Unreal Engine - Carnal Instinct [2024-10-17] [Team Carnal Instinct]

Review of the version on the Unreal engine 5

This is an erotic game about an alternative ancient Egypt with magic and various supernatural creatures.

Gameplay:

• Exploring the world around you, fighting enemies, completing quests and romantic events with other characters.

• In the game, quests are divided into categories of Main, secondary and small events. This can be a mission to clear an area, talk to characters, or search for items. Since the action takes place in Ancient Egypt, of course there are mazes and puzzles.


Positive aspects:

• A good plot full of secrets.

• Beautiful graphics and a large open world.
After switching to Unreal Engine 5 looks like candy.

• Good optimization.

• A simple and intuitive combat system.

• Good character development. Some of the dialogues have already been voiced by the actors.

• The player in the game is given a choice of which character to be. It can be a human male/female or different types of furries, also male/female. According to the new system, this happens for magic points that can be spent at a special obelisk (in the UE4 version, it was just through the game menu).

• Well-made sex animations.

Negative aspects:

• There are bugs with animations and quest triggers.

• Not everyone can like so many furry characters.

In advance, I'm really torn about this game. On one hand, it's extremely high quality, on other hand, I deeply hate some of the developer chocies here.

Let's start with the bad: the transition to UE5 is probably the most useless, timewasting thing the devs could possibly do. The game already looked great on UE4, it ran well, worked mostly bugfree, there's nothing meaningful the transition to the UE5 could provide to the players, but in exchange, it put the story development on hold for who knows how long.
On the top of it, the UE5 version is bad. Like real bad. For the literal first half hour of gametime it has zero interaction with any alive characters. It feels extremely empty, and it's empty by design. Devs said they wanted to give the game a proper intro, but in reality, a putting a Skyrim-like scene at the beginning would've given the game enough intro. The introductionary part of the UE5 version is terrible, and would absolutely stop me from playing any further.

Now, onto the UE4 version. I can honestly say I've never played such a complex, and well-made porn game as this. It's genuinely an RPG game that revolves around sex. The sex part is naturally integrated as a central part of the plot instead of making unlifelike saint-to-whore kind of story that we've all seen too much.
The game has several quests with varying quality. Some of them are genuinely so great that blow AAA games out of the water (the investigation quest for example) others are just basic fetch kind of ones. Or somewhere in the middle. A non-fetch quest, that wasn't thought out much. But even the fact that a porn game has genuine meaningful quests, and dungeons is a refreshing addition.
The game has a basic combat system too. Not too complicated, and honestly, it strarts out hard at first, but with very little progress it becomes too easy. I've seen worse in non-porn AAA games.
The most of the dialogues are pretty well written for their purpose too. Of course there are the random encounters that are repetitive, but in general, there's no room for complaint there.
My only real problem with the UE4 version is the sex part. The game has several sex scenes, but those scenes don't give the player much freedom. plus most of the time the fixed camera positions during the scenes are positioned behind some object, so the already bad camera angles are made even worse. By the lack of freedom in scenes I meant the game decides which scene it would play for which random encounter, and doesn't allow any change in that. And all of those scenes are basic penetration ones. They are animated well, but become repetitive after 6-8 random encounter.

All in all, great game, but I'm really afraid when it will get an actually meaningful update next.

The UE5 release looks like an actual game with proper plot and mechanics, has great graphics with good optimization and is a solid foundation for the future updates.
Voice acting is a nice touch, though not every dialogue is voiced and that feels quite off.
Map is very big and introducing easily accessible mount is a good decision, but there seems to be only one boat in the world and you either have to remember where you left it (there is no marker on your map) or swim to new places on your own.
World is still empty and is primarily filled with easy-but-annoying enemies.
For now, loot is in abundance and there is only a single trader, who can't buy stuff from you if their inventory is full (it is, cause they fill it up with random things). Completing quests doesn't give you any rewards, at all.
A new "customization" feature has been implemented, which lets you buy new morphs for a currency that can be found at some sort of obelisks around the world. Different morphs give you perks, e.g. Crocodilian can swim faster. In UE4 version some morphs were important to complete quests, and I wonder if in UE5 they are going to be just for show and perks.
Overall, UE5 version is a good and promising basis, but still missing some crucial features that, hopefully, will be implemented later.

