More like a slightly higher than 4* game, will round up a bit since I see its currently at 3.5
Slice of life game, there is not some overarching plot. Writing is overall decent for a VN, not a lot of spelling mistakes. Most characters have a unique-ish voice. Some of the characters are poorly written, but most of the main ones are decently done. Some of the character development doesn't make a lot of sense though, particularly in some of the more recent episodes.
Graphics and some aspects of gameplay are a bit dated. The text messaging feature is overused, and occasionally you have to save and reload it in order to progress because it otherwise gets stuck.
There is a ton of content. You would be hard pressed to find many VNs with more content, and most of this is in the B to B+ range for quality.
This game is a buggy mess especially College Kings 2. Its a DAZ college clone game done worse. I gave it two tries but I can't give it anymore of my time.
College Kings 2 was slow as can be, skip function would not work. Without or with using dukes mod it crashed.
CK2 import ignored CK1 events. Why bother playing CK1 if it won't import right into ck2?
Worse is to play every path i feel like I'd ahve to commit way too much time. The path builder is ok but it needs to be more advanced to be useful.
Some characters aren't bad but Ryan and Imre need to go away. Mr Lee is kind of a secret badass.
This game was great, It has great models, and pretty good renders overall, but the game has more recently been plagued with inconsistent writing and variables, You may make a choice and later on in the story a character acts like you never did this, things like this bring the quality of the game down some, but it is a great setting, with great girls and romance, and with more consistent writing could be something really great
It's as if the game purposely tries to screw you up whenever it can. Everything is hidden under layers and layers of cover that one single wrong choice a decade ago in the game impacts important events.
I think it was pretty good in the beginning, but then quickly falls apart in Act 2. Feels like the writer changed in between acts. Some characters just act out of character and become annoying. It's a porn game, so you're obviously going to be having sex with as many girls as possible on the first run. But this will only punish you heavily later on. Why?
I can understand that maybe the dev didn't intend on this game having a harem tag and they only want you to pursue 1 or 2 girls. That's fine. But if the game is designed for repeat playthroughs, then why do you have those god awful Cell Phone segments where you have to pause, slowly check the text messages, and then scroll through text on the phone clicking one by one. This makes any subsequent run extremely tedious and boring since you can usually just skip through all the text in other Renpy games. It also lags quite a bit on these phone sections for some reason, and I have an extremely beefy computer that can run all of the latest AAA video games on Steam with max settings. There's no excuse for the cell phone segments being this unoptimized and laggy.
I was kind of an idiot and picked Apes instead of Wolves. Later on, I realized that this was an awful choice. Samantha barely has any scenes and I think she was effectively written out of the story tbh. And the dev is adding way more scenes for the teacher which is only exclusive to the Wolves path. Seems like another poor design. If you're going to play favorites, you shouldn't have made them exclusive.
You can probably get by a lot of these issues by just installing multi-mod and setting all the relationships to Girlfriend to get all the sex scenes, but this might create bugs and Renpy might throw a lot of python exception errors on your screen. I am not faulting the dev for this, because these errors may have been due to the mods.
Overall, it had a lot of promise in the beginning, and I would probably rate the first Act as a 9/10. But then the game just becomes really bad later on. I don't know if I will come back to it. The renders are obviously very good, and the sex scenes are passable enough. 3 out of 5 stars is fair.
Summary: This is a good game if you like the college setting and if you can look past some annoying mechanics and if you like realistic proportions/dimensions in character renders.
Longer review:
The good here is that I found the story fairly well-written, with the lives of the women the MC interacts with intertwined carefully and thoughtfully and with lots of simple but compelling drama. I enjoyed the story a great deal, and I didn't find anything in it to be distractingly stupid or out of place, like the sudden insertion of either fantasy elements or bizarre international criminal conspiracies you see in some AVNs.
The bad is that I truly hate some of the mechanics. The free roam sections are frequently far too big, and they suffer from traditional sandbox issues, where you can struggle through minutes of clicking random spots on the screen just to figure out how to turn around or go to the next room. Some of the free roam scenes are so big I am honestly not sure I even found every room before giving up.
