Unity - Cloud Meadow [v0.2.3.0f] [Team Nimbus]

  1. 2.00 star(s)

    thealucid

    This review is a bit of a long one. So I'll have a bullet point list of the pros at the top and a longer diatribe below describing the cons if you want to continue on.


    Pros
    • Graphics. Excellent artwork. Seriously good.


    Okay. That's it. If you're still here and want to continue on you've been forewarned. Strap yourselves in because the rest of the review is a bit of a doozy.


    Cons
    • Gameplay. Calling what this game has implemented a gameplay loop is like dragging your dick across broken glass and calling it a form of masturbation.
    I've been trying to put my finger on what it is about this game that makes it so unpleasant to play, and I think I've finally found the heart of it: the open world setting. I think the creators of cloud meadow saw how an open world setting is a hallmark of excellent, immersive, games and misunderstood the feature as some panacea for good gameplay. Without understanding that, as a gameplay feature, an open world setting is only enjoyable and compelling after a fuck ton of work has been put into it. This is true for games of enormous scope from TES, Fallout, and the Witcher 3, but it's also true of games on a much smaller scale like Stardew Valley. Because a poorly implemented open world setting will not only fail to immerse the player in the world, but will actively distract them from it.​
    This is because an open world setting in a fully visualized format requires the creators to spend undue time on making that world come to life. Where text or button interfaces allow the player to flesh out the minute details of the world with their imagination, here the creators need to show the environment living and breathing in this shared space with the player. Otherwise you get a travesty like Cloud Meadow.​
    The open world setting of this game feels like stepping through a shallowly painted set piece populated by mannequins, no matter how pretty or vivid those painted colors might be. I don't want to run through a lifeless town populated by static NPCs between several loading screens so I can dick off to another island devoid of animate life so I can get access to a barren dungeon.​
    It's not fun, and every step of the way makes me to stew on how dead the game's world is. Bluntly speaking, running through this game's open world setting feels like a colossal and aggressive waste of the player's time.​
    • Gameplay Part II: Dungeons. Wasting time going through a lifeless maze was pioneered by a Windows 95 screensaver, and should have stayed there.
    Maybe this is a matter of reality not meeting expectations, but I feel this game's dungeon would be so much more enjoyable if it was in a format akin to Darkest Dungeon. There's absolutely no reason for me to have to hold down a button so my character runs across an empty expanse for several screens, only to have to backtrack when I hit a dead end. This isn't fun. It's boring and immersion breaking. All it makes me think about is the other, less convoluted, avenues I could be pursuing to choke the bishop, spank the monkey, strangle the snake. I don't want to be sitting there, dick in one hand, holding down a button with the other.​
    There's also some serious rebalancing that needs to be addressed for the combat, it seems a soulless fight of attrition and one that doesn't encourage the player to waste time leveling up so it becomes more manageable. I'm not going to go into depth on how unpleasant the combat gameplay is, because I don't fully understand what makes the experience so grating, whether it's just time lag with the animations or whatever. But it's literally more enjoyable for me to avoid the combat altogether and hope I have enough life to survive the boss. Like I don't know how it was fucked up considering it's in such a classic RPG format, but it's there and it would be worthwhile for the creators to figure out what needs to be fixed.​
    • Gameplay Part III: Farming. Because what's a porn game without farming?
    Like I don't know if the devs wanted to create "Stardew Valley: Unrated and Uncut" or whatever, but this part of the game just sucks. Even the actual farming in Stardew Valley was a chore to get out of the way in the morning, aided only by the customizability of your plot of land. Fields could be turned into decorational devices, and the effort of customizing and maximizing your field layouts made the otherwise mindless effort of actual tilling and watering rewarding.​
    What Cloud Meadow implements for farming is something that has all the tedium of farming without any of the feeling of reward that Stardew Valley gave you. While the isometric format of the game certainly doesn't help when aiming your tools, having to till, weed, water, and plant in preallocated spots feels like a tacked on and useless part of the gameplay. Something there that only exists as a shunt to move you on to what everyone is playing the game for: breeding.​
    • Gameplay Part IV: Breeding. What we all played the game for, and what is so badly undelivered.
    I don't really want to go there, but the fact of the matter is Breeding Season looms large in the background of this game. I don't care or want to know the full story of what happened that brought that game to demise, but Breeding Season exists as a kind of precursor inspiration to Cloud Meadow and so comparisons between the two are somewhat inevitable.​
    Part of what made the breeding loop of Breeding Season enjoyable were traits your monsters carried. It's a bit of a Skinner box, but pulling the lever and seeing the traits or mutations the resultant offspring might have was fun. Seeing those traits you curated continue to improve and what their combinations might result in gave the player the same sense of reward one might achieve from finely pruning a bonzai tree. The UI was tailored to this aspect of the gameplay, it let you easily determine the traits of your breeding stock and go about determining your breeding pairs.​
    Additionally, the variety of these traits, and the visible impact some of these traits had (whether it made your monsters more bestial, or appear younger) gave the player many permutations of their breeding stock both to explore and fap to animation wise. While this would have been a likely obscene number of animations to make, it also focuses on the core aspect of the game: sexy animations for the player to get off to. This is the gameplay that would keep the player coming back for more.​
    The breeding in Cloud Meadow is only redeemed by its animation. First off: I don't know what genius thought it was a good idea to bury traits in some submenu you get when directly interacting with a single monster, but it's bad and they should feel bad. It impedes the breeding loop that should be driving a player to get more monsters. Secondly: the number of animations is just disappointing, I know the number is much more manageable compared to breeding season but this is solely what players come to see. As it is now, Cloud Meadow is feature complete for 'HD' breeding animations, and, sad though it is, I'm almost positive Breeding Season has more animations. This might be a bit of an unfair comparison though, as Breeding Season had about 4 sex animations for every possible breeding pair and trait permutations of the breeding pair, while Cloud Meadow has only 2 sex animations and it's only for breeding pairs including the player's character.​
    Let me reiterate this though: Cloud Meadow's breeding animations are basically finished. This is all the fappable content the player is likely to see, and given the audience of this game it's also the only thing players would be interested in.​
    The rest of the game might as well be so much window dressing.​

