| Etheria Restart | |||
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| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Preregister & Preorder | Review |
Etheria: Restart is a competitive turn-based strategy mobile game that pits players against each other in a multitude of different modes. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Etheria: Restart Review Overview
What is Etheria: Restart?
Etheria is the virtual world that humans constructed in order to survive the seemingly eternal winter the Earth has succumbed to. By downloading their consciousness to the cyberscape, humans can once again live in peace and harmony with the rebuilt cities they once used to roam from the physical world. Within Etheria, there are beings called the Animus who can harness the Anima Power, allowing them to have special powers and abilities. The two species lived together in tranquility, until the disaster known as the ‘Genesis’ struck the world, turning the once timid Animus into mindless berserking beings, causing harm and chaos.
The Hyperlinker Union was established to combat the Genesis and Quell the rampaging Animus. Full of Hyperlinkers with companion Animus of their own, they will have to befriend and form parties of Animus to combat those who are unwillfully causing harm to everyone, and eventually cease Genesis.
Etheria: Restart features:
⚫︎ Turn-based strategic combat
⚫︎ Field four to five characters at once
⚫︎ Union/Guild system
⚫︎ Five character elements
⚫︎ Boss fight-centric PvE modes
⚫︎ All pick and draft PvP modes
⚫︎ Co-op, roguelike, and a variety of other modes
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Etheria: Restart's gameplay and story.
 Official Client
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 Steam |
 App Store |
 Google Play |
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| Free | |||||
Etheria: Restart Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
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 Teambuilding Deserves a Chef’s Kiss Loads of Synergies Equipments Add Multiple Dimensions |
Entire Story Mode Weighs It Down Game is Quite Grindy A Balancing Nightmare |
Etheria: Restart Overall Score - 76/100
Etheria: Restart is an excellent game that falls just short of a truly balanced score due to its painfully weak story mode. Outside of that, it stands as one of the stronger PvP-focused turn-based titles on the market, with enough depth and potential to compete with the genre’s heavyweights. Unfortunately, its decision to give special treatment to a specific class of heroes risks throwing the game’s balance off a cliff—and once that line is crossed, it’s hard to walk it back.
Etheria: Restart Story - 6/10
In many ways, you could say Etheria: Restart’s story exists mainly so the game can say it has one. It’s not bad, not by a long shot—but calling it good would be stretching things. If there’s one word for it, it’s just “okay.” Not boring, not exciting. Not offensive, and not particularly sanitized either. It shows up, does its job of fleshing out a cool but predictable world, and tells a story with a few twists that swing between "alright" and "why even bother?"
Etheria: Restart Gameplay - 8/10
I gotta be honest, for a competitive turn-based mobile game that’s mostly hyped up for its PvP, Etheria: Restart actually does a pretty decent job supporting a bunch of PvE modes and minigames too. It’s not perfect by any stretch—the core gameplay is pretty standard and mostly carried by clever character designs that push you toward experimentation. But man, it really drags itself down with its mind-numbingly boring story missions, packed with mechanics that feel like they were shoved in just to pad the feature list for marketing.
Etheria: Restart Visuals - 8/10
While it’s hard to ignore the relatively high quality of Etheria: Restart’s visuals, it’s not exactly the kind of thing that'll make your jaw hit the floor or your eyes pop out. It’s all very stylish and sharp, sure—but there’s just not much punch to it, especially in the animations. And that’s kind of a shame, honestly, because turn-based games like this have way more freedom to go wild with camera angles and flair than real-time action games ever could.
Etheria: Restart Audio - 8/10
Featuring an overall experience filled with plenty of highs and a handful of relatively shallow lows, Etheria: Restart’s audio ends up being a mixed bag—but one you’ll probably enjoy anyway, flaws and all. In a weird way, the contrast between what it nails and what it randomly drops—like solid voice acting that just disappears at the strangest moments, or hype combat tracks that give way to post-fight BGMs that feel like audio sleeping pills—gives the whole thing a kind of unintentional charm.
Etheria: Restart Value for Money - 8/10
Despite offering a 5-star pull rate that doesn’t insult you with sub-1% odds—and mercifully avoiding 50/50 mechanics and predatory weapon banners—it’s still pretty tough to give high praise to Etheria: Restart’s gacha system. Why? Because it throws in a special class of ultra-powerful characters that cost three times more currency to pull for. It’s a ticking time bomb, especially for a competitive game. On top of that, the game leans heavily on stamina for basically everything—from farming materials to keeping up with event tasks—which feels like it's tailor-engineered to nudge your wallet every time you run dry.
