VN - Ren'Py - Completed - College Bound [v0.6.16] [FOZ]

Review based on version v0.5.08. I'm gonna be honest with no intentions to be offensive to dev but the writing is just awful, from the start we know we are not going to get a story driven game and play a straight porn game but this game is for those people that don't care about writing and control though just to appreciate the visuals.

Good stuff: There´s a big cast and variety of models.

Bad stuff: The main deal breaker for me is the MC, my god hes insufferable, his dialogues and inner thoughts are just constant innuendo and cheap sex jokes, he comes of like a psychopath that literally cant hold a single normal conversation without making a deviant sex remark (Even when you are in a faithful relationship).
There´s no story and that could be fine but the game keeps constantly trying to force the characters on you with poor dialogues and bad writing overall to the point where you HAVE to sit and read trough how badly you want to fuck x character even when you have deny it multiple times because x character isn't interesting to you.
Characters personality are overall bland and they all mostly have similar faces but with different features tho overall its mostly big breasted woman, personally i disliked models (i liked 3 of them) but this is subjective and everyone would probably at least 1 character to their liking.

TL;DR: I would rate this game a 3/10, i cant recommend it to anyone, its not a good story driven game and also its not a good porn game since you are forced to read a wall of poor written dialogues and MC nonsensical psychopathic behavior and thinking.

Just finished the lastest update(first time playing) and I must say this game, like The Miz would say is AWESOME. The renders of all the women show their imperfections like veins, stretch marks and all those other good things. The animations run smoothly and I'm playing on a shitting windows tablet. The story is great. The only con I have is sometimes the story moves too fast for me and summer is the worst.

From starting this game you can tell the dev has alot of passion and a focus for quality. Story is unique and interesting, even something small like the home dynamic of living with an aunt is refreshing after playing so many games with mother and two sister homes. General dialogue is good with an interesting range of characters and personalities.

The negatives and what stops me giving this 5 star is sometimes the "sexy" dialogue is abit much. At times it ruins the moment of a sex scene when someone is screaming about "meat missiles", "thunderbags" or "sheath that blade in my scabbard". I dont know if this is supposed to be comedy or sexy talk but for me personally it does nothing.

It gets a huge penalty from me for the choice in models and rendering.
So many regrettable choices in there..

60 percent are a hard no and some if not most of them you aren't allowed to avoid interacting with it seems.

There's a few in there that are ok including mc's GF.

Writing is OK

Just overall not much to recommend it.

Had the potential to become a really good game (4-5 stars) with more polish - up until last update (2-2,5 stars) - 3 stars because of how much fun I had up until now.

This review aims at trying to determine whether the mistake - at least imo - made with the latest update, devalues the game as a whole.

First the pros:
- Great character visuals
- varied cast
- decent story up until the latest update

Cons:
- animations are stiff
- not many options to choose from in the actual animated scenes
- story feels rushed and not fleshed out at some points (the "trial" is a perfect example)

Now to the mistake which broke the entire premise of the game - at least for me.

Do you like games which give you freedom of choice? Do you love to be the one who chooses the characters they want to interact with and the ones you don't?

Well, you shouldn't play College Bound then. Up until the latest update, the illusion of freedom was still intact. Freedom of choice is of course always an illusion, as the creator of a game still holds all the strings in their hands - but keeping up that illusion is important.

If you as a player have the feeling, that your decisions matter and you actually have a say in how the story goes - or at least ends - the game captivates. On the other hand, if you break the illusion, people tend to feel disappointed, cause their decions don't matter in the end.

And that's exactly what happened with the latest update. Miranda is a character which was introduced right at the beginning of College Bound and players get the choice to sexually interact with her or ignore her. So far so good. If you don't want to, you don't have to engage with her.

Let's assume you DON'T want to interact with her and maybe even dislike the character. Good news for you, your choice is taken into account by the developer.

Let's assume you WANT to interact with her, cause you like her for whatever reason. Bad news for you, cause no matter what decisions you make throughout the game, the developer decided to get rid of her for good. You don't have the option to keep her around and maybe even aim for an ending involving the main character and her.

This is the exact moment the illusion is torn apart. If my preferences and choices don't matter, you can take away the option to choose in the first place.

Deciding to get rid of a character for whatever reason, may it be out of convenience or not wanting to develop a character any further, is the death blow in interactive formats like games with the premise and promise of player freedom of choice.

Sidenote:
The fast and rushed trial feels like the developer wanted to get rid of Miranda asap (can't imigine the reason though). During the trial there's absolutely zero information about what actually happened and what the actual evidence was.

Now if you like Summer or Blanca, you will propably get exactly the ending you are dreaming of. Either you will be with the one or the other in the end. Or maybe both of them.