    Well, that's it for the review. I should probably write something about the story, but I was skipping through it so fast trying to get to the breeding section of the game that the only impression it managed to impart on me was that it follows the generic 'stranger in a new land' introduction. Trite, boring, nothing to write home about. The most positive thing I could say is that it's a comfortable trope, something you can relax into without thinking about it deeply. In broad strokes the setting is novel but I don't think it's enough to keep you there.

    Honestly speaking, if I could make only one suggestion to the devs for delivering an enjoyable playing experience, I'd tell them to at least work on stripping out the pointless fucking open world environment. Like, yeah, I can see you invested a lot of time into it and it looks very nice and pretty. But it's such an awful vehicle for delivering your gameplay experience that it coats everything you have in a fine layer of shit.
  2. M
    1.00 star(s)

    MistressAion

    After 4 years of development this game is still not worth playing, nor worth the money spent that people seem to be spending on it.

    It lacks story.
    It lacks fapping material which is highly important when making an adultgame.
    It lacks quality design, not art mind you, the art is amazing, but the over all design of the game is all over the place.
    Has too many mini games that serve absolutely no purpose.
    Long a** introduction.
    Long in-between updates w/ no real content added.

    The only thing this has going for it is the art. Game is 100% trash, not even worth the free download from f95zone and that's saying something.
  3. 1.00 star(s)

    Lucas Martinez

    I don' t like this game, at all. Firstly the story is bad, it is not engaging or compelling. Next, the gameplay is bad. And then the characters are boring. Also the art isn't too good either. The game has been in development for a very long time and yet it has not fixed its fundamental issues in years. Overall this game is not good
  4. 1.00 star(s)

    EPOC16

    This is what 20k a month in Patreon donations gets? Wow.... ignoring the drama that happened between them and a similar game...

    The art is good. The game play however.... its just bad. This game is clearly having an identity crisis as well. It doesnt know if it wants to be a breeder game, sim game, dungeon crawler rpg...

    I mean... if all your looking for is a quick and dirty fap then use the gallery code and go to town. If your looking for an interesting game to dump some time into playing, either forget about this or come back in... looks like maybe a year and see if things have progressed much.
  5. 1.00 star(s)

    Tach

    The only good part of this game is the art assets while everything else is either an extremely subpar imitation of a better game or has incredibly poor ui design that it's essentially not usable. Also a lack of even a single text file that explains what each thing should do and what to do makes any issues you might have even worse as there are barely any 3rd party resources to help figure out if something has broken on the player's end or if it's 'intended' to be so broken at the moment.

