Waifu Impact 2 Review – Bikini Babe Blaster

We did have a good giggle when the reviews of the original Waifu Impact made the rounds. I was even inspired to write a short piece for a Facebook group not too long ago regarding the gloriously unapologetic fan service available in Waifu Impact. It genuinely was a fun little game.

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of cheeky fan service, and sometimes it’s just what you need to take your mind off serious games of war and politics. When faced with countless hours of harrowing tales of strategic hardship, the alternative option of a sexy, smiley blonde in a skimpy bikini is, more often than most of us would care to admit, far more appealing at times.

Introduction

Waifu Impact 2 is the next installment of developer Mitsuki Game Studio and publisher JanduSoft’s running series of sexy girl shooters. The game is the successor to the original Waifu Impact while also incorporating elements from spin-off shooter Kawaii Slime Arena. These games all share flipped assets and basic themes.

The game was released on 7th November, 2024, for both PS4 and PS5 and is also a ‘cross-buy’ title, meaning purchasing one version allows you to download the other at no extra cost. And yes, it also means two platinum trophies for the price of one.

Story

While the lack of a storyline in the first game wasn’t too detrimental since a simple island beach was a suitable arena for a water gun free-for-all tournament, Waifu Impact 2 makes advancements in the setting(s) but doesn’t advance the story to cover these new changes.

We begin on the first of the four Waifu Islands, playing as beautiful blonde bikini babe Stella wearing a sexy ensemble reminiscent of an early Final Fantasy female battle costume. Stella is tasked with exploring the island, gunning down rival bikini girls and slime monsters while collecting crystals which act as a form of currency to spend on advancements and rewards.

Gameplay

Waifu Impact 2 is a third-person run-and-gun shooter game featuring semi-open-world platforming traversal and role-playing elements where you explore the Waifu Islands to unlock new characters, skills and abilities.

Collecting 100 crystals will free another girl from a strange crystal stasis, becoming a new ally who can take Stella’s place. Collecting an additional 50 crystals will unlock a portal, transporting the player character to the next island where the process begins anew.

Enemies have varying levels which correspond to their threat-level. Higher level enemies deliver higher damage outputs and have larger health pools. Higher level enemies will also award the player character with larger amounts of experience once defeated.

Maxing out the experience bar will result in your character ‘levelling up’ which is indicated by a growing number of heart icons in the bottom corner of the screen. Levelling up awards your character with a permanent perk, such as increased damage output, health regeneration or a rapid-fire special attack.

Your heart collection isn’t to be confused with your HP bar which represents your life gauge. Running out of HP will result in your character respawning at the last checkpoint beacon they touched, though any collectibles found up to that point are not lost.

Graphics/Sound

It’s not the prettiest game you’re likely to see, with very little in the way of texturing, variety in the colour pallette or intelligent lighting. The animation quality has improved a little from the first game as our character won’t clip through rocks while climbing or glitch through certain environmental objects quite so often this time.

Every playable character has a decent variety of idle animations, with Stella, for example, often creatively dancing between the shootouts. The character models use basic yet smooth cel-shading without those awful pixelated edges you sometimes get. The four islands all have different themes and pleasingly diverse terrain.

The generic twinkly piano-esque music didn’t really work for me, feeling better suited for games with more of a fantasy theme. The beach vacation theme and action-packed gunplay of the game would be better suited with beach punk-rock or catchy club anthems.

Replayability/Trophies

Clearing one island completely, visiting the other islands and freeing the trapped girls within while levelling up your chosen character to level five is all you need to do to grab the platinum trophy. You’ll likely have all of this covered in a single playthrough which will take you around four hours; roughly one hour per island.

There are plenty of other tasks to keep you busy too of you want to try for 100% completion. Each island hides 250 crystals for you to collect plus a selection of hidden costumes for your girls to switch to. For total mastery you could also grind experience to level up all five available girls to their max levels, unlocking all skills and abilities along the way.

Conclusion

Admittedly, Waifu Impact 2 didn’t make a great first impression. Simply trying to restore some control of the camera by inverting each axis resulted in the game somehow remapping character movement to both the left and right thumb-sticks simultaneously, which when reset, crashed my game entirely, forcing a restart.

After getting the camera to behave itself, I was finally able to witness the beginning of the game, only to find that there isn’t one. Like the first game, you’re simply thrown into a combat scenario on an unknown island without any rational explanation. After recently seeing how rival ‘sexy shooter’ games (that’s pretty much how I refer to this subgenre) have started to evolve, Waifu Impact 2 feels a little stuck in the past.

Sure, the first Waifu Impact was a lot of fun, with a short but rewarding campaign and some mildly challenging platforming sections, yet the new features in Waifu Impact 2 struggle to elevate the game. Where Axyos Games took the bare-bones Hentai Vs Evil and overhauled the presentation, sound design and even the story for Anime Vs Evil: Apocalypse, Waifu Impact 2 feels less evolved.

As much as I have heightened respect for fan-service-oriented games following the rise of censorship on PlayStation, these styles of game aren’t all that rare anymore and so those that do slip through to our prudish console really need to make that bit more effort to stand out. Let’s face facts; We’re never going to get hentai games on a home console no matter how reasonable a request it is, so we need those that flirt with the theme to deliver and impress.

However, we can turn this whole scenario around by asking one simple question: Is it fun? It’s here where the game’s many shortfalls are put in their place. The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is yes, very much so. It’s a very rewarding experience seeing your level, crystal collection and mastery of each island grow in line with your own skills at basic shooting.

You could do a lot worse with your afternoon than Waifu Impact 2. It’s a fun little shooter that doesn’t take itself too seriously. If it wasn’t for the slow start, the underwhelming sound design, and the numerous bugs including camera issues, crashes, and a hit-box alignment that only seems to work at certain distances, we’d be looking at a high scorer here. With such a low price-tag too, I’m keen to see more of what Mitsuki Game Studio can do.