkes, sent up to take the surface back. SHIFT UP, the studio behind Stellar Blade, develops it; Level Infinite (Tencent) publishes it on PC, Android and iOS.

Fights play out in third person along a fixed lane: you aim the reticle, duck behind cover to reload, and manage Burst Skills that chain across three stages. Aim matters, and squad building matters just as much. There are five elements, five weapon classes and squad synergies that settle most of the hard fights.

Around the shooting sit a chapter campaign, weekly raid bosses, an asynchronous PvP arena and a simulation mode for farming gear. The story isn't set dressing: voiced scenes, a plot considerably bleaker than the art suggests, and crossovers with NieR: Automata, Chainsaw Man, Evangelion and Re:Zero.

The game is free and every story chapter and mode is open; what you pay for is pulls. Special Recruit sits at a 4% SSR rate, split into 2% for the featured unit, 1.5% for standard SSRs and 0.5% for Pilgrims. There's no soft pity: the rate stays flat and the ceiling comes from Gold Mileage Tickets, 200 tickets exchangeable for the featured unit. A single pull costs 300 gems and a multi 3,000, so the worst case is exactly 200 pulls, or 60,000 gems. Outfits run their own gacha, separate from characters.

In the shop, the best recognized value is the Monthly Pass at around US$4.99 (300 gems up front plus 100 a day for 30 days); the Battle Pass runs about US$19.99 and includes a season-specific skin, while growth and recruit packs climb to US$99.99. Spending nothing still nets roughly 8,000 to 12,000 gems a month from dailies and events, which puts pity within reach if you save for one specific banner. The Over-Spec upgrade system, announced at the second anniversary, adds another layer that asks for resources on characters you already own.

Support has been heavy and steady since the November 2022 launch: new updates and banners every two weeks, plus Developer's Notes from director Hyungsuk Yoo, where the studio lays out the yearly roadmap with main-story updates spread across quarters and the November anniversary as the year's big beat. The player base holds up: around 20 million cumulative downloads, a 3.5-year anniversary that pushed the game back to the top of the Korean store for seven straight days, the longest run since 2022, and US$1.3 billion in lifetime revenue, with Japan accounting for nearly half of it.

The flip side is content that never landed. The Surface mode was shelved with no return date: the team figured fixing it would take over 100 incremental improvements and moved those resources to characters, story, graphics and music instead. The currencies tied to that mode were redistributed elsewhere, but the mode itself is still gone.

The fanservice is explicit and front and center, and that's the first filter: if it bothers you, nothing else here will change your mind. If it doesn't, what's left is a shooter with more tactical reading than it looks like and a campaign that takes its own drama seriously. Against it: the pity-free gacha punishes bad luck all the way to ticket 200, the daily farming is fixed routine, and the fixed-lane shooting turns repetitive if the story and squad building don't hook you.