I also loathe the way the cellphone text messages work. Every time the MC gets a text message, you have to click the phone, then the contact, then the response. The problem is that Ren'Py seems to have some issue where it can take several seconds for each click to register, so it can take 15-30 seconds for you to say, "OK," in response to a text that just says, "Come over," often with no actual choices present. Why in the name of God is this not just incorporated into the normal interface that isn't a laggy mess? This probably sounds silly, but I broke up with a girl in this game because she was texting too much and I just couldn't deal with the interface anymore.
The subjective thing here is the setting and the renders. Honestly, I liked the setting. I know the college setting is overdone, but I think it is fine and executed well here. As for the renders, they aren't to my tastes. I think of them as girl/boy next door types; very realistic proportions, nothing that would make anyone's eyes pop out in real life. The sex scenes are fairly short and simple, again, very realistic for what happens most of the time between teenagers. Nothing makes them 'pop' for me, like the addition of really hot dialogue or exciting scenarios or careful application of close-ups or masterful teasing that leads into sex or anything. I think of this as the 3D version of above-average quality amateur porn. If that's what you like, this is for you. If you want something a bit more unrealistic or unattainable in real life, you will probably be disappointed, like me.
I'm going to keep playing, but I skip the sex scenes and find the text messages and free roam genuinely aggravating so I think this is overall a "Mixed" or "Average" review.
This one had a lot of potential, but I feel like it fell apart in terms of structure.
I've seen people complain about the trip to Europe, and then others about how the setting returns to college in in the second part? So that's all clearly very subjective, and not worth criticizing.
A lot of the girls are very pretty (Aubrey is a standout) and the sex scenes are all pretty good (Mostly just vaginal sex, but the girls cum in almost all scenes, which is a big plus).
Where the game falls apart HEAVILY, imo, is in structure: you're forced to see pretty much all scenes for all girls, even those you aren't romancing. This makes a first playthrough incredibly long, and even subsequent playthroughs that skip seen content are exceedingly long. I know that a lot of games do this, but this just happens to be a MASSIVE game, and it really makes the whole experience too wearisome to go through more than once, especially if you want to stay faithful to one girl but know that you'll only see most other content on a replay.
If you can figure out who you want to romance and don't mind a long slice-of-life experience with a story that's not particularly enthralling, this game is pretty great!
Top 5 in my opinion. I've never walked the FWB path for all girls but instead have multiple saves with different paths. Hands down Aubrey is Bae! The rivalry between fraternities and the nonsense you get up to is a lot of fun. Bare knuckle brawls, booze and boob's! What more could you need?
There is something here. The writing makes the characters somewhat likeable and gives some dimension. The fighting is fun and I like texting and commenting on the social media app. The animations are not good and unfortunately that is a crucial part of any porn game in my opinion.
A lot of promise with this one, but unfortunately it doesn't deliver, The models are nice if too similar to each other. However, that's where the positives end. The free roam is a little too un-intuitive especially when many times it devolves into finding items. The story has a villain, which is just there to cause outrage with no chance of retaliating against him. There are too many bugs at this stage to even bother reporting them all. Finally, the biggest sin of this game is that it's too easy to miss sex scenes because of this or that condition even with the walkthrough.
The first season was epic. This was one of the first VNs I ever read and it was a story filled with fun, love, humor, drama and sex with characters that genuinely made the reader care about what happens to them. It was so good I bought it on Steam. I was genuinely looking forward to Act 2 and bought that on Steam as well. But after I started it, I decided to wait for bit. Wait for a bit more content. Something felt off about the story development. Whether it's the pacing of the events taking place or the way certain characters were acting ... I don't know. But I was at odds with the opening.
Unfortunately, this feeling never got alleviated. In fact it got worse. I found myself not caring about characters who were already established but were at times acting so out of character I had to go back to the first Act to double check if I had somehow romanticized them too much. Then there are new characters who were being introduced but I couldn't care less about them and were at times so forgettable I didn't remember them when brought up later. I honestly don't know how any of this could get fixed in my opinion. I think this is just a difference of opinion between the dev's own intended story and me.
Act 1 is a 5/5
Act 2 is a 2/5
If you like this title show the dev some support. Buy it on Steam or become a contributor. These guys work hard and let many of us freeload on sites like F95 in hopes they'll gain more support. So take some time, contribute whatever little you can.
