Review on v0.60
Oh man, this game is a hot mess. I sort of feel bad for giving it only two stars because the whole science fantasy genre is normally right up my alley and I have a real weakness for futa content but that's admittedly all super subjective and it couldn't even make up for the game's flaws in my opinion.
I guess my biggest complaint is the huge, sprawling story that's laid out with exposition scene after exposition scene but with no clear narrative thread. The history lore doesn't seem to really make sense (like the difference between these "nations" and "factions", what was that all about? It gets treated like an official change in policy but seems to have been just a natural change over time and the author can't seem to decide on which it was) and it's just all very confusing and overblown before any sort of lewd scenes come up.
It doesn't help that the writing and dialogue is pretty awful, that makes it even harder and more tiresome to follow.
There aren't tons of typos per se but much of the dialogue still reads like it was just put through Google Translate (which maybe it was, I don't know). There really needs to be a good native-speaking proofreader behind this.
The game also can't seem to decide on whether it wants to be a visual novel or a sandbox game or both. For a long time it's pure visual novel with dialogue and dialogue and only infrequent player input, then it turns into somewhat more of a sandbox with all of its own typical problems like not really giving the player a direction on what to do and the sandbox Ren'Py UI being sort of janky and confusing.
At the beginning you also chose like a player type (similar to typical fantasy archetypes like medic, rogue, etc.) but that doesn't come into play like much later (I assume, I actually couldn't bring myself to play the game the whole way through but if that does come into play at some point, it comes in waaaay too late), same as your apparent character stats.
It's just all a mess and the game doesn't seem to know what it wants to be.
The renders are okay, thanks to DAZ (though also only if you DL'ed the gigantic 4.5 GB uncompressed archive), but not really top-level and sort of badly implemented without a whole lot of care with weird issues like apparently varying height of characters (like one other reviewer noted before). Much of the characters, especially the male ones, also look just way too similar. And what was with that weird other race of people that simply look like Japanese anime characters in contrast to the general Western-style 3d look of the game? That was weird and off-putting af.
There are also generally too few renders for the tons of dialogue that we're presented with, making the whole process feel even more like reading just a giant lore encyclopaedia.
After spending about two hours reading through confusing lore and backstory and having had no lewd scenes whatsoever, I started skipping ahead just to see when some of the good stuff would come up, and I didn't even find something. The most I got was the two sisters sleeping naked next to each other. And shortly after that, the game changed to the aforementioned sandbox style and after trying around a bit in that, I gave up.
I know some people would accuse me of just not playing the game like it's intended, if I just wanted porn then I shouldn't play an erotic VN. But the thing is, there has to be something that grips me, that makes me want to explore more than the lewd stuff, and there definitely exist VNs that accomplish that for me. But this wasn't it.
All in all, pretty disappointing.
. And whats that, I get to do the nasty with my own twin sister - oh my god; and, holy crap, is that my older sister making out with my mom - fuck. And I have a daughter... with my twin sister... 