Unreal Engine - Breeders of the Nephelym [v0.762.1 Early] [DerelictHelmsman]

This game brought me enough nostalgia. I remembered how in my childhood I played games about farms where you had to crossbreed animals to create unique specimens. I spent enough time on this game, and I want to say that this game is worth playing for the first time without guides. The only thing that disappointed me was the character editor. He's kind of inferior.

I might have given this 5/5 for the potential alone, but it's not complete and has problems, some subjective, some pretty serious.

To get the subjective problems I have with it out of the way:

There's not enough dudes.

And I say that as a straight male. What I mean is, there's way too much furry and futanari. All males in the game (except the player, if you so choose) are furry, and all non-furry races have futanari instead of males, except for the alien-themed monsters. That includes elves, goblins and orcs, the races that you'd think would be the most human-like and for whom normal males would be easiest for the developer to implement.

I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that I'm here for the fantasy world and breeding fetish, NOT for aliens, furries and futas - and before the furries et al get on my ass about this, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with these fetishes, I just find them inherently disgusting, like "watersports". I don't like looking at dudes in porn, but I don't mind it if he's not given too much attention; whereas furry and futanari are a strong turn-off for me.

It's a good thing you can disable "exotic" females and futanari spawning and scenes, otherwise I might not be able to stand playing this game. But when you do that, no males at all will spawn for certain races, meaning that in order to breed that race, you have to 1) be a male breeder and seed them yourself which takes forever and severely limits your options for passing on traits; 2) get a furry or temporarily enable futanari to fuck them, so you have to put up with this content anyway.

Also, even if you disable futanari monsters and scenes, you still, canonically, have to have your character fuck two or three futa NPCs (and don't forget the one requisite centaur fuck, which I find worse than standard furry stuff) to progress through the game, which brings me to the big problem here:

The Portal and Keystone progression SUCKS.

Your ability to explore the world is limited by a bunch of Cockblock Gates (that's actually what they're called, to give you a feel for this game's sense of humor) which you need Keystones to open. You get Keystones by doing quests for NPCs, usually by fucking them and then acquiring a specific monster. And any Keystone can be used on any gate - that sounds convenient, right? WRONG. It's entirely possible to soft-lock yourself out of being able to reach the rest of the game world, because you unlocked one of the areas that doesn't give you a keystone back, or has a keystone quest that requires a monster from an area you can't reach. Maybe you'll get lucky and somehow happen to do everything in just the right order on the first try, even though the game heavily steers you in the wrong direction once or twice, but for the rest of us, there's the wiki.

And even if you're doing the Keystones in a valid order to reach all areas, there's still a lot of running back and forth to talk to NPCs, go catch the wild monsters you need, realize you don't have a pen for them, go back to town to buy the pen, run back to that area for wild monsters, exit and reenter upwards of a dozen times because none of the ones who spawned in have the trait you need, go to catch one, realize you can't because you don't have the milk he wants, run back to town to buy some, run back to the wild to figure out which milk works, catch him finally, run back to the ranch, and then you can start breeding them and grinding levels... BUT, then you realize that in order to get the trait you need, you have to raise that race's "World Level" which is like the collective health of that ecosystem or something, so you start mass-breeding not to get the trait you need but to release them into the wild because that's how to raise the WL, then you can get rid of all the ones you don't want, go back to the wild to catch a mon with the trait you need, breed it to increase its level, only then do you have the option to run over to the request board to complete the quest... and then run back to the NPC one more time to get the keystone, and then, finally, you can explore the next area. Be sure to drop a save on a new slot before you use the keystone, and check the walkthrough to make sure you're going to the right place, and make sure the walkthrough you're using is valid for your version of the game. Ugh.

Some of that headache can be alleviated by using the various Pussy Portals that you can unlock, so it doesn't take as long to travel between areas... BUT, you need to acquire the ability to traverse portals from a specific NPC, who originally was found in the town next to your ranch that serves as the main hub, but now is found in the Desert, one of the last few places you will unlock, AND, that's just to gain the ability to unlock portals - you still need to run back to every portal you've reached to activate it. This is terrible. It would have been tolerable back when that NPC was in town, so you can get to unlocking portals from the beginning, but now you have to almost clear the whole goddamn map to even start to get fast travel.

WHY?!