    Wait maybe 3 or 4 years on this, it might be an actual product that has something beyond art asset value. Or it might be as dead as breeding season. Depends on how the devs decide to milk.
  6. 3.00 star(s)

    Asia Argento

    Functional at least, but suffers from development hell due to devs that are very slow to update outside of Patron posts... last post mention wasting time on the dungeon when its already too big given they need a better emphasis on farming, the H and more. Seems like they are unsure of what they want to be. Is this hentai Stardew or no? Nimbus needs to decide.
  7. 2.00 star(s)

    kujaku

    They sure have no idea where are they going, they started with a breeding system, cultivation and upgrading, but then they went for dungeons + exploring, and now they are going for pet battles... they leave things half done and i don't even know what this game is about anymore.
  8. 2.00 star(s)

    krantos

    Was a Patreon supporter of this game for over year before pulling my support.

    To be clear, 100% of the 2 stars the game gets is due to the breeding animations. Simpy put they are some of the best I've seen. The Female PC v Male Wolf one in particular is incredible.

    The problem is, that's the only good part of the game, and its clearly the part the developers are no longer interested in.

    Cloud Meadow is a poster child for the dangers of Feature Creep. Had the devs simply focused on making a great breeding game by expanding the mechanics, making it more robust, and adding additional goals and milestones, it undoubtedly would be the best example of the genre.

    However, the devs got too big for their boots, as it were. Instead the game is hamstrung because they also tried to jam in a Farming Game and a Dungeon Crawler. The problem is, none of it is particularly good.

    Sure, its adequate. But its bland. There are a ton of games that do everything they're trying to do with those systems better. If you want to play a farming sim, play Stardew Valley. If you want a dungeon crawler, throw a fucking dart at the Steam Store and you'll find a better one than Cloud Meadow.

    But there simply isn't a Breeding Sim that's half as good as Cloud Meadow could be if they focused on that.

    I suspect the devs simply got caught up in their own hype. They saw the support their game was getting, and thought "Hey I bet we can make a legit game." Unfortunately, they failed to realize what it was about their game people liked and now put all their effort into completely the wrong things.

    I wish Cloud Meadow would some day become the game it could have been. I just don't think it ever will, now that the devs have lost their focus.
  9. 5.00 star(s)

    Darx239

    This is one of the best breeding game right now it has a great potential and the graphics in this game are awsome and the animations are so smooth it's a really great game to spend time on but it's still has a very long way to go and i really hope that they don't drop this like the breeding farm
  10. 2.00 star(s)

    TheInternetIsForThis

    Review as of v0.0.3.17a

    If I had to sum this game up in a few words, it would be: Fundamentally flawed.

    Playing two-handed:


    There's a lot to cover here, so I'll break it up by location.

    First, the farm. Crops are clearly an afterthought for this game. They exist largely because the setting is a farm, and their mechanics reflect that. You weed out bad crops, plant good crops. Water the crops once per day. Harvest them when done. Rinse, repeat. While this isn't inherently bad, it also never gets better. There are no days off, because not watering crops lets them die. There are no shortcuts, you need to water every single crop individually, every time. And you can't even carry enough water for a single field. You would hope that would be offset by the primary mechanic and selling point of the game, but...​
    The breeding mechanic is lackluster at best. You pick one of your charges and choose to either breed with them yourself, or breed them with another of your charges. The animations are well handled (and the art is the only reason I didn't give this game just one star), but the end result of the breeding is that you get an animation and an egg to hatch. The egg hatches into one of the parent types at random (or in the case of the player being the parent, whatever the other contributor was). At which point you have another charge to feed and breed, who while supposedly sentient will do nothing but sit around waiting for you to either tell them to get it on or take them out on a dungeon run.​
    Speaking of dungeons, this game's dungeon is surprisingly lacking. It's a mystery dungeon setup where each "room" is a floating island you can jump to and from. A room will contain 0-2 lootable objects and 0-1 encounters/interactive objects. The loot you can obtain is minimal compared to the effort and time spent wandering the dungeon itself, and the lack of variance in the dungeon's rooms turns it into a monotonous, samey slog all the way through.​
    The battle system is interesting, and worth exploring further. However, it is inherently unbalanced and you'll quickly find yourself settling into a routine where you just use precisely the same moves in the same order while waiting for the battle to be over. Maybe taking a moment to ogle the characters on the field in the process.​
    Speaking of characters, there is the town. Visually, it's quite interesting. The characters are varied, the buildings and setting are eye-catching. Unfortunately, the cast of characters you find in town could charitably be described as animated cardboard cutouts. They have no depth and exist specifically to fill their functions and act as various forms of eye candy.​
    In terms of more basic, overall portions of the game. The movement is too slow compared to the scale of the maps, making even taking care of farm fields or exploring the dungeon more of a chore than it needs to be. The music is light and catchy, but nothing about it stands out. The only standout aspect of the game is its artwork and animation, which leads to the section below.​

    Playing one-handed:

    Just unlock the gallery and use that instead.​
    What would I do next, as a developer?

