[Written after a playthrough of v1.0.]
I was a bit confused as to what exactly this game was supposed to be, so I hestitated to download it at first. Ultimately, I'm glad I overcame that hesitation. I mean, hell, we've finally got a Chloe game where she can make it all the way to the finish line and become a cheerleader, actually grabbing that ever-receding goal that has been just on the other side of the latest dick for years! I was so chuffed when I saw that, how could I resist?
JUST CHLOE THINGS
This is a good Chloe game... and it is very much a Chloe game. Perhaps her final outing? If so, she goes out with a bang, pun intended, in this sequel to Fake Family and culmination of her quest. (Yes, BTW, it is clearly a sequel, contrary to attempts to describe it as a reboot, and no, it's not particularly concerned about continuity with the various other Chloe titles, although characters from those titles do show up.) But it very much has all the other earmarks of a Chloe title.
What I mean is that if you hated GDS' brand of humor in other games, if "grind" destroys your soul, if the constant misspellings and overall bad grammar distract you, if you don't like the way the renders or animations looked in previous titles... well, all of that is still here. Fair warning.
THE GOOD STUFF
What makes this a solid Chloe title is that if you liked all the lewd and kinky shit in the previous games, it's also here aplenty. The happenings of previous games aren't totally retconned out, and in fact everyone knowing Chloe's slutty rep ties directly into a bunch of side-stories -- and one strand of the main plot -- in the form of sexy female acquaintances who either want Chloe's help with their own slutty endeavors or want to learn from her how to be sluttier themselves in order to get their boyfriends to pay more attention to them. ("How tasteless!" you might be tempted to cry at this point, but come on. Do you really come to a GDS game looking for classy, subtle, feminism-friendly erotica? I know I don't.)
There are also some welcome quality of life improvements, especially in the form of a cheat menu that lets you just skip a great deal of the grind if you prefer to do that. I'm assuming there's more content yet to come after version 1.0 -- the nightclub isn't in the game yet, for example -- but there's plenty to do here and it has replay value after one playthrough. The sexual content is hot AF, and I'm not one of the people who has ever had a problem with how the renders look or how Chloe looks. In fact, apart from the fact everything about this concept ties into a "reluctance" kink that really fires me up, I think the renders and animations are among the biggest attractions of these games.
What really makes a difference is that this is the first Chloe game that can authentically answer to the label "Completed," meaning that finally, it is possible to play through the story from beginning to end. Having done this and seen Chloe's "bad" ending (or one of them, anyway), I'm actually curious to see what one of the "good" endings looks like.* For perhaps the first time in a Chloe game, it feels like there are genuine stakes beyond just making the main character into the sluttiest possible version of herself.
(* It turns out there's a "good" slutty ending where all Chloe's evil scheming against Taylor and "Fat"-Beth bears fruit. Another outcome it's fun to be able to finally see!)
A FEW DRAWBACKS
There are a couple of glitches still in evidence, albeit nothing outright game-breaking, and I'll admit I'm disappointed not to see more content for characters I've previously enjoyed, like Pizza Girl or the punk rock Tomgirl (does the latter even have a name?). And that fucking camgirl minigame... what is it with GDS and that camgirl minigame?! I don't know. I learned to kind of enjoy the Fake Family iteration, maybe I'll eventually manage the same with this one.
Those things, however, are all relatively minor gripes. They aren't what holds this back from being a five-star for me. What really costs it that final star is that, for a relatively simple game, this outing shows extremely poor performance. I'm literally running this on a gaming PC. It is still incredibly slow to load certain graphics or transition between menu items in certain situations. It almost feels like there's a slick, fancy fade or masking or transparency effect that's been integrated clumsily into the code and just isn't working well. There are also points where sex scenes seem to take forever to boot up (scene transitions in the glory hole are especially bad for this, to the point where I just found my attention wandering).
IDK, maybe this is something specific to my setup, as I haven't seen other reviews mention this issue. Be that as it may, it's always a mark off for me when the process of playing a game is drawn out just with waiting for shit to load, and I can't imagine what it would be like trying to run this on a less powerful machine.
OVERALL
On the whole, though, this is an incredibly good erotic game that shows off the signature addictive gameplay of the best Chloe titles, focused -- as it should be -- entirely on our winning heroine. This version of Chloe more than delivers on that X-factor that has made all of these games so special and so different from anything else. If this really is the end of the Chloe saga, it's a worthy and arousing way to wrap things up, and fans of prior Chloe titles should enjoy it.