Some thoughts on my first playthrough. I won't do too much detail on the critique side since many issues are being addressed for Planet Stronghold 2, which seems to be progressing well.
Story-wise I guess it's more lightweight than Loren, but works well. I like that it doesn't take itself that seriously the way a bunch of sci-fi games out there do; it's a nice break from the commonly attempted realism look. As others have said the romance was a bit out of the blue at times. Nice CGs though! But I seem to have missed Rebecca's quest, are there certain choices that can cause you to fail out of it even if you get relationship up to 100? (Not romance, I know that has to wait until a Joshua playthrough)
I did this playthrough as Lisa. Chose Soldier class, which turned out to be a good choice for surviving the two-hero quests in Chapter 5. If those kinds of quests turn out to be a trend in Winter Wolves RPGs, I might make a habit of choosing frontline main heroes. Not good to have two squishies fighting with nobody to hide behind...
Also this gave me a Light Weapons boost so I can use the Sparrow pistol! I thought of it as the Hawk Blade of this game; something you get pretty early in the game, but kicks tail all the way up to the final boss. It's funny though since the game doesn't make a big deal over it at all! Also liked the Pulsar sniper rifle, too bad I got it pretty late in my questing. Though my strategy leaned towards weapons with 3 or 4 shots for more raw damage, I also liked Peacebringer. That 36% Aimed crit rate!
I liked the balance of the characters and classes for the most part, with Psionics having a lot of versatile skills, but needing cover from the sturdier classes to survive. Part of that comes from the lack of character or class specific skills or equipment, I guess. Skills were kind of a mixed bag, and I think a lot of the earlier difficulty came from trying to figure out which skills to prioritize. Eventually I had half the team designated as fighters, and the other half as support for the most part. An interesting exception was when using the training room, because the really battle-focused skillsets involve Psionic skills, which only the Psionics really need. So in Lisa's case I trained with Basic Soldier, and went "Sure, I'll take the LockPick and Repair skills while I'm at it". Charisma kind of got left by the wayside since Aaron was busy training Science, but I didn't really miss it.
Talking of skills, shoutouts to my buddy Shock, stunning enemies for 6 turns with 95% accuracy. Apparently this game wants me to fight boss battles, but my Psionics had other ideas.
Probably going to try Nightmare difficulty next with Joshua. I think I'll go at it with the bonus content weapons, since I feel that the game difficulty is actually kind of front-loaded in general.
While this game does have its quirks as I'd expect from one of Winter Wolves' earlier games, it was a fun ride all the same. Thanks for making this game, and I'm looking forward to Planet Stronghold 2!