This review is for the game as of 4.9.9.
I'm giving this a 5/5 because there isn't really a way to give this a 9/10. There's definitely room for improvement when it comes to fairly minor things, but IMO the dev has done one hell of a job at improving from two years ago.
Cons
- The development cycle went to shit somewhere around 2021, to the point where it became a running gag. In the past year, transparency has improved quite a bit, with good interaction from Mulan primarily on Patreon and on Discord, but that's been balanced out by the fact that Mulan and Moana live in a little country called Ukraine. You might have heard of it. Hard to do dev work when cruise missiles are being slung at power plants.
- Repeatable events are there, but extremely limited. Right now, most of them are in Vivarium.
Pros
+ The setting. The cyberpunk version of the Soviet Union is both dystopian and fucking hilarious, and the fact that it's grounded somewhat in reality by the devs living in a post-Soviet republic adds a lot of depth to the game.
+ Even though repeatable events are fairly sparse, the plot-relevant events are extremely well done and are well worth the replay.
+ The game feels very well populated due to a mix of both generic and named characters. Those that are there are memorable in their own right.
+ There's definitely a road map for development. While Mulan is fairly secretive about it, the more frequent progress reports mean that new events and tweaks to already existing events are fairly intuitive.
+ The art. Holy hell, the art.
I'm giving this a 5/5 because there isn't really a way to give this a 9/10. There's definitely room for improvement when it comes to fairly minor things, but IMO the dev has done one hell of a job at improving from two years ago.
Cons
- The development cycle went to shit somewhere around 2021, to the point where it became a running gag. In the past year, transparency has improved quite a bit, with good interaction from Mulan primarily on Patreon and on Discord, but that's been balanced out by the fact that Mulan and Moana live in a little country called Ukraine. You might have heard of it. Hard to do dev work when cruise missiles are being slung at power plants.
- Repeatable events are there, but extremely limited. Right now, most of them are in Vivarium.
Pros
+ The setting. The cyberpunk version of the Soviet Union is both dystopian and fucking hilarious, and the fact that it's grounded somewhat in reality by the devs living in a post-Soviet republic adds a lot of depth to the game.
+ Even though repeatable events are fairly sparse, the plot-relevant events are extremely well done and are well worth the replay.
+ The game feels very well populated due to a mix of both generic and named characters. Those that are there are memorable in their own right.
+ There's definitely a road map for development. While Mulan is fairly secretive about it, the more frequent progress reports mean that new events and tweaks to already existing events are fairly intuitive.
+ The art. Holy hell, the art.