| Calamity Angels: Special Delivery | |||
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| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | DLC & Pre-Order | Review |
Calamity Angels: Special Delivery Review Overview
What is Calamity Angels: Special Delivery?
In Calamity Angels: Special Delivery, players step into the shoes of a member of the Angel Delivery Service, tasked with delivering packages across the Orkotris Region, a land teeming with unruly monsters, rival couriers, and unpredictable events.
Your delivery crew takes on jobs from the bulletin board, uncovering local lore, strange incidents, and personal tales tied to the parcels you carry. The anime-style courier game was released on February 17, 2026 via PlayStation 4 & 5 and Nintendo Switch, with a release sometime in 2026 on Steam.
Calamity Angels: Special Delivery features:
⚫︎ Crew Mood Managment Mechanics
⚫︎ Board-Game Style Exploration
⚫︎ Points about the graphics
⚫︎ Item Management System
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Calamity Angels: Delivery Service's gameplay and story.
| Digital Storefronts | ||||||||
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 Steam |
 eShop |
 PSN |
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| $39.99 | ||||||||
Calamity Angels: Special Delivery Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Charming and Quirky Cast of Misfits Character Portraits are Good |
Combat is Entirely Up to RNG Repetitive Gameplay Loop That’s Not Satisfying Bland Environments Humor is Dependent on the Person |
Calamity Angels: Special Delivery Story - 6/10
The game’s character-driven story carries a lot of charm, but it ultimately feels too light to support the length of the full experience. Although the interactions between the eccentric cast members provide some laughs, the overall plot lacks the momentum needed to stay engaging once that novelty wears off. It is a decent distraction if you enjoy low-stakes anime humor, but it doesn’t quite reach the potential set by its colorful cast.
Calamity Angels: Special Delivery Gameplay - 4/10
Almost everything here is a frustrating mix of random chance and repetitive board game mechanics that quickly lose their appeal. Combat feels like a chore because your characters constantly ignore your orders due to their own weird quirks, yet the enemies are so weak that you can still win by just mashing a single button. There are lots of small frustrations that, when put together, make the experience of playing leave a bitter taste in my mouth.
Calamity Angels: Special Delivery Visuals - 5/10
The character portraits look great, which isn’t surprising given they were designed by Kei Nanameda, the artist behind Mary Skelter and Death end re;Quest. However, those strong designs don't do much to hide how bland the rest of the presentation feels once you start actually playing. The environments are very basic and look like they belong in a web browser game from the early 2010s.
Calamity Angels: Special Delivery Audio - 5/10
The soundtrack generally sounds nice, and the characters are brought to life with decent voice acting that fits the quirky vibe. However, the music is looped so frequently that it wears out its welcome, especially with awkward transitions where the tracks clearly fade out and restart from the beginning. What’s even more annoying is that voice lines overlap and trigger too often during scenes. They make the game feel far less polished than it should be.
Calamity Angels: Special Delivery Value for Money - 5/10
Yes, the $40 asking price is lower than most big-budget releases, but it still feels a bit expensive for the experience on offer. The repetitive gameplay loop doesn’t give you much incentive for a second playthrough. Given how much of the gameplay is tied to waiting for random animations and managing space for delivery packages, you aren't getting a high amount of quality playtime for your investment. It is a game that’s much easier to justify when it eventually gets a discount on a seasonal sale.
Calamity Angels: Special Delivery Overall Score - 50/100
Calamity Angels: Special Delivery has a charming cast and a lighthearted story that fit right in with what you’d expect from Compile Heart, but the gameplay keeps getting in its own way. The random combat mechanics and repetitive board-style missions slowly drain the fun, even though the game itself is rarely difficult. It’s a cozy JRPG with some heart, but one that never fully pulls its ideas together into something truly satisfying.
Calamity Angels: Special Delivery Review: Handle With Care and Patience
A Niche Studio Doing What It Does Best
Compile Heart has spent years carving out a very specific corner in the JRPG market. This corner is a niche within a niche; while JRPGs are already a specialized genre for the average gamer, this developer doubles down on a very particular aesthetic. Their games are usually defined by heavy anime influences and a sense of self-awareness that never tries to apologize for what it is.
