Review for Deviant Anomalies v0.9.5
Overall: 2/5 - I'm giving up on this game. While the game itself isn't terrible, trying to play individual updates has been tedious and frustrating.
Story: 2/5 - It's definitely a mess. Not really sure what's going on with monsters and superpowers, and it's not flowing very well. Too much time spent on side stories and a lot of WTFs with no progress on the main story for a long time. The MC acts like a retard sometimes, like when he forgets to wear the gas mask. Then, there are some really dumb inconsistencies like when the MC is running for his life screaming "I don't want to die a virgin!" and the very next day he's fucking a MILF and dominating her like a porn star.
Writing: 5/5 - The writing is the highlight of the game. It's quite good, but without a great story, it's mostly wasted.
Visuals: 3/5 - The girls are somewhat cute and some of the animations are quite good, but the models are just the HS Japanese-inspired stereotypes. The resolution usually looks really low during animations.
Audio: 3/5 - Generally, the occasional voice acting and moans, etc. are well done, but the sound effects for navigation, map, walking, etc. are annoying.
Gameplay: 2/5 - It's a below-average sandbox with garbage user interface. The dev spent a lot of time to make it look flashy but totally forgot to make it easy to use. Classic noob mistake of thinking "look at all of this neat stuff I can do" and wasting development time on it when it's actually the lowest priority in the minds of players.
GUI: The GUI seems like it was made to look cool, but no thought was put into whether it was better. Things like the interior navigation buttons that are greyed-out and only have color when you hover over them. That's the opposite of what a player wants to quickly find the next place to go. One positive note is that there is occasionally some context-sensitive help with some of the "games" the MC needs to play to win the love-interests.
Navigation: I don't know WTF the dev was thinking. The world map is available from only some interior locations. There is a mix of menu-based navigation, icon-based navigation, and hotspot-based navigation. The best examples are when you want to leave a conversation, interaction, room, area, etc. Sometimes there's a menu item like "Back", sometimes there's an icon with a man running through a door (i.e., emergency exit symbol), sometimes there's a different icon with the word "Exit" and a man running through a door, and sometimes there's an arrow in the shape of a circle. The icons are in different locations on the screen for different locations/scenarios. Navigating the Garrison Tower is retarded. From the map, you enter into the lobby and from the lobby, you can go to the bar streets, but you can't go from the bar streets back to the lobby, you can only go to the bar. Also, you can go from the lobby to the bar, but you can't go from the bar back to the lobby, you can only go back to the map. It looks like the sandbox was created by 3 different people that never talked to each other. Consistency is key to making things easy to use. These are all examples of what NOT to do.
Inventory: Guess when you can't check your inventory? If you guessed "Any time you actually want to check your inventory," then you're really close. The answer is: Any time you're in a place where you can use items in your inventory -OR- any time you're in a place where you can buy items for your inventory. Oh, and some stuff like the milk and vitamins don't even show up in your inventory at all.
Quest hint system: Sometimes it's good, sometimes not. Sometimes you're not sure what to do next because there's no help/hint for the quest.
Performance: There's a lot of lag when moving between locations, pulling up the map, etc. This is not a hardware performance problem. It's due to delays built into the game for fade-in/fade-out and such, and it sucks.
Content: 2/5 - The amount of lewd content seems low for well over 2 years of development time. It really feels like too much time was spent making the lewd scenes into their own grindy minigames. I'm not really into the pregnancy fetish, but I'm guessing people who like it will be disappointed by the weird case of the virgin girl whose body is tricked into thinking it's pregnant.
Other: It'll be interesting to see if this game gets taken down due to all of the unauthorized trademark usage. There are dozens of examples and all it will take is one person to report it to a company and that company sending a letter to Patreon.
Overall: 2/5 - I'm giving up on this game. While the game itself isn't terrible, trying to play individual updates has been tedious and frustrating.
Story: 2/5 - It's definitely a mess. Not really sure what's going on with monsters and superpowers, and it's not flowing very well. Too much time spent on side stories and a lot of WTFs with no progress on the main story for a long time. The MC acts like a retard sometimes, like when he forgets to wear the gas mask. Then, there are some really dumb inconsistencies like when the MC is running for his life screaming "I don't want to die a virgin!" and the very next day he's fucking a MILF and dominating her like a porn star.
Writing: 5/5 - The writing is the highlight of the game. It's quite good, but without a great story, it's mostly wasted.
Visuals: 3/5 - The girls are somewhat cute and some of the animations are quite good, but the models are just the HS Japanese-inspired stereotypes. The resolution usually looks really low during animations.
Audio: 3/5 - Generally, the occasional voice acting and moans, etc. are well done, but the sound effects for navigation, map, walking, etc. are annoying.
Gameplay: 2/5 - It's a below-average sandbox with garbage user interface. The dev spent a lot of time to make it look flashy but totally forgot to make it easy to use. Classic noob mistake of thinking "look at all of this neat stuff I can do" and wasting development time on it when it's actually the lowest priority in the minds of players.
GUI: The GUI seems like it was made to look cool, but no thought was put into whether it was better. Things like the interior navigation buttons that are greyed-out and only have color when you hover over them. That's the opposite of what a player wants to quickly find the next place to go. One positive note is that there is occasionally some context-sensitive help with some of the "games" the MC needs to play to win the love-interests.
Navigation: I don't know WTF the dev was thinking. The world map is available from only some interior locations. There is a mix of menu-based navigation, icon-based navigation, and hotspot-based navigation. The best examples are when you want to leave a conversation, interaction, room, area, etc. Sometimes there's a menu item like "Back", sometimes there's an icon with a man running through a door (i.e., emergency exit symbol), sometimes there's a different icon with the word "Exit" and a man running through a door, and sometimes there's an arrow in the shape of a circle. The icons are in different locations on the screen for different locations/scenarios. Navigating the Garrison Tower is retarded. From the map, you enter into the lobby and from the lobby, you can go to the bar streets, but you can't go from the bar streets back to the lobby, you can only go to the bar. Also, you can go from the lobby to the bar, but you can't go from the bar back to the lobby, you can only go back to the map. It looks like the sandbox was created by 3 different people that never talked to each other. Consistency is key to making things easy to use. These are all examples of what NOT to do.
Inventory: Guess when you can't check your inventory? If you guessed "Any time you actually want to check your inventory," then you're really close. The answer is: Any time you're in a place where you can use items in your inventory -OR- any time you're in a place where you can buy items for your inventory. Oh, and some stuff like the milk and vitamins don't even show up in your inventory at all.
Quest hint system: Sometimes it's good, sometimes not. Sometimes you're not sure what to do next because there's no help/hint for the quest.
Performance: There's a lot of lag when moving between locations, pulling up the map, etc. This is not a hardware performance problem. It's due to delays built into the game for fade-in/fade-out and such, and it sucks.
Content: 2/5 - The amount of lewd content seems low for well over 2 years of development time. It really feels like too much time was spent making the lewd scenes into their own grindy minigames. I'm not really into the pregnancy fetish, but I'm guessing people who like it will be disappointed by the weird case of the virgin girl whose body is tricked into thinking it's pregnant.
Other: It'll be interesting to see if this game gets taken down due to all of the unauthorized trademark usage. There are dozens of examples and all it will take is one person to report it to a company and that company sending a letter to Patreon.