Intresting game.So much potential to be exploit and I hope the devs won't give up on this . The game offers you quite medium size map and be glad it's only medium because you travel on foot with posiblility of fast travel on certain locations.

Disclaimer: This is based entirely off the Pre-Alpha as of 8/2/23 and the new changes therein.

Good: UE5 graphics are simply amazing and the FPS are still high. Of course, I'm not running on a potato, and people who refuse to upgrade are probably going to suffer. Still, it beats any of that "Made with Unity" garbage out of the water in both visuals and framerates. Nice to see a dev team who actually knows how to code. Speaking of which, I have only found one real bug in what is there (to be fair, there isn't much there) and that was sound related (i.e. certain special ambient effects get stuck in a loop & don't end when they should).

Combat is a lot easier than the previous iterations, which is good because enemies are everywhere. Again, smoother graphics help with this a lot, as things are now fluid instead of jerky.

Voice acting doesn't suck, which is rare for any game made these days. Yes, the dialog is cheese but what do want from a porn game?

Map is frikkin' huge (if empty) and has lots of potential.

The game mechanics that are in place seem to work just fine. Some have complained about the controls but I have no issue as I am a grown up person who isn't trying to interface a gamepad with a PC.

Boats are a nice addition. Could use an autopilot, though.

Bad: World is very, very empty, except for enemies that are way too abundant. Hopefully this will change in future, with copy/paste combat locations replaced with regular NPCs.

Many previous game mechanics are still missing, even simply things like climbing have yet to return.

New plot is absolute weaksauce and I hope they go back to their original story because it was far more interesting. Starting off in a bazaar looking at things you want but can't afford yet is a great hook. Starting off on a beach with a stick and having to spend half an hour running through hordes of enemies to find even one person to speak to is a great way to turn people away. Plus in the old version you can get laid within literally one minute of starting. Now it will take you over an hour. It's a porn game. I shouldn't have to explain this one.

Campfires are nice, and free healing nicer, but it's no substitute for having a proper home base to call your own.

Making players spend an hour running through three different quests before unlocking basic character customization is a very, very bad move. Again, this is something players want to do before you even roll the intro credits. Let them do so.

Desperately needs an autorun button.

Conclusion: I greatly enjoy all the potential that this new UE5 version has opened up, however I fear that they may end up taking everything from here in entirely the wrong direction. Just because you have a new game engine doesn't mean you have to wipe out everything that came before it and invent new everything. They'd be better off just porting everything they had before into it and then deciding what to keep and what to scrap from there.

I tried this game years ago and it was very empty, but they have taken advantage of the time and have turned the game into an incredible game, 5/5 but if there is something that they have to improve it is the optimization of the game, it consumes too much memory of the graphics

[Review of version 0.3.70]

This game is GORGEOUS. Some of the best artwork you will find in any adult game especially among the limited selection of futa content.

Things become slightly less impressive when those gorgeous character models have to do things. Sex scenes mostly get the job done, but they are not quite at the level of the simulators like what Illusion and Miconisomi put out. Some clipping here and there. Camera angles are quite limited and sometimes have objects blocking the view.

Combat feels janky and not much fun. Gold seems very hard to come by which limits purchasing supplies or the cute and sexy outfits sold by the merchants. Overall gameplay can feel a bit grindy sometimes. The gameplay is largely rescued by the atmosphere, the lore, the quests, and the artistic side of the game.

The game has also been in development for several years, and the progress seems like slow-going. This is one of those games that looks like it has so much potential if it can ever escape development hell. If this game ever reaches a true state of completion then I might bump this review up to 5 stars, but I won't be surprised if it remains "in-development" for the rest of eternity.

All of these reasons make me rate 4 out of 5 stars at the present time.

Well this is the first serious looking unreal project I’ve seen on this site.

Game runs very smoothly even on epic graphics, very nice graphics mind you.
Physics seem to be pretty decent too.
UI looks pretty neat as well.
Audio is very good too.
Animations are well done.

This game could one day become something really big, but devs have tons of work infront of them obviously, but for what they have done they have my respect.

