Review as of 0.754
Breeders of the Nephelym is definitively a game with potential. However, it feels unpolished.
*The biggest issue is with the lack of quality of life features.
The world is big and you waste way too much time moving around. Portals shortcuts are unlocked very late in-game, way too late. Buildings housing the different races are far from each other and working with them is a pain. Shops are way too far away from home and have obscure limitations (shop sometimes unavailable, stock limits, etc.). Yes, it can be improved later but the fact that nothing was done about it already is very worrisome.
*It feels like there is a lack of thoughts that went into the added features.
This feeling starts at the very beginning of the game where you don't know where to start. You will go to the first NPC to understand what this is all about. Obviously, you will ask how to breed/house your monsters, right? It is in the dialogue options so obviously, that is what you should do. But instead of telling you how to get started the NPC goes full nerd on you and pukes lore at you, leaving you with no usable information whatsoever.
That is when you start having the feeling that not enough thoughts went into the game and it will never really leave. Each new element that you will come across will always appear flawed/useless/incomplete.
*The character presets that you encounter in-game can be really uncanny.
Big butts, big boobs, exaggerated hourglass figure. This is a big letdown. Some are definitively better than others. The editor, which you cannot access without a code, is really powerful. This is definitively the biggest strength of the game. A shame the devs hid it. SERIOUSLY, why would they do that??? This is the core of their game. New presets can be added, devs could encourage preset sharing. That would be an obvious solution. But at this point, I fear that it may never happen because of the lack of common sense with this game.
A lot of work went into Breeders of the Nephelym, definitively more work than the majority of porn games. The game is also ambitious but does the mistake of building on top of weak foundations. Weak features can definitely be fixed later but those do add up. It eventually becomes hard to forgive the game for being bad just because the game is not finished.