Their latest release, Calamity Angels: Special Delivery, follows this established blueprint almost to a fault. It is a cozy JRPG, a sub-genre that has seen a lot of growth lately with the Atelier Ryza games, and one that I admittedly enjoyed to some degree. However, even while having liked some parts, there is a persistent feeling that it doesn’t quite hit the ceiling of what this studio can do.
The game isn’t entirely bad. It functions well and somewhat hits the notes it intends to hit. In a year where the gaming calendar is absolutely packed, Calamity Angels is the kind of title that requires you to give it a lot of grace just to justify picking it up over something else. You have to be willing to overlook some repetitive loops and a lack of depth that other modern JRPGs have mastered.
Story is Very-Very Low Stakes
The story here in Calamity Angels: Special Delivery is built around a world where the simple act of moving goods from one place to another has become a high-risk profession. Because monsters have taken over the lands outside the city walls, society has become dependent on specialized delivery services to keep resources flowing and communities connected. You play as Yuri, who has just been appointed as the leader of a delivery team known officially as the Cutie Angels. It sounds like a standard setup for a heroic adventure, but the reality of the situation provides the game's primary conflict.
The Cutie Angels are not exactly an elite force. In fact, they are widely considered the most incompetent delivery service in the city. Their reputation for failure is so consistent that the guild has nicknamed them the Calamity Angels, a name earned because every job they take seems to end in some kind of disaster.
As Yuri, your job is to take this group of social outcasts and failed professionals and somehow guide them toward becoming a respected unit. It is a classic underdog story, but one that focuses more on the humor of the struggle than the glory of the result.
Because this is a cozy RPG, the story does not try to hide the fact that it isn’t an epic odyssey. The stakes are kept intentionally low, and the focus remains on the interactions between the characters. The goal is to see if this group of misfits can successfully deliver a package without everything blowing up in their faces. Most of the enjoyment comes from watching the cast deal with the various hardships and roadblocks they encounter. It is about finding the fun in the insanity and laughing at the absurdity of their situation as they try to gain even a shred of professional recognition.
When you compare this to other JRPGs on the market, the entire plot can feel a bit trivial. It is a character-driven experience where the plot is often just an excuse to put the cast in ridiculous situations. There were several moments where the writing took what should have been a tragedy and turned it into a joke through the sheer eccentricity of the characters.
It might not reach the same level of humor found in Mado Monogatari: Fia and the Wondrous Academy, a game from the same developer that had me laughing out loud, but it evidently shares the same DNA. It tries to maintain a lighthearted tone even when things are going poorly for the protagonists.
Whether the story works for you is going to depend entirely on your personal sense of humor and how much silliness you are willing to let the game get away with. If you need your stories to be grounded or logical, you will likely get frustrated. If you can enjoy a plot that runs on cartoon logic, you’ll have a much better time.
The Cast is a Calamity but a Cutie
The cast is the strongest element of the game, and their individual quirks explain exactly why the team is called the Calamity Angels. Each member has a specific personality trait or habit that actively interferes with their ability to do their job. For example, you have Somnia, a character who seems physically unable to stay awake regardless of the danger surrounding her. There is also Ivris, a mage who possesses an arsenal of powerful spells but chooses to ignore them in favor of settling every dispute with her fists.
These traits define how the story progresses and why the team constantly finds themselves in trouble. The rest of the group is filled out with similarly strange personalities, and as you spend more time with them, you start to suspect that their eccentricities are exactly why they are called the Calamity Angels in the first place. It reminded me of a workplace comedy where everyone is slightly incompetent, but they have just enough heart to keep things moving forward.
I liked how the game used these quirks to drive the subplots. Rather than the characters growing out of their flaws, they usually just find more creative ways to live with them. It’s a nice change of pace from the typical JRPG coming-of-age story where everyone becomes a strong hero by the end. Here, they stay as messy and strange as they were at the start, and the world just has to deal with it.