It is a shame at least for me, that they put this amount of work into unattractive reptiles and cats with human bodies. I’ll probably come back one day to check out their progress just to appreciate their work, shame I can’t appreciate those H-scenes tho.

The game runs well on my dusty old rig. The models and character variety are great, all of them look gorgous. The map and environment are pretty much AC: Origins - lite. Not bad looking, but also not amazing either. The quests are semi interesting, mostly just boiling down to "me horny let fuck". It's a porn game though and they're interesting enough. The gameplay... is weird. On one hand its just the dark souls of porn, on the other its kinda clunky and skyrim esque (bows just straight up win everything lol .

All in all, for a porn game, this is above the bar. Went into it expecting trash and was pleasantly surprised. AFAIK there is no animation viewer, so if you're in a rush maybe skip it.

Alright, gonna be honest and gonna be brutal about it.

Graphics, animations: 10/10, i'll give you that, they are top notch!

But the rest is, total disaster in my honest opinion, here is why;

Gameplay is annoying, frustrating, not well thought from the players perspective.

-%90 of the game is a walking, running simulator. Quests are ALWAYS far away from teleport locations and you have to run from one point to another for hours and hours. And to make it worse, some quests (lets say fetching stuff) needs you to bring two things, it tells you at the start but doesn't let you know the both of them, so you bring one and then the .....er sends you to almost same place to bring something another! This is B.S desing imho and we, as players, know the reason behind this; its to make your game-play longer! This idea alone should be burried 6ft deep under by now!

-Dungeon designs are terrible, confusing, easy to get lost several times. While it looks like it has its inspiration from Skyrim, in Skyim we atleast had a spell called clairvoyance to show us the path if we get lost ffs.

-There is (or are, after 1st encounter i didn't find the heart to do more of them) un-finished SIDE-QUEST! Like what the hell man, you start a side quest, spend 30 mins (20 mins running around ofc) only to find out (not available, coming soon) at the end of it. Seriously???

-Scenes, when i said graphics / animations are top notch, the scenes are the most vanilla boring s...t you'll ever see. And the fact that in order to find them you went through lots of B.S makes it even worse.

Yes, from afar this MAY look like something beautiful, and for some reasons it still is, but for other obvious reasons i can not give more than 1 star. Devs should learn that not everything is about graphics & animations, if your game requires the patience of a saint to play it, then there is something wrong with it.

Great mechanics, with nice lews scenes, could be a little better with the cum, should see where the cum falls. Story is good but could have 1 main mission where everything connects.
But all around is a great game, good job to the developers!

This game seriously can't get anything less than 5-stars, at least at this point. For a game that looks this good and has plenty of sexual content in it, it's crazy that it's free. It reminds me of an actual published game. Combat isn't perfect but works, character customization is great. This is an actual good game, while also being super hot.

The game is ascetically pleasing but is an unoptimized bug filled mess and if you encounter a game breaking bug then best you can do is to restart the entirety of the game again and hope that whatever broke your days worth of progrss does not replicate.

This issue would not be as bad if the dev team took time to address said issues or provide a service like fixing a bugged out save and save a few days worth of repeated and tedious railroaded progression in what is essentially a walking simulator with elements of gameplay elements and sex.

The state of the game at the time of review stands with most of the content being incomplete such as quests and locations by the way of invisible walls and the way the dev team priorities new and often bloating content to attract the attention of a larger audience without finishing any of the already established content.

TLDR:

Game breaking bugs common with no support from the dev team.
XXX Rated walking simulator.
Outstanding imcomplete quests from years ago.
Uninformative UI and Map.

[v0.3.42](UE3) Was awesome!
One of the few h-games I liked to play without focusing on "h" part.
Played it some time ago, but forgot the name of the game...

-Story, Originality
Van Darkholme: "Friking slaves, get your ass back here! Frik♂you!"
Literary rise from a slave to a chad.

-Renders
Cool 3D models.
My computer didn't blow up.
(But I lowered some of the settings to be safe)

-Sound
No sound.
Can enable sounds on videos if you want.

-Playability
Played through all the content I could.

There is some grind, but there are not so many items. So, you grind until you get the best equipment.

There are ~20-30 quests and most of them interesting.