    I would start with the core mechanics, centered on the farm and moving out. First would be handling the crops, which need to have a long term improvement in caretaking to make them a viable source of play and profit. This can be achieved the following ways:​
    • Add properly improved ways to water crops, that allows the daily chore to pass more quickly.
    • Add rarer/higher end crops that are more valuable
    • Add recurring crops where the base plant produces multiple fruit over time.
    • Allow your charges to help with the farm's upkeep, which would also improve their apparent worth to the player. This is an especially valuable feature if that means you can see them wandering around the farm to take care of it.
    In terms of your charges and the breeding system, that's a complex knot that the developer already clearly has some plans for, per promotional materials. It would appear that there is some sort of growth/evolution system planned, which already clearly integrates into battle. Beyond that, I would:​
    • Integrate more visual variations. The game already has a system in place for this, including for animations being played. I would take advantage of this to add multiple patterns and, if reasonable, additional body shapes.
    • Properly incentivize breeding. There appear to be plans in this department, where you would breed to order and/or sell off excess offspring. I would recommend also potentially allowing this to play into the combat system, where you can try to breed abilities together to create an "ideal" battler of some description.
    In terms of the dungeon, it's a complex problem. However, the solution is less difficult than you might think:​
    • Vary the dungeon's appearance. Break up the base island graphics into pieces, and create variants of the same pieces that get picked via seed. Follow that up by taking the same approach to the decorations on the islands themselves. A little bit of (non-colliding) clutter goes a long way.
    • Properly incentivize exploration. Perhaps rare variants can only ever be found in the wild. Increase the item/gold rewards. Maybe add some proper gatherable objects in the dungeon that sell for enough to make gathering worth your while.
    • Math out the battle system. Currently the variety is interesting but ultimately useless. The lack of balance means that you'll find yourself using only a few specific moves as soon as they're ready. Ideally this would be counterbalanced by variable effectiveness (for example, edged attacks might work better against something with thin fur/no fur than something that has a thick coat of fur.) However, carefully considering cooldown versus damage/healing/effect is something that should be done for every battle move in the game.
    For the town, the problems run deep but are potentially some of the easiest to solve. The characters all have purposes. (which should be balanced against changes made to the game) What the characters lack is, well, character. Basically, making the town interesting and compelling beyond the player needing to be there boils down to actually filling in the characters. Give them schedules, dialogue, interaction, relationships with each other and the player. Special events, holidays, etc. Let things happen, and turn the caricatures into people.​
  11. 1.00 star(s)

    kav33

    Absolute trash that furries are supporting for some unknown reason lol, the game might be complete and decent by 2030, it's been years and the game is still a holo alpha of nothingness, little empty world with a few scenes, basic boring fights thrown in, no actual story or anything to do except the most basic of 'farming'
  12. 1.00 star(s)

    Dmitopur

    scam about donations. great support monthly and no(no=supermiserable) progress for a long period of time (more than 2 years). each update brings only bugs and 95% of updates is bugfixing or adding new notes in loading screen. ofc few scenes were added, but who cares, since they r buggy and most part of the game just doesnt work. not cool at all =/
  13. 2.00 star(s)

    Khime

    The only reason i'm giving 2 stars is because of the art, because pretty much the rest is terrible. There are tons, and i mean TONS of bugs, gameplay is lame, and the story does not deliver. Considering the time the game is in beta and the money they are making per month, this is unnaceptable. It's a shame, really.
  14. 1.00 star(s)

