VN - Ren'Py - College Kings [Act 2 v6.0.4] [Undergrad Steve]

VERSION:Act2 v.6.0.4
SUMMARY: Not bad, but not great, many out there like it and better.
RATINGS: (out of 5):

1. Models: 4
2. Animations: 4
3. General Visuals: 4
4. Characters: 2
5. Story: 2
6. Writing: 3
7. UI & Gameplay: 3
8. Content (amount): 3
9. Sound & Music: 4
10. Fetish & kinks: 3

Average: X of 50 possible points giving a X% rating i.e. X stars.

PROS:

1. Nice looking models, at least with regards to the LIs
2. General visuals are good
3. Animations are rather good and seamless, smooth transitions.
4. Sexual scenes are often
5. Several choices so there is replay value to try other things, but best to just go with the walkthrough that gives you most scenes.

CONS:

1. Biggest gripe is child looking MC, most guys, myself included looked at least older than 12 when we finished school. This MC is simply a child and I can't stand his look. That look works fine in something like a mother son incest kind of game, because he looks like he still suckles...FML.
2. Sexual scenes are all good and well but they are pretty vanilla and boring, I mean cum shots are rare, creampie shots are...are they in the game? Just a bit dull
3. Story is fairly straight forward and boring at this point, done before countless time and honestly its not really "fun" there are other games that have a lot more funny shit going on that is pretty much a requirement for college setting games as its a fun time for young people.

FINAL THOUGHTS & SUGGESTIONS:

• Overall the LIs look really nice, animations and general visuals are good, but the game is pretty boring and dull with a babyface MC that attracts woman like no mans business escapes all logic. There is nothing attractive about him and his "confidence" is forced and hardly enough to cause him to become the local Don Juan, its all setup just too conveniently for this little MC and in all honesty, while the game has some pros, there are better options out there IMO

The funny and sad thing about this game is I would of paid for the first season
in a heartbeat {I'm sure others have said the same lol} Since season 2 episode
one......it's been a disaster in my humble opinion and this is the season he started charging for it lol!!!!! The many many bugs....the saving system ? Yeah I'm not going to get into that but anyone who played this after season one knows what I mean. Pool party fiasco.......oh man I could go on but in the end I've lost all respect for the dev and the game. I've not even played the new esp......and probably never will.

Overall enjoyed the games.

TL;DR
loads of content, some pretty girls, some pretty hot interactions but all very vanilla

Some minor spoilers ahead.

What I did like
some of the girls are really pretty and also memorable. My favorites looks wise are probably Nora, Chloe and Aubrey, in no particular order. After getting to know them a bit better, not picking Nora or Aubrey as girlfriend actually hit me in the feels just a little bit.
Despite the college setting many of the cliches and tropes apply but not all of them, making it a tad less formulaic.
There is a lot of content. I am at it for days now and still not at the end of the current content. As there are two main fractions and content is to some extent determined by the fraction you belong to, replay is probably factored in by the dev. However, as they are so long I'm not sure I can make myself do it.
I actually liked the mini games like the murder mystery, the campaign planning and some more.

What I did not like
The fighting - but there is an autowin button
The timed challenges are a bit pointless because of the roll back function but whatever.
The 3 relationship states - friend, fwb, girlfriend - sometimes change inexplicably. Chloe loses her fwb due to a random thought that pops in MC's head and we never get her back to intimacy until much later in the game. Similarly for Aubrey. For Nora it is on the other hand quite convincing. After she throws herself at MC and you reject she goes back to being friends only, makes sense. I don't dislike the status changes themselves, just the inconsistency.
I am not sure how to handle the personality traits and the categories that determine them, i.e. bro, boyfriend and troublemaker. At one point I was desperately trying to get troublemaker points to keep the personality as it was (some kind of party where I wanted to talk with Nora, quite at the beginning). However despite going back to 2 saves before and playing half a day and all the party there was no way to change the outcome because the points were coupled. Each action would always give, I think, troublemaker and bro combined. That made it impossible to get the right alignment.
Also, as much as I understand the need to de-clutter the interface, the points should be visible without the phone because managing them is crucial to pursue certain paths.
The use of the phone was annoying to me. I lost count how many times I clicked beside the phone and had to go back to the message app to continue a conversation.

Neither
There seems to be no direction or narrative. Things just happen. There are events (field trip, election, pool part etc.) like milestones in a project plan but no overall story.
There are animations and I suppose they are functional. Some parts of it like facial expressions were quite nice, motions in general not that much.
I did not use the path builder feature yet, perhaps I'll play around with it. That said, keeping track of your various relationships and points is tedious, especially when the ladies change their mind on a whim. I also don't quite understand how a girl with fwb status changes to friend only just because I don't ask her to become my girlfriend. No input from her side is required and she should not be aware of my decision. Still, from that moment on she refuses to put out. Does not apply to Nora as she is asking directly to become more than friends at one point and we have the choice to accept or refuse. In this case the consequence is logical, i.e. downgrade to friend.

I'm sorry but this game is horrible.

- Story's pacing has to be the worst I've ever seen in my life; you cannot connect with anyone in my opinion and I could not care less who xyz was due to it. Theres not really any college here it might as well be called Frat Wars.

- Writing is also pretty bad, I'm not perfectionist in grammar/etc but hallmark movies do a better job than this.

Its just trying wayyy to hard to be this deep consequence thing and its not.

The history is generic and the characters are a hassle and you can't overlook that because the animations and images are boring, it's so ugly to watch, you cant even feel like the characters are touching each other. The story move at a good pace, not to fast and not to slow, no grind and you can even skip the fights. But for me the most important thing is the art and the animations son i can't like this.

Overall what you would expect for a college type game by hooking-up with coeds. Overall the artistic quality was good and the girls Hot. Also, the story moves at a relatively good pace without a lot of grind. Nice functionality to where you can automatically review intimate scenes. With that being said, the intimacy was not very imaginative .

Really nice and ejoyable game with a lot of different paths, decisions and girls to play with. The gameplay is exiting with interesting conversation and minigame. It's a game for every player who wants to try NSFW game.
Some graphics are a bit odd, but in general is good.

By far and away the best ever Renpy VN game made and I have played nearly 200 of the buggers.

Regardless of what people say about part 2, it IS even better than part1 and part 1 was outstanding. This game is very well written, outstanding renders, great animation, lots of choices and paths, brilliant UI and very well polished. Just a outstanding piece of work.

If you were to make a blueprint of how to make a proper VN game this would be it.

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?