One of the great things about Desert Stalker is that it doesn't need to overly rely on it's plot. It already has egyptian Mad Max harem down with fantastic setup imagery, hot character design and decent writing. All it needs to do as a game is focus on it's core set of characters and avoid getting too anime-y or too self-indulgent in it's own plot.
And that's exactly where it struggles.
There's a real fine line the game walks attempting to balance it's anime styled characters with the stylized middle-eastern ones. I would argue that the more characters the game introduces, the more likely we are to run into more of these Dead or Alive Volleyball style anime characters that pull you out of the experience. Jamming in themes like vampirism and roman coliseums while we move back and forth from STALKER style desert settings to perfectly preserved egyptian tombs, there are real moments where you lose your sense of place as the game bombards you with a cool new characters that only get one sex scene.
The constant new side content feels like a distraction from the core characters and hinders this game's sense of scale. There are four perfectly fuckable characters to interact with from the start of the game, yet for some reason we keep adding more and more characters onto the roster. Introducing all these characters invites plenty of narrative fodder that's drawn out to a degree that sexual content takes a backseat to uninteresting plot development every update.
There's a lot of gimmicky content that tries to add a level of depth but ends up falling flat. Exploration sections of the game have too many options that only play out with two unimportant outcomes. There's a village on a bridge where you decide the fates of each villager just to tap into Fallout nostalgia and the payoff is sexless slides in an unskippable cutscene. There's an anime lab where special races of characters now enter the fray because... deus ex machina?
When there's already so much richness in the middle eastern-esque parts of the world, why sideline the plot into cringey setpieces? We want to see these elements evolve and our choices matter. Knowing how small these independent game developers teams are and how slow the update cycle can be, the focus should be on that core set of content unless we're prepared to wait several years to see Desert Stalker release.
My recommendations are simple. More sex scenes of core characters that push the plot and introduce us to new characters, less distractions and random anime-fantasy-sci fi content.
4 stars. Good.
And that's exactly where it struggles.
There's a real fine line the game walks attempting to balance it's anime styled characters with the stylized middle-eastern ones. I would argue that the more characters the game introduces, the more likely we are to run into more of these Dead or Alive Volleyball style anime characters that pull you out of the experience. Jamming in themes like vampirism and roman coliseums while we move back and forth from STALKER style desert settings to perfectly preserved egyptian tombs, there are real moments where you lose your sense of place as the game bombards you with a cool new characters that only get one sex scene.
The constant new side content feels like a distraction from the core characters and hinders this game's sense of scale. There are four perfectly fuckable characters to interact with from the start of the game, yet for some reason we keep adding more and more characters onto the roster. Introducing all these characters invites plenty of narrative fodder that's drawn out to a degree that sexual content takes a backseat to uninteresting plot development every update.
There's a lot of gimmicky content that tries to add a level of depth but ends up falling flat. Exploration sections of the game have too many options that only play out with two unimportant outcomes. There's a village on a bridge where you decide the fates of each villager just to tap into Fallout nostalgia and the payoff is sexless slides in an unskippable cutscene. There's an anime lab where special races of characters now enter the fray because... deus ex machina?
When there's already so much richness in the middle eastern-esque parts of the world, why sideline the plot into cringey setpieces? We want to see these elements evolve and our choices matter. Knowing how small these independent game developers teams are and how slow the update cycle can be, the focus should be on that core set of content unless we're prepared to wait several years to see Desert Stalker release.
My recommendations are simple. More sex scenes of core characters that push the plot and introduce us to new characters, less distractions and random anime-fantasy-sci fi content.
4 stars. Good.