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So, that's a pretty long and thorough list of complaints for a game I'm giving a "good" rating to. Well, that's because once you get through all the nonsense, there's a pretty good game underneath. Even if this game never gets out of alpha, it's still the most complete game of this type, that I'm aware of - I think there's some text based game that has more versatility, but come on, it's text based. If you have a breeding fetish and want to see a whole bunch of weird interspecies fantasy creatures getting it on, I don't know of any other game that can so fully satisfy that admittedly very particular kink.

Could it be better? Yeah, definitely. We can always hope it gets out of Alpha, even though it's been there for five years, and I wouldn't have normally even bothered with an incomplete game, but this gets a solid recommendation from me, warts and all.

Sorry i had to break the 69 reviews lol. Interesting game tbh. I've seen worst, i've seen better but I see a lot of potential in it. The reason why i gave 3 stars is because of one major flaw: The sex scene ambiance sounds. They put female moans but what about sucking sounds ? What about cuming sounds (i'm not talking about males for my hetero folks). And what about pounding sounds? Those are very important for me to get in a porn game and i know i'm not the only one. I don't care about the story (it is only a plus for me). I know the creator is currently suffering from life issues and i hope he recovers soon. He has a gold gem on his hand with his game. He only needs to tweet it more and this will be a guaranteed masterpiece. If the game could have the same depth as ai-shoujo (sex scene wise), OOF!

** Based on Version 0.754.2a
- Based on a new player’s experience

This has to be the worst game that I’ve ever wanted to like. I have never felt so compelled to question the design choices of a game than I do right now. It has a great a concept but the execution is baffling to me. It feels like I’m playing some sort of FTP MMO game meant to give you a rough time until you throw some cash into it.

Here are my issues that I have with this game. Two versions to choose from: Long as heck for people that want a detailed break-down and a TL;DR version for my lazy-sack fam out there wondering if this is good material to stimulate your jimmies.

Long as heck Ver.
Grab a Fanta, pop an Ex-Lax, and do the Aztec two-step because we have A LOT of shit to cover.
TL;DR Ver.

It's a good game that you can lose lots of hours in. The issue being there are definitely hours lost in there that are lost due to things being tedious like making you run around to the spawn locations of different breeds, running up to the hub area to buy upgrades, running around and doing quests to unlock other areas that need more running around to. Portals are present but are unlocked late in the game when you've already spent so much time running around and not fulfilling the point of the game. I recall they had portals before that were unlocked from the get-go, you just had to interact with them, so why remove that functionality?

Aside from the annoying gripe over quality of life stuff, the basis of the game is entertaining. Breeding to get better stats and better traits, having different species breed in the hopes of making a hybrid species. Doing trial and error to try and get the best breeds possible can be rather entertaining. The breeds all look good and come with different shapes and sizes with different colour combinations that can all change depending on the characteristics of the other species they were bred with. It's a fun game, but for the love of god don't put everything so far away and make your character run at the same speed everywhere because contemplating whether you want to actually go out and acquire more of a certain species can be a real struggle.

It was good when it was online accessible but restricting to only laptop users is ridiculous?
I played and only issue I had with game on steam was exiting and sometimes it would have issue like spin unless you didn't load with controller you are doom to spin spin until you slowly exited.
Now if I tried get it again prior before uninstall means, its 4GB that going to take 2 days. idk for people on steam will avoid this product, only those who have faster internet will not.

Game play had breeding pen where that only place you bred and had new generations, anything outside wasn't really interesting?
there no taming monsters with new traits or how detect if one had special traits.
You have feed in order to tame them? Feed them something similar to what tastes good for species. You couldn't collect sperm or juices in wild?
You can collect juices from your tamed monsters. My question in newest versions did they allow you enter barn and have fun with your monsters?
To me Protagonist could had group collection made go quicker.
If they still have harpies they could have egg hatchery where you were surprised what came out.

But from what I know last played not of this occurred.
Human was only character you could play I kind wonder if there was furry creature you could play instead human?

Basically just a high system requirement, 3d, more complete version of Breeding Season...that's about it.

There's not much to it beyond that basic breeding mechanic.
Yeah you have to go catch them yourself and there's a whole world to explore, but aside from a few nifty aspects to the game, it's just Breeding Season 2.0 only without as many kinks.

And when I say high system requirements, I really mean it, because I have a beast of a PC and running this game makes it growl and run hot even with the graphics settings turned down to the minimum.