Etheria: Restart Review: Cool, Competitive, and Carrying Baggage
I’ve been excited to play Etheria: Restart ever since getting into the final test and messing around with its various PvP and PvE content. And yeah, despite all my gripes about balance and those sketchy special banners, gameplay still takes the crown. I ended up enjoying the teambuilding side of things to an almost embarrassing degree—it’s that good when it clicks.
So, what is Etheria: Restart, anyway? In simple terms, it’s a turn-based strategy game that leans hard into PvP, unlike most of its genre peers that focus almost entirely on PvE content. The story takes place in the digital ecosystem of Etheria, a virtual world created by humanity to escape a dying outside reality by uploading their consciousnesses. To help maintain this artificial world, humans created the Animus—a race of sentient data who take on human forms within Etheria.
Life in Etheria was calm for a while until ideological rifts began to form. Some factions wanted to liberate the Animus, others forced the status quo to remain unchanged, and eventually, these opposing beliefs spiraled into violent engagements. Conflict erupted, dragging even the bystanders—those just trying to live peacefully—into the mess.
The Story Mode is a Big Turn-Off
All in all, the plot doesn’t sound half-bad, right? Sure, it’s predictable and packed with the same post-apocalyptic tropes you’ve seen in other mobile titles like Cat Fantasy, Snowbreak: Containment Zone, and Strinova (even if we’re still waiting on the mobile release for that one). But hey, if the writing’s tight and the delivery lands, even the usual post-apocalyptic slop can end up sticking with you as one of the more memorable stories in the gacha space.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case here. The sequence of events is, frankly, dull—and even in moments that should carry weight or urgency, the writing just kind of forces you to shrug it off. Take one chapter, for example: you're forced into Etheria’s version of arena bloodsports, and you go toe-to-toe with the final boss in what seems like a huge, dramatic clash. It feels like the stage is set for some big payoff, right? Some real narrative punch? Instead, that moment gets hijacked by one of the salty losers you stomped a fight earlier. Sure, it was foreshadowed a little, but the end result is that a major plot beat is undercut—and you're left with a narrative reward that barely feels worth the effort, especially for a chapter that’s a relative slog to get through in the first place.
And then there's the gameplay
tied to the story missions, which honestly feels like it was tacked on just to pad out the mode. It’s a clunky mix of light adventure, half-baked stealth, and shallow puzzle elements, all steeped in that unmistakably mobile-centric design philosophy. For instance, there’s this ambush system where you can hide behind boxes or walls to get the jump on enemies. Sounds like a fun mechanic? Not really. It basically works like a glorified skip button, letting you bypass certain battles. You don’t even need to think about where to hide. The moment you duck behind a box, you become completely invisible, which removes any real thought or tension from the whole thing.
Worse still, the system’s not even consistent. Some enemies you can skip by ambushing, others you have to fight anyway—ambush or not. So at that point, why even bother? Just sprint around attacking everything you can see and skip those that you can. As for the rest, just beat them, even if they get the jump on you. The whole mechanic feels like a waste of time—and that's just one piece of the puzzle. I haven’t even touched on other clunky inclusions like the grappling or scanning systems, which feel equally unnecessary and just add bloat without adding meaningful depth.
Teambuilding is Pretty Darn Amazing
Thankfully, that’s where most of my major issues with the game come to a halt. Everything else either lands with impressive polish or falls into the realm of minor to probable concerns. The gameplay, for instance, firmly belongs in the former category. While its core mechanics aren’t exactly breaking new ground, they’re executed with enough refinement and foresight that it’s clear the developers put serious thought into making every character viable across both PvE and PvP—at least to a functional degree.
That kind of foresight is exactly what makes teambuilding in Etheria: Restart such an oddly satisfying experience. Because every character is built with PvP in mind, their kits naturally lean into layered, matchup-heavy design—almost like an elaborate game of rock-paper-scissors with far more options than just three. Take Freya, for example. She’s a hard counter to debuffers like Kloss thanks to her passive debuff purge, but you can flip the script by using a buffer like Tsukiyo, who’s strong against Freya but vulnerable to either debuffs or defense-penetrating burst damage.