Combat Has You Fighting Against Your Own Team
The way these characters behave in the story is one thing, but it is another thing entirely when those same quirks start bleeding into the actual gameplay. In a narrative sense, I like that the cast feels distinct and that their personalities drive the plot forward. However, once you transition into combat, those same personality traits turn into gimmicks that are hard to justify.
It is a somewhat unique mechanic, yes, but because of it, the game ends up being much more frustrating to play. Although I appreciate the attempts at consistency, these traits can be grating.
During combat, the primary issue is how the characters’ quirks manifest randomly. This randomness becomes a constant source of annoyance because it strips away your sense of control. When you are choosing your actions for a turn, you have to constantly monitor the character portraits at the top of the screen to check their expressions. If a character looks happy, there is a higher percentage that they will actually execute the command you give them. If they look upset or distracted, the chances drop significantly, and they might end up doing something completely random.
What makes this system even more difficult to deal with is that it never feels reliable. Even in situations where your characters look happy and ready to go, the game still relies on hidden percentages. There were several moments where I needed a specific attack to land to finish a fight, I see their mood being happy, only for the character to ignore the command anyway. To make matters worse, even when they do decide to follow through with an action, they might still fail because, say, they’re afraid of bugs or frogs or something similarly random.
It is a gimmick that I grew tired of almost immediately because it turns every encounter into a chore and removes the need for actual strategy.
This lack of control extends even further when you look at how the game handles special moves. Instead of being something you can strategically trigger when you have the resources, many of these abilities are entirely up to chance. The game simply decides when a character is going to perform a special action, and once again, the results are completely unpredictable.
Take a character like Numero, for example. One of his special moves involves a slot machine mechanic that applies debuffs to the battlefield. These debuffs can hit your own party just as easily. If the slot machine lands on one of your characters, you are stuck dealing with a penalty that you didn't ask for and couldn't prevent. It is incredibly punishing to have your own team turn against you because of a random roll of the dice. When you are already struggling with characters who refuse to attack, having your special moves sabotage you feels like the game is working against your enjoyment.
Even though it is occasionally entertaining to see these animations play out for the first time, the novelty wears off quickly. The constant interference from these random elements makes the gameplay feel like a series of inconveniences you have to tolerate. It certainly reinforces the idea of the Calamity Angels being a group of people who cause disasters wherever they go, but experiencing that disaster firsthand as a player is not particularly rewarding.
One small mercy in all of this is that the frustration with the random mechanics is really the only true challenge you will face. The unpredictable nature of the characters can be annoying, but the game itself isn’t difficult enough to actually punish you for it. There is very little reason to spend time strategizing or planning out your moves before a fight, because most of the encounters are tuned to be incredibly forgiving. Even when your party members decide to ignore your commands or accidentally debuff themselves, the enemies rarely capitalize on those mistakes.
During my time with the game, I found that for the vast majority of normal battles, I didn't even have to look at the screen. I could just sit there and mash the X button on my PS5 controller until the fight was over. The enemies often do so little damage that their attacks basically just tickle your characters.
It’s a bit disappointing because a cozy game can still have a satisfying gameplay loop, but here it feels like the difficulty was dialed down so much that the combat loses its purpose. You end up just going through the motions, knowing that no matter how much your team messes up, you’re probably going to win anyway.
Exploration that Puts Mario Party in a Better Light
The ease of the combat makes the rest of the game's structure feel even more prominent, as you spend the majority of your time managing the logistics of your deliveries. Like many JRPGs that have come before it, Calamity Angels: Special Delivery is entirely quest-driven. The loop is straightforward: you go to the guild, pick up a request, and head out into the world to deliver a package to a specific destination. As you are a delivery service, you have to physically make room for the delivery items in your bag. These take up grid space, which forces you to constantly rearrange or store your own personal items just to fit the cargo.
Once you leave the city, you are presented with board game-esque areas. To move around the map, you roll a six-sided roulette that determines how many panels you can cross. This movement is tied directly to a resource called Omoi Power. The game describes this as the "emotions imbued in the packages" you are carrying, but for all intents and purposes, it acts as your move limit for the quest. Every single movement consumes one point of Omoi Power. Running out of this power doesn’t immediately result in a Game Over or force you to fail the quest, but it does significantly impact your rewards.
