Unity - Completed - Battle Heroine Crisis [v2023-03-15] [CM Studio]

In summation, looks great plays bad. The art is glorious. It's very highly detailed, the 3D aspects are well made and the 2D aspects are both unique and detailed. Sadly, the rest is not up to par. The porn is lacking for the amount of time required to obtain the hentai. The story, if you can make it through the high level Engrish, is awful. Not bad, just drab. The gameplay (a card game) is an interesting concept but poorly executed. You can easily cheese through the entire game with a couple of specific cards (easily obtainable ones at that) and there is no other reason to build a deck outside of this cheese strategy; therefore the gameplay becomes quite boring quite quickly.

A wholly and completely retarded game.
At first I didn't realize how completely retarded the game was as the cards appeared to make sense.
But based on how the shuffling system works where AT cards are sent to the top of the deck and stack buying AT cards is actually detrimental, they are traps!
Even if you had a AT card that removes 3 cards, AT cards are at the top while useless cards are at the bottom so there is no meaningful interaction as long as you don't have enough card draw and Action Points to go through your whole deck or make some careful multi turn setups.

For fuck's sake they just had to shuffle thing randomly!
What the fuck! I am flabbergasted on this design.

I also restarted the first heroine to check if the combat was the same for all characters and second one got locked. Brilliant!@11

One of the rare cases where the game is fairly enjoyable and the inclusion of H-content is largely irrelevant and unnecessary for enjoyment. There are a few, relatively well-animated sex scenes, but they're nothing particular to write home about... the underlying card game is fairly interesting.

If you've played slay the spire or dominion you're in for a sexy treat. the gameplay can feel a bit repetitious but don't let that tear you away from the gorgeous/sexy art and it's somewhat of a motion comic.
Combat is pretty much get the same or higher than the card that is placed at the top and also to keep the 3 traits above a certain level.
Afterward, it's the carnival battle (fans of the anime/manga knows what this is), you then get the penultimate scene and everything is unlocked in the galley. (something that I always appreciate in games like these)
Art 5/5
Combat 2.5/5
Story 4/5 (I might be a bit biased cause I love the manga)
OVERALL RATING : C+
The game is fun if you're a fan, if not you may want to read up on freezing and come back, if you enjoy slay the spire or dominion and want a sexier reward for your efforts then try this game out.

Not the best, not the worst. Overall probably not worth playing.

Porn scenes are layers of warp animation. Decent quality. You will get 3 motioncomic-comic pane sex scenes per arc that have 4-5 animated images. Scenes build on earlier scenes in certain cases. You be the judge of if that is reuse or not as it does have a certain utility with the comic pane nature of the presentation. The motioncomic-comic pane elements are not executed that well and frequently you'll have several near identical images on screen or images crudely overlapping each other before slotting in their proper place.

Writing and story isn't worth mentioning. It's machine translated poorly and what plot was there for the arcs would be at best considered serviceable. As much/little setup as a low end doujin.
What is interesting though is each arc only takes place over a few days and most cardgame gauntlets take place back to back in continuity of the story. Thematically each sequence of cardgame is usually treated as a battle of wills between you and the girl, where you're assuaging her concerns/making her fall for you. The text wrapup of such is not in line with it's mechanical usage, as the first girls first gauntlet takes place over weeks and the radiant writing is designed around such. It's all ignorable, so once you stop reading it the game makes a certain amount of sense. The usage of cardgame sequences is not the worst idea despite it's implementation.

The cardgame itself is halfbaked. Not enjoyable. It has some mechanics of convenience on the devs part that make it a real slog like the fact it's designed around not having a deck builder, "injury cards" that are a dead draw, an annoying 1 "remining action" limit on the cards with mechanics, and the source of new cards being a "shop" card you have to draw/ takes up a place in your hand and requires your only actionpoint to access. Winning is easy, never buy anything but the best cards and do not take anything that gives you injury cards ever. Then just coast.
On top of it all, the highest "difficulty" stat requirements to not lose a sequence are something like 25/100 making most of it ultimately pointless until you get to the "Carnival" combat mechanic.