If you like any of the other girls, you will probably be disappointed by the end of the game, cause they are most likely only requisites in the play which is essentially centered around Summer and Blanca.

The decision to take out a character despite the choices a player made, is no good sign for the future of this game. As a writer, you probably should avoid introducing characters (including choices about what to do with them) just to throw them away sooner or later. Just don't let the player interact with characters, you want to get rid of later on. This way people won't get the false impression of being able to reach an ending with them.

TL/DR: Taking Miranda out of the game, despite what the player chooses is a devastating move in regards to upholding the illusion of freedom of choice.

Wouldn't be surprised to see some patrons (especially the Miranda enthusiasts) jump ship after this update.

Nonetheless I wish the developer luck with this and future projects.

PS: Removing the only character which is at least somewhat of an antagonist wasn't a wise choice either.

Really like this game. The story and graphics are decent. The updates are fast and while I don't download each time ( I like to wait for more playtime) it's great not having to wonder when the next update is

I wasn't too impressed at first, but I decided to give it a go, and here I am, 5 hours later. Judging by gallery I'm somewhere halfway through the content available in 0.5.03 and I'm not going further.

Graphics and renders are pretty nice, no complaints there.
Sex scenes are acceptable, but also nothing special - really short, mostly it's just 1-2 simple animations. Don't get me wrong, quality wise they're good, but I'd really want to see them getting longer. I liked vulgar dirty-talk tho, more please!

What I didn't like, is the MC.
Narration tries to present him as a strong, intelligent and dominating character, yet somehow, more times than not, he cames out as a fucking twat and a future sex offender constantly talking to himself about his "big, throbbing, fucking meat-missile".
I like this kind of talk during sex scenes, but reading awkward sex remarks in almost every casual conversation isn't arousing, it's repulsive and it makes him look like a retard. Stop writing about it, Dev, just make a goddam sex scene.
I understand this is game's way to tell me I'm going to fuck this chick - but again, it's a porn game, I am very well aware that I'm going to be fucking all of them.

And overall there's too much "narrative" and "your thoughts" blaberring. At some point I just stopped reading these and my experience actually improved, so... yeah.
If writing would be better, I'd give it 4.5-5/5.
I think this game has potential, maybe I'll even get back to it at some point to check how it developed. Good luck!

I liked this game when it first came out and then after a few release, I thought it was a little silly and kind of steriotypical. Plus, I was not a fan of the "weekly" updates. They were just too small, but I did appreciate the effort. Anyway, I stayed away from the game for a while, but the dev kept producing and the ratings stayed high so I thought I would give it another chance and I am glad I did.

My favorite thing about this are the women. They have original looks and the dev has tried to go with real shapes. The dev makes the MC a guy who appreciates all women and I dig that. He finds something attractive about all the women and he is not overly selective about where he dips his wick.

The story is unique, and I like the way the dev handled the MC's primary LI. There is a decent amount of content, but all the interactions are a bit short and they all basically follow the same pattern. Additionally, the story is nothing earth shattering. I did not get invested in any of the characters, but all the LIs are interesting. The drama is typical HS/College stuff. The MC is obviously surprised he is suddenly getting so much action, which is weird, but the dev goes all in on this concept and it works.

I also don't understand the replay gallery. What is that? They are just animation clips with no setup, context or dialogue and others are just images. Strange.

Also, the renders are just okay. The dev does a lot where the characters are all rendered on top of the scene rather than in the scene. I know this is a way to improve render speed, especially if you have a moderate rig and in this case, the dev wants to crank out the updates, but it always takes me out of the story.

Yet despite all the shortcomings, I found myself doing a couple of different play throughs to see what happens. I found the different paths to be pretty good and while not crazy different, the subtle changes were good and felt right. When I finished, I found myself wondering what was going to happen next and looking forward to the next update.

Bottom line? The devs hard work and passion for the project, make up for any short commings. It would be cool to see what they could do with a highend rig and some help with the language, although they do pretty well considering.

It's worth a download.

By playing a game where choices are supposed to matter, I have no choice but to watch the MC choose taking a random phone call instead of having sex with his beautiful girlfriend for the first time? Bad MC.
Edit: i understand bad MCs in AVN, but i would like to have at least a choice, here...
In all honesty, i felt most of the time i was just reading a story rather than play a game. If the story was really interesting, it would not be a bother: we read novels all the time.
Nothing can give you a better time than good visual matching good music and there is a lack of both, but for me the worst was the music timing.
Granted, most games have a hard time to understand the importance of music and its matching with the visual, rythm, tension, etc.
And the music is out of place, everywhere. Not in rythm with the scene; often absent; then it's there for some seconds but do not go with the flow of the visual/text.