This game was great at the first season, but quickly went downhill after.
Ridiculous plot points, addition of random unmemorable characters which were never mentioned of again, plus unnecessary addition of drama for the sake of keeping the plot going. The recent change to UI as well as unfleshed plot in the last season really sealed the fate of this game for me - It feels similar to how the show-writers of GoT had great source material at the start to copy off from, and then suddenly falls flat when they no longer had materials to copy from.
On a side note: This is the only game on F95 I've seen that actively has a warning against mentioning another game in the reviews. I'm not a fan of that other game, but why does it specifically only mention that game?
This game deserved 5 stars , but this game really lost it charm. The first time i played this game i really felt that the choices mattered. now i feel like i can chose what i want and there is nearly any consequence.
Its a good game but i have too high expectation for this game.
[REVIEW OF THE FIRST SEASON].
Just an innocent freshman at San Vallejo College, you are oblivious to the path that lies ahead of you. Growing up gets real when you learn about the unique cultures of the place you must call home. As loyalties form and tensions rise can you lead your fraternity to the crown and with it become the king on campus?
Overall: ⭐⭐
College Kings: Act 1 is a complete plot and narrative mess.
It starts off well, with some characters that (seem) interesting, but there comes a point where literally nothing happens.
There is no definite plot to indicate where the story they want to tell us is going, nor are there characters that make you interesting because of what happens to them; I can count the interesting characters on less than the fingers of one hand.
Visually it's also nothing to write home about, and its clunky animations and some annoying bugs I've had playing the game don't help.
Really good games, specially for A-Game beginners. Biggest downside is that the game story does not have a proper end. It should have a better closing chapter, or at least a better conclusion to it, as the end feels like it came out of nowhere.
Other than that, it is still a good story with a lot of likable characters and good interactions amongst them.
The game is good, it has a ton of content, the models are decent (even if sometimes they enter the creepy valley) and so are the (short) animations.
Personally I enjoyed it quite a bit, probably because I didn't try to get laid forcefully with every single girl.
I let Emily go, I (kinda of) helped Ryan with her, I went mostly the Chloe route (with the random fuck from Aubrey and Mrs Rose) and tried to be mostly "friendly" with the others.
Sometimes, like others pointed out, some interactions appear out of nothing (like the engine has some flag saying "you are already friend with that one", when being an occasional acquaintance would be a better description), but I try to overlook those.
It's not some incredible piece of work, mind you, similar games (and maybe better ones) exist, but at least you can see a lot of work put in this.
If "mediocre" had a poster child, you're envisioning this game. This was my first AVN experience and I'm happy to say that it can be better than this.
The game starts very strong, but doesn't know when to end and falls flat eventually and becomes uninteresting as you're forced to interact with LIs you've already rejected in the past and spend time with them without any player input. Not to mention this game has some of the worst writing I've ever seen from a dev that speaks fluent English.
One plus is the girls look fucking great and the lewd scenes aren't half bad, just don't go in expecting anything mindblowing and you'll have some fun until it gets boring quickly.
There is a good game in here somewhere. The problem is the dev seems to constantly be rushing to the next big moment rather than letting the story breathe and fleshing out the girls.
The KCT system exists to force multiple playthroughs and even worst there are moments where your choices just don't matter because the game wants to force you into something (Chloe and Aubrey decision).
The models looks good, the animations are very good but it just isn't very well thought out.
Collage Kings is a very mixed bag. The game has good visuals, most of the girls are pretty and modeled well.
This game really wants to be so many things and it really never works as one single unit. In my opinion, to have a good story you need to first set up the setting and the characters. Collage Kings never really does this and it ruins much of the game.
Many times characters will just have sex with you for 0 reason out of the blue, there is no tension set up and there is no indication that they like you. This ruins most of the "pure" girls in the school as the buildup is just not good.
However i did actually enjoy the moments where the game just tries to have fun and in particular the fun sandbox moments sprinkled throughout the game. But when this game tries to do anything emotional or tries to be serious, it just falls flat on its face.
