I reviewed this game a year ago and have some additional thoughts.
First, thank you for the new content! It really shines and is well done!
Warning: Some spoilers below
Pros
- The skill system has been improved quite a bit.
- The story keeps you guessing and is also largely about the agent's personal life.
- The story no longer locks you into doing certain things all the time. The story is more relaxed with free days to do whatever you choose. The events are waiting for you and the player doesn't feel rushed!
Cons
- The skill increases are too random. Some do not apply to the situation. I would prefer if the skills weren't chosen randomly. You can basically get any skill increase doing any activity so it is difficult to work on specific skills.
- Some skills hardly ever get boosted such as subtlety and power.
- There still aren't very many skill checks in the game (I only remember 2-3). I know it's a visual novel but all these skills you are building need to be integrated into the game. For example with the gun deal there could be many checks for agility, intelligence (with the acting), strength/power with knocking the guy to the floor, etc. The game really needs these skills integrated in much better. I don't mind failing in a game. There should be a small chance of failure throughout the game. The higher the skill the less chance you fail a skill check.
- English is good but not great. There are plenty of misused words, misspelled words, and missing words throughout the dialog and text. You really need a native English speaker to review and update all the text for the game. I know a few players offered to help with this for free in the past and you've turned all of them down for some reason.
- The game tries to hit too many fetishes. I was turned off with the grandpa content so I bypassed it. At least I had a choice in the matter. I wish I would have had the choice to kiss his granddaughter though instead of being forced to do it. I wish I would have had the choice to pull the trigger in the gun deal scene (didn't know if there was a bullet in the chamber or not).
- The player is groped and treated like a sex object a lot in the game and the player almost always has to go along with it. I wish there was an option to move away or slap the offender in many cases. It is impossible for the player not to be a slut in this game. The player has no self-respect or standards.
- Nearly all of the sex scenes involve BDSM to some degree. The player never really instigates the sex for the most part. In nearly every case the sex starts out somewhat forced and then once the player starts feeling pleasure it turns mutual. I love the BDSM content but it is overused in this game (my opinion of course). I recommend finding other clever ways to get the agent into sexual situations.
The game is a 4 out of 5 for me. I really enjoyed the new content! The writing is the best part of the game and the graphics are well done! I was pleasantly surprised with how much content you added since my first review.
If you want to turn this into a 5 star game fix all the cons above. I estimate that it would take a good three months to implement (I have some software development experience).
I modified my review from 3 stars to 4 stars and updated my review.
Hey there! Cheers for the kind words and the well thought out feedback for sure. Glad we could make such an impression and an experience.
Since you took the time to lay out all your thoughts on the game, I might as well give you some friendly rebuttal and chat through some of the concerns, maybe by the end we'll come to some new light on the game and be better for it? There's no harm in some good spirited discussion regardless.
Firstly, thank you for the points you made as Pros. I'll not go into them now as I'm long-winded enough and don't need to be kissing my own ass Sal style, but I do appreciate them being said. Maybe we'll get into them later.
The Cons:
- 1-3) I'll tackle these all at once, because in the end they all have the same underlying cause. The skill system is pretty much defunct. That's my impression on the matter anyway. It's from a time when I wasn't even on the project and the game was going to be something else... More about building an agent around a style, less about an (almost entirely) story driven VN. In fact, I think it was in v0.8 that I last got to use a skill check in the script, because by then the plan was to remove the skills bit from the game when we wrap up the content and complete the engine on our way to v1.0. Since we've not got all that much content left to add at this point, it's probably best we just wait to take them out after we are content complete rather than make people wait an update for more engine changes.
Long story short is that the skills are simply to be ignored after you get past Mission 1 and sadly these points are pretty moot. They are from a different iteration of the game before we were even beWilder. If we ever get to do another Agents of Heels series game, it may well be that it will be more inclusive of stat, the way this was going to be once (and like our game Noemi's Toscana Rebirth is), but that's a question for far in the future. Any more details and the full story on what may/may not happen with the stats will have to come from Unshi.
- 4) So, the English, huh? Well... I'm in two minds as to what you mean here. The simple bit first. The reason we don't have people here giving us the Native English version of the texts is because we have a native speaker. Me. English is my only language. Of course, I do make some mistakes (that'll happen with 1M words of text across the whole game) and I have odd phrasings at times, but the writing has picked up since I joined, I think we'll all agree. You can see the point at which the style changes actually, as the texts get longer and more in-depth, for better or worse.
Now... A large part of the game from the Start up to Mission 1 was written by Unshi who has English as a second language. These were serviceable, but did have some mistakes yeah. We call these Act 1 scenes and we are redoing them with my simple rewriting when we can (our last version added 9 more rewrites, now we've only got a handful left to do). If these are what you mean that need improving, we do so agree and we're on it!
Otherwise, short of a helping hand with fans pointing out where typos and errors are found so we can go back to whip up a fix on them, I'm not sure what needs to change. The game doesn't read like it's written by a non-English speaker in the latter half, does it?
- 5) Choices and fetishes. Yeah, we touch on a lot, but we do them well enough I like to think. As for choice, there is a lot. Most things can be avoided if you want via an open choice (such as the Monster and Cat) or you can get through it by being on an appropriate path (like Good Nat can solve Tim's problems without fucking him). The kiss with Kate is important though, and that kiss is a part of the story Kate has running in the background of both our games, not just AoH, so that's why you can't say no to it... but that scene does offer a choice of sex if I recall correctly. Still, maybe added choice would be a good thing, so it's something we will note for the future, sure.
- 6-7) These ones I think are the ones we disagree on most actually. Yes, a lot of the content involves Nat going from Good Agent to Corrupt though harassment that the infection takes control of. That's a little bit Cliche for FemProtage though, sure. We agree there. However, there are times you can be the harasser, where you can avoid sex and do things the right way, where you can be a bad ass and fight instead of fuck, and in the Bad Nat path you can kill off people and be the FemDom agent in charge. If we had the time and resources to do lots more options and paths, sure we would add more ways to do things, but with what we do have I think we provide a good balance of actively being a slut, being corrupted into a slut, and being outright powerful.
Still... One can always do better, so a proper discussion here on it's own conversation may be a good thing if you have specific suggestions, ideas and/or what ifs you'd like to talk about. That stuff can be fun to do too. Let us know with a holler, I'm sure people around here have a lot they think about on this front.
Anyways, I do hope that was an interesting read, and more importantly that it shows off some of our own internal thoughts and influences in how we make AoH. We've got plenty of games and ideas to go in the beWilderverse as time goes by, so its great to hear that people such as yourself care enough to write down some points to help us be better as we grow. I also hope I didn't come off as augmentative.
Now... I'll stop so we can digest and maybe even discuss more. Either way, thanks for stopping by and letting us know you enjoyed our premier work. It's all food for thought and for a good spirit!