The board itself is covered in various types of spaces. Many of these panels contain enemies that trigger the combat encounters I mentioned earlier. However, there are also event tiles that can, say, give you a useful item or trigger negative status effects like poison or debuffs. It mirrors the randomness of the combat. You are constantly at the mercy of the roulette wheel, hoping you hit on a higher number or land on a buff and not a series of traps and mandatory fights.
There are some attempts to add challenge, specifically through enemies known as Omoikurai. These are special entities that roam around the board independently of your movement. If they catch up to you or block your path, they present more of a challenge than the standard enemies you find on the panels.
They, however, never really felt like a big threat. Because the combat remains so simple, encountering an Omoikurai is usually more of a nuisance that slows down your progress. They don’t feel like big bosses that test your skills.
As much as I wanted to enjoy this part of the game, it becomes repetitive very quickly. The core experience of the game involves rolling a roulette wheel over and over, landing on a panel, watching a brief event or fight, and then repeating the process until you reach the goal. Because the environments you are moving through are often bland and look very similar to one another, the sense of adventure fades away after the first few hours.
The enemies also lack variety in their visual design, so you feel like you are fighting the same few creatures in the same few fields. The game does include a feature to speed things up by 2.5x, which I found myself using almost constantly. Without that speed boost, the pace of the game would be almost unbearable because the actual gameplay isn't deep enough to justify the time it takes to complete a delivery.
This repetitiveness is made worse by the fact that there is almost no incentive to explore the map or grind for better items. Because the packages you deliver take up so much room in your inventory, you are constantly fighting for space. On most journeys, about half of your bag is dedicated to the delivery itself, and the other half is filled with essential recovery items. This leaves almost no room to carry anything you discover out in the world. If you find a rare item in a chest, you usually have to throw away something useful just to pick it up.
This limitation makes the act of exploring the board feel pointless. You end up just trying to get from point A to point B as fast as possible, ignoring the world around you because the game’s own inventory system discourages you from engaging with it.
Is Calamity Angels: Special Delivery Worth It?
No, It Doesn’t Deliver on a Lot of Things
I really wanted to enjoy Calamity Angels: Special Delivery. At first glance, it seemed like exactly the kind of game I would get lost in for a weekend. The presentation makes a great first impression; the character portraits are nice, and the voice acting is quite good. The cast themselves are fun to spend time with, and their quirky personalities provide a lot of the charm that Compile Heart is known for. All the pieces for a great cozy JRPG were there.
However, the game has a lot of issues that work against it. By the time I reached the end of my 15-hour playthrough, I realized I had gotten very little actual enjoyment out of the experience. The frustration of the random combat mechanics, combined with the repetitive nature of the board-game exploration, eventually overshadowed the charm of the characters. It felt more like I was tolerating the gameplay just to see the next story beat.
The game costs $40. Even though that is cheaper than many AAA releases, it is still a lot to ask for a title that feels this limited. It is a very niche JRPG, and even for fans of the genre, the lack of depth and the annoying gimmicks make it a hard sell at that price point. If you are really curious about the characters, I would suggest waiting for a big sale before picking it up. It is a game that starts with a lot of promise but ultimately fails to deliver.
| Digital Storefronts | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam |
eShop |
PSN |
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| $39.99 | ||||||||
Calamity Angels: Special Delivery FAQ
How Long to Beat Calamity Angels: Special Delivery?
Calamity Angels: Special Delivery takes about 15 hours to complete. Completionists, though, can expect to spend 20-30 hours exploring everything the game has to offer.
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Calamity Angels: Special Delivery Product Information
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| Title | CALAMITY ANGELS: SPECIAL DELIVERY |
|---|---|
| Release Date | February 17, 2026 (PS5, PS4, Switch) Around 2026 (Steam) |
| Developer | Idea Factory, Compile Heart |
| Publisher | Idea Factory International |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) PlayStation 5 PlayStation 4 Switch |
| Genre | RPG, Strategy, Adventure, Anime |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | ESRB T |
| Official Website | Official Website for Calamity Angels: Special Delivery |