-Performance
It works.
But if you want top graphics, you have to have top graphics card...

-Bugs
Jumping to some places is very hard.
Enemies don't see you sometimes.
And there were other small bugs I don't remember.

-Animations
Look smoth and nice.

-Voice Acting
As far as I remember, all dialogs have voices, or I heard them in my head(?).

-Grammar
Didn't see any mistakes.

-Amount of content
Played it for ~5-7 hours and liked it a lot.
When you are near to the end of content there are more bugs and game begin to feel empty, but that's understandable.

When you finish all the plot quests and have everything there is nothing else to do...
Even though game looks like sandbox, where you should have fun even after you finish plot quests (maybe I want too much from this h-game).

[2024-10-17](UE5) Bad.
Oof... It updated so much...
I can even buy it at steam (Too expensive for me though).

Now it feels more like a "A"/"AA" game.

BUT

The graphics are too unoptimized.
While GPU hits 20-30%, CPU maxes out at 80-100% (with lowered graphics)
-And some visual effects bug out
-Game updates graphics and stutters
-Pressed "Lovesence" button at menu for fun and the game lagged out and got stuck in the menu.
-At a scene with a boat full of fruits I thing the game bugged out, because I couldn't do anything, but give a row and be berrated by a girl (After I walked away and returned, man on the boat returned to the boat).
-If you wait for a certain daytime and teleport, the light doesn't change.
-When I fought the boss with the statue I didn't understand that you have to hit the statue at first (it wasn't highlighted in any way).
-Quest markers doesn't dissapear after complition.
-If you skip too fast, the character jumps.
-If you do quests in wrong order, some dialogue misses out (Gave monster head to anubis folk and couldn't speak about their loot I had to give).
-If you don't do anubis quest first you will have to walk in the dark (Couldn't find torch anywhere else)
~Quest items doesn't dissapear after the quest (Not sure if it is a bug).

Well the game changes and becomes better.
But it is too big and developers can't fix the bugs...


(Update)
After playing for several hours I decided to look at my first h-scene in this version...

Well...

I am sad.

Not only it became dull in gameplay and more unoptimized, but h-scenes now look awfull and textures bugout...
Why the hell did they change to UE5 if it became worse?!

Even quests are now not connected and feel useless.


The game wasn't "updated", it was "downdated"...

One of the best games Ive played, from f95. A lot of content, a lot of customization, and actual gameplay content that isn't adult themed. A genuinely good game with plenty of time you can spend either playing for the first time or repeating scenes.
Give. This. A. Try!

Insane game. Amazing graphic, nice fight, interresting quest.

Just one problem, animation cutscene ... Need more possibility, like sex sandbox as wild life with choice of position.

Im not into animal but this game sell it very well. I hope the best for creator

So many updates and still very limited in the aspects of sex, few not very great sex animations, static, bad camera angles and no free cam, facial expressions - do not exist, most NPCs will refuse to take big cock, belly bulging is inconsistent, one scene has internal view and that deserves tag? Please...
The 4.5 stars might have been good if this was first release but the game got several updates since the initial release and still feels like the initial release I played a while ago.
Traveling is slow since sprint is only slightly faster than regular walking animation, map has fast travel but it's still super boring, combat is basic, graphics are ok but the game lags during sex scenes on high end gpu, clearly something is not optimized, I'm guessing it's the depth of field, devs probably left the highest setting at some ridiculous value and it cripples frame rate to single digits (high end PC).
Story - I guess it has one, but not good enough to justify such high rating, even then, this is a sex game and it doesn't deliver in that aspect, EVERY NPC should be fuckable but with such limited, preanimated system there is no chance for this game to ever be something else than just glorified RPG with some sex in it.

lemme wax pretentious for a sec. games with boobs stapled onto them are not as interesting as games with natural boobs.

what the hell do i mean by this? well, in my mind, there are two kinds of h-games:

1. titles that absolutely could be serviceable, enjoyable indie games on their own, which happen to have sexual content of some sort that just floats around the main game.
2. titles that are designed to be about sex, where the sex is in some way woven directly into the gameplay.

granted! i am not trying to imply one is better than the other. i personally happen to prefer the second category, but i've had my share of phenomenal and awful experiences with both.