Story 2/5
Its just to weird a story overall and most of it i dident really find that interesting since its very vanilla, sure there is a bit of fun with a little fighting and quite a few girls to go after so its pretty much a typical college thing with frats, fights, drinking, girls and so on, but to many LIs just dosent make sense, and the trait system is more annoying then fun since it blocks LIs if you dont have the right one, so it limits the LIs you can get with which isent much fun.
Dident really like how Riley turns lesbian/BI just from a single random kiss from a girl, even though she said she never done anything with a girl before and even while MC is fucking her shes trying to start a lesbian relationship with someone, which makes it weird and a bit idiotic if your on her path and to make it really idiotic she fails getting with one girl then 2 mins after she shes after a 2nd girl.... her story is just fucked up.
Another thing that did annoy me is how they show Aubrey getting fucked by some dude at the very start of the game, shes one of the few i did like the looks of but MC never talks to her about that so you can only assume shes in a relationship with Adam which is also an idiot, so she got destroyed as a possible LI from day 1 which is idiotic since shes a constant part of the story and yet you never learn anything about her and Adam, but she comes on to MC right after you see her fuck someone else? which feels stupid and you can fuck her as well if you want and not once does MC talk about seeing her fuck someone else.....so it only leaves 2 options shes either a whore fucking everyone or a cheater which MC wouldent want to touch either due to hes last girlfriend, and yet game constantly trows her in your face instend of just letting you close her path, to make it even more stupid she will also drop MC if you dont accept to share her with another girl...
And heres another funny/idiotic fact, Aubrey that turns MC down because he dosent want to share her with another girl, is against polygamy? she only wants Monogamy? i mean coooome on how can that make sense to anyone.
And Riley is hoping for MC to accept polygame even after you told her she had to pick between you or the girl......
And if you miss the one chance to tell her no to sharing Aubrey, you will play most of chapter 1 being with her, maybe even staying faithfull to her since its not a harem game and all to get a scene where she and Riley comes to MCs room offering a 3-some and if you turn that down, both Riley and Aubery will then leave MC to have sex between them selfs...... so sure hope your not on Either or even worse Both of those girls path, its pretty much as close to NTR as you can come, might even be NTR since MC is in a sexual relationship with one or both of them and they leave him to fuck someone else, game just tries to hide it behind FWB tags on the LIs.....
And as for the wasting time when you close down a path with a LI like Riley or Aubrey or anyone else, your still forced into a shit ton of content with them which just isent fun if you have no interest in the LI, like going to a LIs parrents wedding thing? i mean why the fuck wouldent she take her girl friend instend or go alone, why force the player to go with a LI that has 0 interest in him?
It really is one of the worst ways ive seen stories done with LIs, it feels like such a huge waste of time being forced to go through a shit load of content with LIs whos already turned down MC, its just so pointless, MC is just a pure slave to every LI and never say no to any of them, he really should have a dog collar with a chain it would fit him so well.
As for chapter 2 it gets even more boring, main focus is on two girls so if you dont like either theres just not much to come for, not that there is much anyway since alot of LIs paths will already be closed off when your done with first chapter and theres no way i would play this game multiple times to try out diffrent LIs since you will already have seen 90% of their stories in your first playthrough which ruins any replayability.
And even though game does have virgins i guess theres a reason it dosent have the tag, the virgin scenes are awfull to say the least, its a 100% normal sex scene, theres no blood which is a matter of taste, but girls has absolutly no pain or anything either so it cant really be call much of a virgin scene, but atleast they did the right thing and not put the tag up.
Girls 2/5
They dident do much for me, maybe its the grey teeths that makes em look wierd which does seem to be fixed in chapte 2 or maybe its just the character type but i found most of them meh and the very few i did like was either a whore, a lesbian or already in a relationship, or just dident want to be with MC, so yeah game just wasent for me personaly.
Animations 3/5
They are ok but nothing special, still good enough to enjoy though and mostly with multiple positions.
Music 3/5
Its pretty standard music, i would have liked some better stuff with songs/voices instend of just basic backgroud tunes, but atleast it does change every now and then so it dosent get boring but never gets really good either.
Choices and Trais 1/5
Some LIs are really tuff to get since just a small worng choice can turn her into a permanent friend, traits blocking LIs paths if you got the worng one, so you cant be with everyone in a single playthrough.