What you end up with is a dynamic system where you’re stuffing four or five different rock-paper-scissors games into one team comp, trying to beat their paper with your scissors while dodging their rocks. There’s a lot of synergy to uncover, a fair amount of trap picks to avoid, and an underlying thrill to finding combinations that click in just the right way. And on top of that, there’s even an entirely different layer of depth to consider when building your teams.
Enter the game’s Shells—basically pets, if pets were allowed to go absolutely wild on the battlefield every few turns. But here’s the kicker: you’re not stuck with just one for your whole party. Nope. Etheria: Restart lets you equip one Shell to each character, and let me tell you, some of their effects are no joke. A handful of them are so potent they can straight-up swing entire matches through the absurd combos they enable.
Shells function more like equipment with active skills that auto-trigger whenever their conditions are met. Their effects range from dealing bonus damage, to speeding up your next action, to other game-altering nonsense. On top of that, they offer stat boosts and plug into the set bonus systems to further provide obscene stats to your characters. But even without those, the synergy between specific Shell effects and the characters they’re paired with opens the door to truly cracked combos—like action trains where two characters pull each other forward on the timeline, practically dancing around the turn order. And of course, since you can pull that kind of nonsense, the enemy can, too (at least in PvP)—keeping the whole thing in a fragile, delightful equilibrium where everyone's just a few steps away from pulling off some absurd cheese.
It’s glorious—and grindy.
The Perfect Team Needs the Worst Grind
Etheria: Restart’s set bonus system throws a fun little twist on what you’d usually expect. Most mobile games treat each piece of gear as a flat point toward a set bonus, but here, modules—the game’s version of equipment—drop with different values, usually one or two points each. Shells take it even further by giving up to three points across two different set bonuses at once, which is kind of wild when you think about the possibilities.
This little change means you can stack up to three set bonuses on one character—though honestly, two is usually the sweet spot. But if you’re a perfectionist min-maxxing your builds, good luck. It’s not just about nailing your main and sub-stats anymore; now you also need to roll high-value set points on the right modules with very specific main and sub-stats.
The real pain kicks in when you start farming Shells, though. At higher rarities, they can roll with up to eight set effects, and each one can support two different sets for up to three points—so not only are you hoping for the right combo, but you also need those effects to be strong enough to actually activate the bonuses. It’s peak RNG madness, and yeah, it turns endgame builds into a micromanagement hell—but hey, if you’re into that kind of suffering, more power to you.
A Fragile Balance
I mentioned this back in my final test review, and even with the slightly more forgiving hard pity introduced in the live version, my stance hasn’t really changed:
Etheria: Restart having a special class of characters—specifically the dark and light (Disorder and Constant) elementals—that either cost three times as much to pull from their exclusive banner or barely show up in the standard pool is a ticking time bomb. Sure, none of them are outright gamebreaking right now (though a few are definitely toeing the line), but what happens later down the road?
Let’s be real—the easiest way to drive revenue in a gacha game is to throw balance out the window and reward the players who swipe. We've seen it before (cough Seven Knights cough), and with Etheria: Restart’s strong PvP focus, the pressure to spend for an edge is very real. People will pay to win—especially when the system quietly encourages it.
Is Etheria: Restart Worth It?
Worth checking out, at least
Even though Etheria: Restart’s balance is in a bit of a fragile spot, it’s still absolutely worth sinking a few hours into just to see how it plays. The competitive side of the game shows real promise, backed by solid mechanics and character designs that hold up both in terms of gameplay and audiovisual appeal.
The monetization leans toward rewarding spenders, true, but it doesn’t go completely overboard with freebies. The spending milestone rewards are actually pretty mild—nothing like some games that toss you straight into endgame territory just for swiping a card. That said, it feels like a conscious choice by the devs to keep the playing field relatively fair, which is quite promising.
Give it a shot, especially if you’ve got that competitive itch to scratch.
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Official Client
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam |
App Store |
Google Play |
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| Free | |||||
Etheria: Restart FAQ
Does Etheria: Restart’s gacha have a 50/50 mechanic?
No, Etheria: Restart’s limited gacha banners guarantee that you will pull the featured character every time you get a 5 star.
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Etheria: Restart Product Information
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| Title | ETHERIA: RESTART |
|---|---|
| Release Date | June 5, 2025 |
| Developer | XD |
| Publisher | XD |
| Supported Platforms | PC, Mobile |
| Genre | Action, RPG, Strategy, Anime |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | TBA |
| Official Website | Etheria: Restart Official Website |
