A bit of a rollercoaster ride.
Some parts of CK are extremely well done, others ... not so much.
Ever since the dawn of visual-novel time, there's been tags for "school" and "slice of life", and those two already describe most of CK rather well.
Early on (and judging by the title), school (or rather university/college) appears to be the dominant tag, but as the game progresses, it quickly becomes clear the slice of life tag governs more content.
That's neither good nor bad by itself, unless you were actively looking for a game heavy with school content.
After the gargantuan download, one might expect breathtaking visuals and a huge amount of content. In a way, that's also the case.
The renders mostly high quality, although a ton of them are grainy, something you might not expect (and I have a hard time understanding, it's not that hard to get rid of grain in Daz Studio).
Asset selection is a bit uneven, especially when it comes to environments, something I've been noticing in a few games recently, but probably because I dabbled a bit in DAZ myself. It can be hard to find exactly what you are looking for, I'm familiar with the difficulty, but some low-poly assets really stick out like a sore thumb, especially when most things are on the better side of the spectrum.
Anyway, where it matters most, in terms of the "actors", I have hardly any complaints. Lots of familiar faces (popular Genesis 8 characters), but also a few nice surprises. A strong point overall, minus the grain.
There's few animations, and I felt there were fewer and fewer as the game progresses, but those that are there are - especially early on - outstanding.
The music is okay and besides that there's hardly anything, except some occasional ambience sounds. Nothing to write home, but also nothing to complain about.
As for the story itself, as I mentioned above, it starts rather college centric, but then heavily digresses and keeps meandering in all sorts of directions.
There's a pretty large amount of content, but many, many plotlines are opened, and I'm not sure there's any point to it all. The game appears to be developed like a soap opera on TV, every update includes whatever content came to the authors mind at the time, with the occasional "arc" running several updates. There's some impacful decisions, but sometimes it appears the story goes on randomly afterwards. A few things make no sense whatsoever - for example you can be with a girl for the first time and she tells you her boyfriend, and then there's no more content for her for several in-game weeks, and afterwards, she's treating you as if you were just casual friends. I can understand juggling the impact of decisions can be hard, but if you're not willing to follow through, maybe it'd be better not to have a certain option in the first place?
Also, the romance options seem to be pretty disconnected from each other, i.e. for the most part, other girls don't care about / react to the MCs escapades, even if they should.
The moment to moment storytelling, as I wrote above, is best described by the "slice of life" tag. There's a lot of little things happening, and for the most part, at least it remains some semblance of brevity, so I wasn't tempted to skip through too much of it all the time, but on the other hand, it's all low-key day to day affairs, mostly disconnected from each other.
As I mentioned, there's lots of content, but, like a soap opera (or this review by now), it drags on and on without really going anywhere.
If you're a fan of soaps and/or the authors writing style, this could actually be a good thing, as the game appears to be updated regularly, so at least you can look forward to getting your next fix.
It has to be said, though, the kinky scenes are few and far between, so as an adult game, CK is a bit of a failure.
Finally a word about the game "engine". It's renpy, of course, which is a good thing, but that's not what I'm referring to.
I've read quite a few people here complaining about "pure VNs", citing that they aren't really games, and there's some truth to this. In a choice and consequence based game, part of the appeal is to see the other side of the story offered by other perspectives, which are opened by taking different choices. Exploring these "alternate timelines" requires replaying a lot of already-seen content and retreading a lot of familiar ground, though, and that's where renpys Skip mode (a staple of VN games long before renpy, of course) is a godsend.
So if you "enhance" your VN with "gameplay" such as a mobile phone with apps, free-roam or minigames, you violently interrupt this "flow" of replaying the game. The player is forced to go through the same boring motions each time. And who wants to do that, especially when a game has so much raw-content volume as this one? There CAN be too much of a good thing.
And that's why I can't give a higher score. With some games, it's very easy to point at something and say: in this area, this one sucks, but that's not really the case here. There's nothing REALLY bad about College Kings. But it's not REALLY good, either. Once again, it's like a (somewhat average) soap opera. You can get attached to it, and it's entertainment to kill time with, but at the end of the day, it isn't all that special.