Your deck, money, and progress reset when you start a new arc, so there is no longterm mechanical depth here besides getting more expensive good cards and no bad cards again as fast as possible.

The game has a tile combat system as the end of arc bossfight it calls "Carnival" (yet another bad machine translation.)
This is much better than the cardgame that makes up 95% of gameplay.
It uses the same cards with the same card effects, same 1 AP limit, but now you're placing points into your 3 stats and choosing 1 of them to attack with. The XXX/100 points you have in the 3 stats does... something under the hood, but as you'd expect big number is better. If you have 60+ points in the bar and attack the stat they're weakest in with 5+ card points that turn you'll delete half the enemies healthbar. Damage is as easy to avoid as putting card points into everything and having high stats to back them. You'll do 3000 and the enemy will do 200 back even with 2/5 blocking their 4/5.
Short, simple, relatively clear conveyance. Shame we see so little of it in a game you'd assume was about fighting giant kaiju monsters and not solely highschool drama.

Bugs/feature of Unity, different levels seem to autosave in different places. Going back to the title screen resets the cardgame/resets all your choices to the autosave and sometimes it will either reroll your cards or the enemies cards. This is by far the best thing to try when you get a bullshit hand or the enemy has some ridiculous cards; ~60% of the time a cardgame will reroll one or more elements but occasionally you're stuck getting fucked over by RNG.
The card shop always rerolls and if you have a "fixed" card draw that grants you access you can use this to avoid the 100money reroll fee.

As a total package, not that good.
I bowed out after completing the 2nd of 3 available arcs. The gameplay is tedious regardless of being mechanically consistent/understandable. You've read these exact plot setups in a thousand doujins so it's not worth playing for the story. The porn is ok enough but it is only basic warp animation without any interactivity or control. The execution of the motioncomic elements is pretty janky and the porn writing around it is cringe inducing and only part of that is on the translation. There really isn't a smoking gun for why the game is mediocre or anything to point to as fixable. The card game plays as intended, fixing it would mean replacing it and yet the cardgame isn't why the linear kinetic novel is also subpar. It's a fully actualized game design that just "is" like this.

Hah what a meme, had to try it just to see more of the trainwreck that is Im-dal-young. Spoiler: It's same trainwreck as always and f*** this game for ruining decent gameplay 4/5 for the gameplay design dropped to a 2 for the pain of interacting with this engine.

This is a 99% focused gameplay review, I do really not care for the story so I skipped it(looked similar to the manhwa). The art is consistent and quite good live2D, the english seems decent but has typo errors (like heroine misspelled as hiroine). H-scenes presented with panel boxes like a manga.


So now gameplay. Honestly I like it and its got a bit of choice complexity. If you've played boardgame dominion then playstyle may be familiar with a neat twist.
You start heroine chapters with a basic deck and build it through their subchapters and it all culminates in a final battle where you use the stat cards to boost for a kinda rock-paper-scizor style showdown where your ability will be based on how high you got the parameteres during the card phase.
You start the turn with 1 action and by default draw 5 cards from your deck to you end and by end of the turn you will discard all cards not played.
The deck consists of 2 types of cards, action and stat card. You can play as many stat cards as you want to either counter the randomly chosen negative NPC cards presented or to unlock a positive NPC card. The stat cards not played will instead boost one of three parameteres needed to pass the subchapter requirement and give you some gold to spend, primarily on buying new cards but there are other uses as well.
Action cards cost 1 action to play and perform meta effects like [draw 2 cards], [+2 actions], [+1 action and draw 3 but boost every stat not 0 on NPC cards by 1], [+2 action, +3 card and add a worthless 0 stat card to your deck], [gain 700 gold], [pay 500 gold to permanently remove a card from the deck] and more. There are more action cards added to the game as you progress the Heroine chapters at least for the first 2 of them with the 2nd chapters being more complex than the ones in chapter 1. Can't answer about chapter 3 since I didn't get that far due to the reason listed sometime later in review

And now finally time to answer the important question which is the entirety of why I find this game neat. How do you gain more cards? The answer is the [open shop] action card. Yes that's right. Expanding your deck will take up one of your highly important resources to play the essential action cards and is done midgameplay. And thus you get into some interesting choices between purposefully failing the early but easy NPC cards to get gold to go shop while its easy and fairly painless or try to squeeze in a purchase lategame when the shop card is a liability for your draws and may cause you to fail the NPC card check.

