I’m a huge fan of (isometric) RPGs and I never shied away from info dumps and wall of texts before now. Both this review and this game can be surmised in quite a short sentence: CoC2 is a bad porn game and an even worse text-based game.
Writing:
The writing quality varies wildly because there are so many different authors and nobody who actually review or enforce a style; overall, it is mediocre at best.
As someone pointed out in the other reviews, the MC is like the wind: it has no agency, it is merely a tool used by the writers to both describe and usher changes in their little world. Being a tool, the MC has no personality whatsoever: in one instance they can be a psychopath, in another a knight in a shining armor, in yet another a dom and the scene after the biggest slutty dumbass ever. *You*, as the player, have no agency either but to witness to the writers’ stories — the main plot ceased to exist past the prologue — and as such you have *no choice at all*: there are instances here and there, but they are far in between and just fluff (like choosing if a character is going to be a sub or a dom). The characters of these stories are… huh, okayish? They are nothing deep. I actually stopped caring because you are told their stories and background all the time, but you never really see them struggle and grow; the only exception is Ryn, actually, who is the only redeemable character alongside Kasyrra. Everyone else too is a tool of the writers to tell *their* stories.
If you see nothing wrong with this, ask yourself: what was more important in LOTR, the journey or the lengthy descriptions of the shire? CoC2 is what LOTR would be if Tolkien somehow forgot about the journey and spent the whole book describing the shire, tom bombadil, and telling Frodo everything about Morgoth demise and what not. Sure, those stories as cool but can you imagine pages and pages and pages of the shire’s description *again* and *again* and *again*? CoC2 is that, minus the beauty of Tolkien’s writing.
The sex scenes are plain bad. I wish they would stop reading coomer porn and read your average booktok smut romantasy book, whose sex scenes will probably be better. I don’t have words to describe how bad it is, but it feels like most of these writers never had sex; again, there are some exceptions here and there.
I remember, but I may be imagining it, that once Savin or one of the writers trash talked CoC for being bad and what can I say? They surely wrote something worse. But CoC never shone for its writing, it was fun to play and it was stupid. It wasn’t pretentious so you never gave it too much thought… after all, it’s a porn game! CoC2, unfortunately, can’t receive the same treatment: it feels pretentious and you can see how the writers think it’s some good, hot shit whose writing is on par with AAA games (Which is fitting considering the state of the industry).
The game
The gameplay is bad and spammy. It is annoying to navigate the map because there are so many boring trash mobs. I never liked this either about CoC1, but I don’t like erotica games with Grindy/complex systems. I think the only outlier are Seeds of Chaos with its management system that I kinda like and Kingdom of Subversion, which keep it simple and removes the trash mobs of lower level
The “Corruption”
Imagine a world where everyone was a sex crazed addict, where monsters and vandals alike roaming the land unchallenged, pillaging and raping the weak — or being raped in return. Terrible, right?
That’s *exactly* the oh-so-pure world the writers makes the MC protect from Kasyrra. The player can rape, or be raped, on a whim based on who wins the fight — sometimes the companions are raped too — and somehow this is a pure world. Kasyrra unleashed some bad shit, true, but most of what is wrong with the in game world is not on her. This is, straight up, bad writing. BAD writing. We are told how this world is good and cool and whatnot, but it mismatches completely both the stories of the characters and the damn presented world. This is as bad as CoC1’s world but without the demon corruption. CoC2’s world is fucked up beyond redemption, there is no corruption in this game because there is nothing left to corrupt: the inhabitants did this all on their own. Everyone wants to have sex with you or to sex with you, there are no stake, there is no build up nor growth… You end up not caring about the characters because, as I said in the writing review, they aren’t alive: they are placeholders to fill whatever lore dump is being *told* (remember, never shown!) at the moment by the writers and you, the player, are just a puppet they use as they see fit.
Writing:
The writing quality varies wildly because there are so many different authors and nobody who actually review or enforce a style; overall, it is mediocre at best.
As someone pointed out in the other reviews, the MC is like the wind: it has no agency, it is merely a tool used by the writers to both describe and usher changes in their little world. Being a tool, the MC has no personality whatsoever: in one instance they can be a psychopath, in another a knight in a shining armor, in yet another a dom and the scene after the biggest slutty dumbass ever. *You*, as the player, have no agency either but to witness to the writers’ stories — the main plot ceased to exist past the prologue — and as such you have *no choice at all*: there are instances here and there, but they are far in between and just fluff (like choosing if a character is going to be a sub or a dom). The characters of these stories are… huh, okayish? They are nothing deep. I actually stopped caring because you are told their stories and background all the time, but you never really see them struggle and grow; the only exception is Ryn, actually, who is the only redeemable character alongside Kasyrra. Everyone else too is a tool of the writers to tell *their* stories.
If you see nothing wrong with this, ask yourself: what was more important in LOTR, the journey or the lengthy descriptions of the shire? CoC2 is what LOTR would be if Tolkien somehow forgot about the journey and spent the whole book describing the shire, tom bombadil, and telling Frodo everything about Morgoth demise and what not. Sure, those stories as cool but can you imagine pages and pages and pages of the shire’s description *again* and *again* and *again*? CoC2 is that, minus the beauty of Tolkien’s writing.
The sex scenes are plain bad. I wish they would stop reading coomer porn and read your average booktok smut romantasy book, whose sex scenes will probably be better. I don’t have words to describe how bad it is, but it feels like most of these writers never had sex; again, there are some exceptions here and there.
I remember, but I may be imagining it, that once Savin or one of the writers trash talked CoC for being bad and what can I say? They surely wrote something worse. But CoC never shone for its writing, it was fun to play and it was stupid. It wasn’t pretentious so you never gave it too much thought… after all, it’s a porn game! CoC2, unfortunately, can’t receive the same treatment: it feels pretentious and you can see how the writers think it’s some good, hot shit whose writing is on par with AAA games (Which is fitting considering the state of the industry).
The game
The gameplay is bad and spammy. It is annoying to navigate the map because there are so many boring trash mobs. I never liked this either about CoC1, but I don’t like erotica games with Grindy/complex systems. I think the only outlier are Seeds of Chaos with its management system that I kinda like and Kingdom of Subversion, which keep it simple and removes the trash mobs of lower level
The “Corruption”
Imagine a world where everyone was a sex crazed addict, where monsters and vandals alike roaming the land unchallenged, pillaging and raping the weak — or being raped in return. Terrible, right?
That’s *exactly* the oh-so-pure world the writers makes the MC protect from Kasyrra. The player can rape, or be raped, on a whim based on who wins the fight — sometimes the companions are raped too — and somehow this is a pure world. Kasyrra unleashed some bad shit, true, but most of what is wrong with the in game world is not on her. This is, straight up, bad writing. BAD writing. We are told how this world is good and cool and whatnot, but it mismatches completely both the stories of the characters and the damn presented world. This is as bad as CoC1’s world but without the demon corruption. CoC2’s world is fucked up beyond redemption, there is no corruption in this game because there is nothing left to corrupt: the inhabitants did this all on their own. Everyone wants to have sex with you or to sex with you, there are no stake, there is no build up nor growth… You end up not caring about the characters because, as I said in the writing review, they aren’t alive: they are placeholders to fill whatever lore dump is being *told* (remember, never shown!) at the moment by the writers and you, the player, are just a puppet they use as they see fit.