with that out of the way, carnal instinct is solidly in the first category, and good gravy, is it egregiously so.

carnal instinct is an open-world action RPG. it has dungeon crawling, single-target Souls-style stamina combat, quests, rudimentary base-building, and, of course, a crafting system. it tries and fails to execute most of these elements.

the open world is underpopulated, which could be a good thing, depending on how little combat you want to engage in. exploring is mostly pointless because getting within 50 feet of a lootable object activates the player character's MKULTRA conditioning and puts a little marker on the screen for you to walk at, and these caches are usually placed near other locations of interest, so there's no reason to go off the beaten path unless you have a quest marker off in the distance that your handler put there.

the dungeon crawling is, i think, intentionally gimped, so that you can't see more than 10 feet in any direction, obscuring how extremely linear the dungeons are and forcing you to spend more time in a dark, underground maze trying to figure out where the hell you're going and if you've already been that way once before getting stuck in between two rocks and having to reload a save. they also make you engage in combat.

the combat is not all that bad on it's own. yes, the player character handles like a drunk semi-truck, and the game's status as Perennially Unfinished Unreal Engine Porn Game means that the performance will do you zero favors there, but at least it's better than the dungeons. i just hope you like mashing mouse1 and throwing out the occasional parry like a beer can onto the freeway.

now, notice how in all three of the above elements, you can start to see a gameplay loop emerging. get a quest, go somewhere, kill some guys, maybe get asbestos in your lungs from cave air, turn in quest. sounds pretty reasonable, yeah? it would be, if this were a $5 student project ARPG on steam, but this is a sex game. where's the sex?

i already told you that i prefer games which try to marry gameplay and sexual content. the reason for that is simple: mood. take strip poker, for example. it's tense and more than a little exhibitionist. if you lose a hand of strip poker, you have to bear the embarrassment of getting naked, but being all exposed like that is fun in its own unique way. conversely, if you don't lose, you get to see other people naked. the goal is simple, the mood is established, bam: instant drunken afterparty classic.

carnal instinct's mood is all over the fucking place. everyone is walking around with their pussy out because of religion or something, and the voice acting is like something horrible mimicking a woman to lure you out into the open. the gameplay mostly revolves around the beige combat and walking around the overworld -- the unseasoned pasta of game mechanics -- before slapping you in the face with sex sometimes.

instantly, you go from gameplay that has been clinically proven to put small lab animals to sleep to labor-of-lust animations with care even in the camera movements. you pull down your pants and start crankin' it a little, but it's too late -- after the gameplay, nothing could get you going. the cognitive dissonance is just too much to bear. the worst part is, scene-wise, it's not all that bad! there are shitloads of them and they're professionally animated, even if they never show you the pussy because they haven't figured out how to make collision work properly down there.

i apologize if this review reads like the game killed my dog or whatever, but i'm just completely baffled at how such a high-effort project on the visual side of the things would deliberately design its gameplay to be just as unfun as its SFW counterparts while still being a sex game. something about it just does not compute.

in conclusion: they should put the sex scenes on e621 and bin the rest of the game. Would Not Recommend!

Game is very buggy, animations clip a lot, fighting system is bad, quests are uninspired and uninteresting.
Game sort of fakes a living world but in truth most of the game is quite empty. Most enemies are brainless. A lot of stupid jokes out of nowhere. You have several weapons, which are all lackluster and the fighting animations clip often. Combat can be easily abused and basically turns you into some kind of demigod. The scenes themselves clip a lot and are uneven. Content itself is all over the place, if you search for just regular intercourse you will be disappointed.
Its especially annoying that a lot of it is tied to your gender/form. So you have a lot of scenes either completely unavailable or they don't make sense.
The devs are amateurs and it shows. Overall I don't recommend it.
Overall I can't recommend it.

The lack of male character options is kind of cringe right now, I can only play a FUB in their 40s with a cartoony dick and cartoony dick physics.
I want to bone furry babes and be boned by hot fuzzy men, and look good doing so.
Combat is very mediocre right now. Frustrating bugs like being unable to obtain any new Elixirs of Life are kinda cringe. The amount of walking is kind of cringe.