Definitely there is also something to be said about the plot. The game starts with a single "try to get what was expected" but it's resolved in like the 5 first "choices" of the game and after that it's a pure sex trip.
It's not very interesting to play someone whom every girl wants at first glance. But I would accept it if it was somewhat justified in the plot; i didn't find any acceptable justification.
Knowledge being king, i think you may either love it if you are in for a "many sex scenes with varied women" type of game. It has its merit.

Wow this is an all around great game! So many different options as well as great character development and tons of high quality animations. Wow I was honestly shocked this game has the most animation scenes in a game I have ever played. Well done dev! Highly recommend! Can't wait for more updates!

Animations & assets are all original & the story is interesting & has multiple paths for fans of differing stories

I have to say this is a great game with characters with more depth than the average game of this type, honestly there were 1 or 2 characters I despised at the beginning but the quality of the writing is really good & gives even the more unlikable characters a lot of depth & hopefully more as the updates drop, Hell the character I hated most at the beginning of the game is slowly becoming my favourite character in the entire game lol.

Re-Review

Its a shame but I have had to knock 2 Stars off my original review, as the updates for the game came out that character I "Hated" became my favourite has been all but taken out of the game, there is no way to stop what happens to her character sadly & that takes away from the whole choices having meaning in these games in my opinion.

Version Played: 0.412
Time to Complete: Roughly 6 hours for all content

While not really new from a setting perspective (dude in college with a magic dick who bones everyone while other men are only notable in their utter absence) this game does a good job of having an actual plot in addition to a setting. Said plot is simple, but effective, and keeps the game from turning into purely scene after scene of sex. The dialog writing is fairly decent as well, however it suffers from a bit of sameiness in how everyone talks and the fact that everyone is always on. By that, I mean everyone seems to always be there with a quip or a witty response and it feels unnatural--particularly since it's the same across all girls regardless of age and established personality.

Positives
+ Great selection of ladies with varied ages, body types (that are realistic!) and races. Honestly, the game knocks it out of the park in this aspect and gets a recommend for that alone.
+ Clear goal and progression in the story
+ No grind!!!!

Negatives
- Dialog writing, while generally strong, is a bit same-y across all characters. Also, for descriptions, if I read about dude's "turgid" cock one more time, I'm gonna scream. (Turgid isn't really a synonym for "hard" or "throbbing.")

Another issue I have with the game is that, while the MC has a girlfriend with compelling issues and their relationship is supposed to be driving the plot, there is absolutely no incentive to be faithful to her. As a sex game, the player is going to naturally want to bang whoever they can and the writing isn't strong enough nor focused enough on THEIR story on the micro-level to make the player want to remain faithful. Accordingly, I'm more interested in just ditching her whenever I can so I can crush ass elsewhere.

Finally, there is one scene with a character who is a lesbian who gets convinced to try some dick. I don't really think it works quite like that and it felt kind of insensitive, but I'm guessing most people won't really take issue.

Note to Devs: Thank you for the fantastic game! I'm not sure how much more there is to go with the story, but definitely try to find ways to distinguish the girls in their dialog to make the interactions more natural. Also, and this might be a tall order, but see if you can add more stakes to the Summer relationship, since atm, I would much rather just smash my way through the city than try to forge something with her.

Wait, so in a game where choices are supposed to matter, we have no choice but to watch the MC choose taking a random phone call instead of having sex with his beautiful girlfriend for the first time? Yeah, fuck this Protag. Really wish we had a choice in the matter.

The game clearly wants to sway you into cheating since every girl but the GF (and like, Willow, but at least she has the goth aesthetic) is busty and shapely. Which is fine, I enjoy the temptation, but most of the chicks are MILFs, which isn't my thing personally.

The sex scenes and animations are really good, probably the best part of the game, but I wasn't digging any of the chicks, so they didn't appeal to me as much as they would to others.

Honestly, I just lost all interest in playing as the MC, after the Failed Summer first time scene.

I feel like, if you're gonna make a VN where choices are supposed to matter, let the player take full control.

Edit: Decided to give this game another chance, and while I enjoyed my playthrough more the second time around, holy shit, is the MC one of the most unlikeable characters I've ever played as.

Either the dev is attempting to write about topics beyond their capabilities (i.e. mental illness) or they are intentionally writing everyone to be total assholes.

MC finds out about his GF's mental health issues, and he immediately responds by picturing another woman naked. What? If I'm on a Summer loyalty route, shouldn't he feel a shred of empathy for her?

Honestly feels like Summer's "issue" was forced in to make the player dislike her even more and go toward the other LIs.

I honestly feel bad for her.

Game is still a hard pass.

The characters design and graphics are really different from all the other VNs out there but still decent, but that's all there is to it... The story is especially stupid and the characters are really dumb... It is a good fap but if you care about the setting and story and characters of a VN avoid at all costs cause it is really dumb... All in all an extremely overrated game

a bit of a downer to be honest

it feels liek the choices you make have very little consequences and your dont really build anything with the character's you meet.

