I didn't really liked Depraved Awakening, previous game from this dev, it was pretty average for me, and before playing City of Broken Dreamers i was wondering whether this will be more of the same but with different setting or it will be something more interesting and just better all around. Unfortunately it's the first option.
City of Broken Dreamers proves yet again that darker themed stuff like crime, death and drama doesn't fit well with porn genre. It just doesn't work. Especially if nor the story, nor the characters are that good. Plot have some potential and combined with pretty interesting cyberpunk setting it should work but it doesn't. MC is being hired to find a girl and bring her back to his employer. We found her but we don't bring her back. So for the rest of the game story runs in circles, when we hide from our pursuiters, fight with enemies, search for the girl again because sometimes she just leaves us, change our hiding place cuz we're under attack and then fight some more. It's not really interesting, nor engaging. Characters are also not that great, some of the LIs are fine, some other are pretty bland and shallow. You don't really care about those people. Love interest selection definitely could be a lot better. Even my favourite girl was "only" 7/10 so she wasn't that great or anything. Some of the side girls seem to exist in the game only to provide sexual content. They lack some depth. This girl we have to find, why can't we just deliver her as contracted, get a paycheck and move on? This is supposedly a dark and not very pleasant world, so why we should care about some random girl, which is a pretty dangerous person, who could just end us anytime? We're doing our job, there is nothing wrong in that, right? Depending on our choices, we can try to take the girl back but that attempt fails, and we have to go through all this mess regardless (this also shows that our choices doesn't really matter), dragging all our friends and allies into danger. That is just not a reasonable thing to do. Second half of the game is definitely worse than the first. Game gets boring and uninteresting to play, writing is getting worse, dialogues get more and more skippable. At this point there is nothing in the game which would grab the player attention anymore. Endings are also very short and disappointing.
Render quality is pretty solid, with really good looking models, with some nice details on girls body. Animations are ok for the most part, but some of them are rather stiff, sometimes movement here and there looks very robotic and not natural. In some cases characters hands are in weird, unnatural positions. More polish would definitely be required here. In terms of sex scenes, its pretty common in porn games, that they're getting better with time, the dev improves over time but here sex scenes are getting worse later on. In the second half of the game, there is more sex scenes but they are shorter, and honestly pretty emotionless, without any passion. Also, there is no real diversity in those scenes, all of them pretty much look exactly the same. Only the girl and background changes. The previous game have issue with out of place sex scenes, here is a bit better but still, you're being chased, they could find you any moment and kill you and all your friends, but sometimes MC just randomlly bangs a girl among this mess. I don't know, there is very severe lack of intimacy and privacy in those scenes. Like, they are just a distraction for a MC, just a stress relief between other things. Some music is there, that's good but the music itself is nothing too crazy. Some sound effects but only during fights like explosions, shooting etc. Nothing during sex scenes.
Ultimately City of Broken Dreamers is a huge letdown. Promising story in interesting setting never reaching it's true potential, disappointing LIs, solid visuals and pretty ok sex scenes getting worse later on and finally unsatisfying endings. It's not a good game, it's below average. Definitely not worth 15 hours of playtime.