Still definitely worth playing, but just don't expect much more than your average ranch simulator at the cost of a high end PC.

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.

i've been following this game since i had my potato pc and wanted to play it, now that i can play every game with my transformer computer i decided to try this game like three times and can't like it, the concept is great, the art is awesome, graphics like WoW are comforting , the way you get your cattle can't convince me at all, animations are fine but too slow, let's wait until its finished to make a better review of this game, i've got faith, but not enough to spend hours on it.

Very great work! Iam just at the beginning but it makes a lot of fun and the graphic is very beautiful. I hope you continue your work!
Maybe sme have some tips to get a keystone ?

Love the mechanics of the game, hope to see other species in the game like the centaur race because there's only the one I've encountered, more mermaids, and hopefully rabbit races. Other than that, it's a good game to play.

One of the most ambitious projects I've seen on this site. And it is already amazing overall. A very in-depth character creator, beautiful models and landscapes, and pretty interesting gameplay.
The only fault this game has is the somewhat limited amount of r-rated stuff to do, which starts to feel repetitive after a while. The game does get frequent updates though. The furry stuff can be scaled satisfyingly low, so it should not hinder anyone from trying the game out.
Overall score: huge tits/5!

somewhat my fav game so far XD,
it has about almost everything for everyone, costomizable in almost every way, and semi gud story in itself too, i actualy probs would donate to the creator, for its still being fined tuned, but i still love it as it is

but yeah, theres still alot of bugs to the game to be improved on, but for a 3d sandbox exploration game as well~ its pretty dope, and dont mind the bugs

it's super fun to play with! worth to be supported. Beautifully crafted, hope got more interaction with the NPC, and different colors for the monster. best breeding game out there so far! thank you developers

You can have giant monmusu themed waifus via 3D gfx. I would enjoy it a bit more if there was a wider range of sizes for each type, maybe a cheat code to enable that (maybe a double/ 1.5x size cheat for nephelym would be cool imo and/or the ability to add/remove traits with cheat mode on).

Plot isn't fleshed out despite the starting area kind of implying there should be, but really if they go a bit more sanbox breeder sim with it that's way better than so many monster breeder games that dead end trying to make a story that gets sidetracked by patrons and content creep. The core is there, and its pretty good.

I hope they integrate the shops to being more relevant and useful though or cue the player into them being useful, because I never felt the need to tbh, lol.

Almost every female is fat. The "jiggle physics" make females that shouldn't look fat - have fat level of jiggles. Just seems like a fat fetish game and bad figures all.

trait breeding is mediocre compared to the predecessor of breeding seasons.

Not my style of game. Really shallow. Bad performance. I don't understand the draw for this game unless you really like the figures of the girls. But anyone who has any desire for fitness, tomboy aesthetic, petite, or etc will need to look elsewhere.

So to start I follow this game since version 0.3 and now we are at version 0.753. I will start by saying that the game has been greatly improved since those beginnings, we can see that the developer is passionate about the creation of his game.

Positive points:
-The game is constantly improving
-Graphics are good enough for UE4
-I really like the colors of the game
-A wide variety of species and personalization
-The Open World is big
-Progress is rapid

Negative points:
-Barns are too small for some species (Sylvan)
-Somewhat repetitive once the world is fully discovered

BEST GAME !

The epic-ness, expanse and visuals of the game! I love watching the run across Climax Peak and across Cove of Rapture, running alongside the aqueduct ruins into Amorous Hallows, and even the cave underneath in Homestead! love the grand landscape, I think the Petra scene blew me away. I love the animations and polish, the Creator Editor, and variety and the depth of details in everything... the whole concept is so wholesome and I have agreed 100% with the tastes here. I will keep supporting!!!!! Fantastic game. Well designed developed. No bugs or crashes. Very smooth and most polished game out there. Incredibly rich detail and simple to follow. Cool animations and lots of animations from the get go, without need for any tutorial. Most important of all, it's FUN.

I had been wanting to play this game for quite some time. It reminded me of an older browser game that I use to play. Not sure how much correlation there really is between the two. But never the less I needed to see it for myself.

And I can honestly say that I love this game. Five stars says enough. And all I can say is, Mega Slime I am so so sorry... I was going to be your new friend, but I feel horrible for what I have done to you.