    giraffe69

    I have been waiting and waiting for years to make this review hoping they will change for the good but i guess something never changes no matter how much time passes.
    Good:
    1. The animations
    2. The fighting is interesting. Characters have their own moves so you can make teams and see how they work together.
    3. The open world has a lot of details
    Bad:
    1. The controls are still bad.
    2. The open world looks good but you really can't interact with a lot of characters or explore a lot of places.
    3. There really isn't that much of a story. Nothing interesting or exciting that will make you wanna play more and more.
    4. Bugs, bugs and more bugs.
    My final thoughts:
    For a game that started after breeding season in which most of the things were done perfect and the fans loved the game i really can't understand how they can f it that much. Even after so many years the game still goes after many paths but never focuses long enough on one of them. The development started on "2016" but the game has so little content or to say them spending time on a content that nobody would expect them to spend time on. They bring updates like every 12 days or less but when you see what it is on them you can see that most of it is fixing bugs and bringing 1 or 2 new things that bring nothing to the game for me that is like " hey we have a lot of bugs to fix so we will add one new small detail and call it update". For a game that has a team working on it with over 19-20k$ it sure has a lot of bugs. It's like "they are leaving them purposely so they can look like they are working on the game hmmmm" A lot of people are saying a lot of stuff about the money or the updates but if you go and look into other developers and their games you can see that they work on much smaller budget with a team of 2-3 people and they bring so much into every update they release. Nobody cares if updates come every 12 days or they take up to 2 months what people care is what does the update bring to the game. One game can release a new update after couple of months but give so much content but this game can bring 10 updates and give 1% content which is true. Maybe that is why most people just want the code for the gallery and then they leave. If things go on like this let's just say the future will not be bright.
  15. 4.00 star(s)

    Dieselheart

    Best selling point of this game is its art- it's really good.
    As for gameplay... Well, game had lots of problems and was in barely "launchable" state for a long time, but as of recent available version(0.25e) it is finally not some mess filled to the brim with bugs, but an "early build of a game", definetly playable and, beside a couple of bugs, none of which(unlike previous builds) were gamebreaking for me, even enjoyable..
  16. 2.00 star(s)

    Taak

    I give this game two stars rating only because it has great SafeFW art and design. If not for it I would have given it only one star rating. Let me explain my reasoning behind such a low rating.

    First let me just briefly mention that I'm not a patreon of this project simply because I remember what happened to the previous project that the Lead of this one has worked on.

    The main issue that I see with this game is that on the Patreon page they state that the "Total Completion" is at 66%. But the version of the game is 0.0.3 at this stage. So it just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

    But OK lets just imagine that it is not a significant issue and is misleading, but let us look at the game itself. It was pitched by the lead as a better version of Breeding Season, there were lots of drama etc. Since than almost 4 years has passed and this game is not even near to what BS was. It tries to be a dungeon crawler more than anything else, but that the most boring part of it. It is not engaging in any way. It is not challenging. It is not fun. It is just time consuming.

    Animations and all NSFW stuff is there, but you wont find much of it. And it does not really play any role in this game. You can successfully crawl through dungeons with characters that are set in the story without any need to breed some incredibly powerful companion.

    I really don't see any point in wasting more time in this game. The art design is really good, but everything else and the design decisions in everything else are just poorly made.
  17. 2.00 star(s)

    DeadlyFood

    Kinda broken, still in beta which is fine I guess but some stuff is game breaking if it's a bug, or poorly explained if it's not a bug. Probably won't be playing this game until it's refined a lot more. The animations are fantastic but the game itself has a lot of issues.
  18. 4.00 star(s)

    chubchub330

    While the game certainly has its bugs it's to be expected from a new release. What i'm excited about is the excellent art direction, and the creative nature and ideas of the developers is expressed in a fun and interesting art style to boot! I have high hopes for this game and will be following it closely, as the porn is good but I enjoy the mechanics just as much (when they work). Awesome shit produced by the devs and I look foward to the next release!
  19. 1.00 star(s)

    Gorgolock

    Extremely boring gameplay that has top-notch animations. Development "seems" fast, when in all actuality it's the slowest development out there for the sheer amount of money people keep putting into it. There is waaayy too much going on in the game... like beyond too much you can get lost just trying to find your way around. If you don't have a higher end computer this will be very slow, unless it's just slow for everyone. Have to rate 1/5 because ever since branching off from Breeding Season and creating a whole shit ton of drama, this game is nowhere near the playability of Breeding Season which was made in less time, and fewer funds before it took notice. Yeah, this looks SIGNIFICANTLY better, but not worth wasting your time to download until they complete the game. Right now it's only v0.0.2.5, that's a very very very very small version number for the sheer amount of time they have had to work on the game. Once again, don't waste your time downloading a 7 trillion gb game. If you want the scenes or something then try to find some.

    For the staff looking at this, my review isn't about the developer or pricing, but the pricing and speed at which they release is apart of this to not give hopes to those wanting fast releases with actual content. The review is mostly about the game itself.
  20. 1.00 star(s)

    jaevulen

    Boring gameplay that tries to be too many things at once without being particularily good at any of them. the dungeon crawling is tedious and repetitive, the farming is superficial and the sex animations are only as a side bonus to the game in general. almost like the developers are hoping to get backing for this game through promise of sex to later just make a sexless version for steam. The animations are very well made. thats it.