I was roughly OK with this till day mid-twenties. To be sure, this is drowning in a supernaturally talented/lucky MC that every woman wants to be with. It has grind elements and minigames. With Twinehacker/Sugarcube, I could brute force my way past most of it. And what was lost to the bizarre gatekeeping in this game, I simply didn't care. Nothing is compelling enough to warrant multiply replays, let alone the mental gymnastics involved in keeping track of where the gate keeping happens and how you could avoid it happening.
As another review mentioned, you'll run into things along the lines of "you would have had to have done something with this person on Day 13 to be able to use these 3 options with them on Day 24" or "There would have been a lot different scene on Day 28 if you had gotten them pregnant on Day 18". They constantly have these orange circle question mark icons that initially are helpful and later on seem helpful and a slap in the face. I understand that this is supposed to incentivize multiple playthroughs, but I was TRYING to impregnate all of them and I cannot FATHOM how I missed Jillian unless I chose someone with more priority on that day and unknowingly blew my only chance at that option.
I'll wager that insight on stuff like this is outlined in the Official Game Guide you can get for $2.00. If it isn't, then it's worse than I thought. Realistically, they aren't asking for TOO much. For $10, you can unlock all the useful cheats. But it still smacks of the manipulative and predatory tactics in mobile games and that Activision and Ubisoft love to try to put in their games to bring that Mobile money to PC Gaming. But it's less predatory in this one than in other recently reviewed HTML games by me.
What brought me to a stop to write this review before even finishing this to the current update is the storyline for the MC and Kelsi that starts in the Day 20-ish range. For a guy that developed a city-wide reputation for being a problem solver and always knowing what to do and gets things done. I cannot abide by the sudden idiocy in his reaction to Kelsi. Literally, he's doing what he gave his daughters and Kelsi shit for earlier on in the game. And it's ironically occurring at the same time that he gets caught betraying someone important to him. The amount of willing suspension of disbelief expected of me to swallow this not just 180 degree reversal of character trait but a sudden and isolated regression of skills and mental faculties as a human... but mostly JUST for the Kelsi storyline at this point. I feel like I'm supposed to not question this and just ride with it like it's character growth because he's also written as being completely blind to how he should handle his wife around this same time. Again, completely unlike this character has been 99.9% of the time up to this point. I just don't believe for a second that he would waste his time on this whole convoluted scheme. I think he would just be like, "Kelsi, I just want you to be happy. If you feel this is your happy, then by all means." And then when/if it fails, if it does, he'll weigh whether he should help her again. I'm sure I'm biased here, since I always kicked Kelsi to the curb - I didn't need another Gina.
Hell, I stopped liking Being a DIK because I felt the game jumped the shark after the INTERMISSION release or whatever it was. So maybe I just don't like this game because I can't easily see all I want to see playing it and will just cheat to unlock the Gallery and stop playing it. Maybe I'm the only one that has issues with a smart MC suddenly acting like an idiot for two new developments in existing storylines. It just undermines an already precariously held together foundation, imo.
I'm hanging on by a thread with this one. Will update if I end up with more to say or somehow can make this wall of text make more sense.
As another review mentioned, you'll run into things along the lines of "you would have had to have done something with this person on Day 13 to be able to use these 3 options with them on Day 24" or "There would have been a lot different scene on Day 28 if you had gotten them pregnant on Day 18". They constantly have these orange circle question mark icons that initially are helpful and later on seem helpful and a slap in the face. I understand that this is supposed to incentivize multiple playthroughs, but I was TRYING to impregnate all of them and I cannot FATHOM how I missed Jillian unless I chose someone with more priority on that day and unknowingly blew my only chance at that option.
I'll wager that insight on stuff like this is outlined in the Official Game Guide you can get for $2.00. If it isn't, then it's worse than I thought. Realistically, they aren't asking for TOO much. For $10, you can unlock all the useful cheats. But it still smacks of the manipulative and predatory tactics in mobile games and that Activision and Ubisoft love to try to put in their games to bring that Mobile money to PC Gaming. But it's less predatory in this one than in other recently reviewed HTML games by me.
What brought me to a stop to write this review before even finishing this to the current update is the storyline for the MC and Kelsi that starts in the Day 20-ish range. For a guy that developed a city-wide reputation for being a problem solver and always knowing what to do and gets things done. I cannot abide by the sudden idiocy in his reaction to Kelsi. Literally, he's doing what he gave his daughters and Kelsi shit for earlier on in the game. And it's ironically occurring at the same time that he gets caught betraying someone important to him. The amount of willing suspension of disbelief expected of me to swallow this not just 180 degree reversal of character trait but a sudden and isolated regression of skills and mental faculties as a human... but mostly JUST for the Kelsi storyline at this point. I feel like I'm supposed to not question this and just ride with it like it's character growth because he's also written as being completely blind to how he should handle his wife around this same time. Again, completely unlike this character has been 99.9% of the time up to this point. I just don't believe for a second that he would waste his time on this whole convoluted scheme. I think he would just be like, "Kelsi, I just want you to be happy. If you feel this is your happy, then by all means." And then when/if it fails, if it does, he'll weigh whether he should help her again. I'm sure I'm biased here, since I always kicked Kelsi to the curb - I didn't need another Gina.
Hell, I stopped liking Being a DIK because I felt the game jumped the shark after the INTERMISSION release or whatever it was. So maybe I just don't like this game because I can't easily see all I want to see playing it and will just cheat to unlock the Gallery and stop playing it. Maybe I'm the only one that has issues with a smart MC suddenly acting like an idiot for two new developments in existing storylines. It just undermines an already precariously held together foundation, imo.
I'm hanging on by a thread with this one. Will update if I end up with more to say or somehow can make this wall of text make more sense.