What is the plot of this again?

also, if one is to cum inside a woman, that is supposed to get her pregnant right?

This is one of the few games that I enjoyed enough to write a review on, the renders are good, not amazing, and the story is good, but not amazing, however if you are into dominance, and some slight revenge this is great as you are able to get "pay back" on a few annoying characters in the game which is great.

I like most of the character models, they are a little more realistic with not everyone being a 10/10 gorgeous, but many have good bodies ie. big breasts, but along with the big breasts they are more "curvy" too, which is a lot more realistic than the big breasted really thin girls that are normal on the site, its a nice change of pace, but Hopefully doesn't become the norm. Too much of anything makes it boring.

I really like the issues of the main Love Interest, you can see her changing slowly as the game progresses which is really cool, and you can see the impact that your bad actions are slowly having on her.

Models/renders 4/5, story 3.5/5, fetishes/sex scenes 5/5, dialogue, 5/5 overall a 4.5/5 rounded up since the Dev is active and i liked the VN! Also, pay attention to tags, this has cheating in it, where you cheat on your GF if you don't like it, stay away instead of doing the classic, HEY I SAW THIS HAS CHEATING AND PLAYED IT AND IT HAS CHEATING, 1 star reviews.

Great VN. I won't bother going over the story nor the kinds of entertainment you should find within as the Overview and the tags should let you know what to expect, despite the many one-star reviews further down from people who can't read well apparently. Just a hint, if cheating triggers you, don't play games with the cheating tag. I'm not the biggest fan of BDSM(although I'm ok with light applications of it), I'm not searching out clearly labeled and tagged BDSM games and then leaving one-star "well labeled and tagged BDSM game has BDSM, one star" reviews.

Speaking to the game's actual quality, this is actually a great VN. There's a lot to love especially if you like curvier women and there's quite a lot of variety. There's pretty fast pacing so you're never too far from the next scene. In order to keep up this pace, there is a little of the ol "every girl sees bulge and drops panties" kind of setup but overall not too absurd/heavy-handed with it, especially for the needs of the adult VN audience. We don't always have time for a 3 hour wank session so it's nice to have some faster-paced options out there.

The animation isn't the greatest I've seen but it's pretty good, has options within the scene that are a click away and there's a lot of scenes already in this game.

The story is pretty solid, mostly focused on cheating, not out of cruelty but the inability to resist temptation. We are talking an adult VN, so no Peabodies getting handed out but in an ocean of machine translated and/or English as a third language stories, it's refreshing to read dialogue that's at least at a high school level. There's a number of VNs that I read at first but eventually, just start clicking through without reading anything. The story for this one really helps enhance the scenes. In addition, there are branching paths but they're the good kind that you don't see too often, AKA where the choices you make are superevident and more so to let you dictate what characters you actually want to see scenes for. Like, person X asks protag if they're cool with banging and if you like the character, you choose yes and if you don't, you say nah.

Overall, I highly recommend if you're into the tags that the game is clearly labeled as.

*EDIT* Removed a star because the game is losing quality and the story is going nowhere (removed another star)

I´m surprised! It is actually very good! Right now there arent any real branches and choices are few too. But the writing is funny and good and is getting better! Don´t make stupid comparisons based on the name! College Bound is one of the best VNs around.

Version is v0.4.02.

Renders are decent. Though the VN introduces multiple girls, the game is biased towards several of them; some of the unluckier ones introduced earlier don't even have lewd events yet.

There are like a total of 2 confirmed virgins in the game, one of them you can't fuck yet, and the other Fine if you like only MILFS, disappointing if you like girls that are pure.

Story is misleading. To be honest,
Anyways I'm dropping this VN unless this plot point is either removed or solved, but solving this plot point (instead of outright removing it) would be extremely difficult to do as this is presumably a modern day setting with no magic and no sci-fi level tech.

This is a really cool game.

The renders are beautiful and the characters are rather well written. The story is easy to follow and every scene, every dialogue serves a purpose.

I do feel MC can be fleshed out a little bit more. In regards to Summer, at times he is loving and remorseful, while other times he is callous. The best example of this is when he finds out what might be going on with Summer at Sina's party. If MC loved her, his knees would have buckled, his breaths would have been shorter and harder to inhale. He would have felt something really cold in his chest, keeping him from being able to say a word. His only thought would have been to hold her as tight as he can, hoping it might keep her from slowly slipping away. Instead, MC starts wondering about Anna's big ass tiddays.

Overall, this is a good game and the dev(s) seem competent. Hopefully they demonstrate a bit of sensitivity if they are going to stick with this storyline for the FMC.