Review for Five of a Kind v0.3.1.1
I got past the bugs I hit earlier, but it's also been 4 months and there's effectively no new content. Using the double-click to EXIT helps speed things up a little, but for a game where you have to keep running around and guessing what to do, it's just too slow. Then there are things like the dev admitting that a particular hint in the journal sucks, but it hasn't changed 4 months later. I'm out. Maybe I'll check it out after it gets the [Completed] tag, but I still think that chances of that are slim with only tiny amounts of content trickling in 2 or 3 times per year and every time it's buggy as fuck. The changelog is telling.
Previous review for v0.3.0:
Renders: 4.5/5 - Very Nice artwork on the still renders during scenes. The art style is inconsistent between renders/activities, though. The renders during free-roaming are generally good except for the MC and NPCs, which have animations during free-roaming.
Animations: 2/5 - The animations during lewd scenes have distinct pieces of the body that move independently. It reminds me of the type of animation used in the "South Park" TV series where the heads, arms, legs, and body are each 2D-images that move separately from each other. This animation style is cheap and definitely not worthy of the artwork in the renders. The animations during free-roaming are OK, but definitely less important.
Story: 3/5 - Somewhat cookie-cutter incest story where dad is out of the picture, so MC has his mother, bitchy sister, slutty aunt, prude aunt, and uninhibited cousin to pursue as love interests. I'd like to give some originality points for the 1985 theme, but it's really mixing up technology well into the early 90's.
Writing: 5/5 - Excellent spelling and grammar. There's actual style, plus it has real humor, and the dialogue/narrative is appropriate for this type of game.
Gameplay: 1/5 - This is where the game falls flat on its face. The user interface is tedious with multiple clicks and mouse movement for everything, the journal/quest hint system is vague, the in-game mechanics are non-intuitive. If there is one word to describe gameplay it's "SLOW." It's slow to startup, slow to transition between the game and the event scenes, slow to navigate between rooms and map areas, and slow to get through a repeated scene. The tedious user interface just slows everything down even more. This game is literally PAINFUL to play. The purpose of a game is to get enjoyment from playing, not to piss you off.
Other thoughts: It's been six months since the last update and I literally forgot almost everything about both the story and the gaming mechanics. Then I see that there are potentially game-breaking bugs in this release. I'd really like to give this game a better rating, but every time I play, I feel like I'm stuck in rush-hour traffic. Hopefully, it gets better as time goes on, but at the current release cadence that's unlikely, I expect it to be abandoned before it's completed, or at best, a full redesign of the game's tedious user interface.