The final mechanic is the forced link button that lets you pick one of 4 options, +1 action, +1 draw, +500 gold OR "Reduce every NPC card stat by 1" and then it adds a "forced link" card to you hand. If you let this card stay in hand until the end-of-turn-discard it will add a random amount 15-25 to the mental breakdown gauge. At 100 breakdown you instantly lose the game and need to restart from the latest subchapter with a consolation boon (+2 to any one parameter or +300 gold).

So the game needs you to manage a balance between buying strong cards so you minimize played stat cards to gain gold, having enough enough +action and +draw so you don't get action starved (a full hand of +2draw but only 1 action to play with is some literal garbage), spending actions and gold midgame to both expand and reduce the deck to improve quality and consistency. I would call this a kinda compelling gameplay loop and I enjoy it.

So why do I hate this game with a passion just one normally does with any Im-dal-young creation after you get over the art? BECAUSE NOONE PLAYTESTED FOR MORE THAN THE INTRO SCREEN BECAUSE THESE UNSKIPPABLE ANIMATIONS ON EVERY CARD PLAYED ARE SO ANNOYING I WANNA STRANGLE SOMETHING. yes, the gameplay goes at like 20% the speed you could play it at and I feel I need to get cheatengine for it's speedhack due to how slow this is. I coulda done this gameplay in around 40minutes probably, now it took 2 hours.

In addition you have no idea how severe the penalties of a NPC card are until you've suffered them. If it says "-morale/-gold" you have no idea how bad it is untill you've suffered it and let me tell you, -7/-680 gold IS A PRETTY DAMN STEEP PRICE WHEN YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE PAYING FOR.

Edit: Now finished, I can confirm Ch3 unlocks even more action cards [draw cards until you draw 2 action cards] and a equivalent for the stat cards. I didn't get a chance to use either because my deck was already perfect and let me max the parameters by turn 24. Adding anything woulda made the deck worse, i even removed the shop card from the deck. And I wont lie. it was highly satisfying to do 10k dmg and oneshot them in the combat phase

If you are a fan of this series its great and animated too.
10/10 characters
What Im surprised the most is that its a card game and the character design by this fan game almost near the quality of the original.

Art / Porn: (4/5)
Let's get the positives out of the way first. The game looks great. Not only the characters, but the cards and menu screens. The sex scenes are uncensored, and the animations are passable. All in all, the game looks good.

Story: (1/5)
What's not so good is the story or even text speed. The story is pretty generic and non-existent: The world's attacked by aliens and we get a group of superhumans who yada yada yada and you get a power to manipulate people's thoughts / feelings so you aim for the alien-fighting hotties. The premise is alright if not generic but it's basically ruined by MTL, slow text speed which can't be changed, and random lag times where the text doesn't advance for a few seconds for no reason.

Gameplay: (2/5)
As good as the game looks, the gameplay is bare-bones. It's a basic deck-builder where you play cards to get rid of enemy cards and then you save up cards to buy more / better cards. As someone said before, the main point of the game is to play as little cards as possible and it doesn't help that many of them don't have any interesting abilities or variance, just different stats and artwork. In addition, for each of the 3 heroine missions available, you basically play with the same deck, cards, and enemy cards with close to no variance.

Conclusion: (2/5)
Battle Heroine Crysis looks great and plays bad. Best words to describe it would be "underwhelming" and "bland". If you're looking for a good card game, just go play Slay the Spire or Dominion. Sure, there's no porn, but I can guarantee that you'll have more fun than playing this game.

Card battle mechanics are painfully boring. Basically you fight cards with 3 hp stats by playing cards with 3 attack stats. When you defeat a card, it will not score its debuff at the end of the turn. Cards NOT played will increase one of 3 meters and maybe gold. Ultimately, you try to play as little cards as possible and do as little as possible, which is the antithesis of "gameplay".

Animations are slow, unskippable and repetitive
Lewd content is almost inexistent

Hard pass