Ren'Py - Abandoned - Heavy Five [Ch.2RS] [Nottravis]

Game Version Played: Heavy Five Chapter 4 Remastered (9/12/2021)

Bottom Line Up Front: The Dev is able to leverage current technology to produce renders and animations that are above average quality, however there are serious problems with the plot, pacing, and engaging the player with sex or with an emotional connection to the other characters.

Heavy Five is a Sci Fi Adult Mystery sandbox/visual novel. Adult because there are sex scenes and nakedness and some fetishes. Mystery because there are teases about a weird things going on and a greater plot in the background. Sandbox because of a free-ish roam in the middle of each chapter. Visual novel because there are more usual choice based reading events before and after the sandbox. Fetishes focus on rape-play (consensual non-consensual or fantasy rape), tease and denial/fem dom, bugs/slugs, and vanilla.

Art: 4/5
The animations are 'good enough', they get the job done- above the average for a solo person operation, but have definite moments of jankiness and immersion breaking that is likely a unavoidable result of using Daz. The stills show attention to detail, lighting, texture, and other signs of am above average quality production.

Story: 2/5
The story is like a ruined orgasm- lots of build up with a terrible payoff. It is true that it is not complete, but if what we have seen so far continues, all the hints and promises are going to turn out to be like Season 8 of Game of Thrones, just a huge let down. As an example- In Chapter 1 you can be challenged to a boxing match with one of the interests. Dialogue and thoughts in the succeeding chapters build up all kinds of plans for this match, like bets to up the stakes or using drugs to win in an evil way. Then it is postponed, and then the day of... sucker punch and a completely artless obvious dodge to add a new 'twisty' bit to the plot. Writers need to learn this- it is not clever to keep adding twisty bits, it is exhausting. Bigger fiction settings than this have failed utterly because they get so caught up in adding mystery that there is a) never any pay off, and b) it is literally impossible to meet the massively inflated expectations of the fan base. This game is headed down that path. There are so many threads of mystery that you need to keep a journal to keep track, but if the result is like the above, then there is no reason to invest emotionally in the mystery as it will only lead to disappointment.


Sex: 2/5
This is a slow burn game, at least according to the dev, and they defend it by pointing out that you have only known these people for hours to days. Avoiding porn logic to get to the sex is fine, even admirable, but it is very inconsistent. Your relationships with the supposed love interests are incredibly slow, but porn logic comes swinging back in to get folks naked in the most contrived ways. Which again, is also fine, an adult game should have some sexiness in it, otherwise strip all that out and sell this on Steam. Ironically, the most engaging and enjoyable sex scene in the whole game so far is the tutorial for chapter 4. This is a theme- the add on bits (note- these are available only to high tier patrons, so your game might not even have them) are sexier and more enjoyable than 95% of the stuff in the game itself. Which is even assuming you can FIND the sex without a walkthrough. Playing the game as a female MC, and as recommended by the Dev (ie just making choices I think are good), I got exactly zero sex scenes in the story itself. Running through multiple times, I was able to find the VR sex (which... is a computer game in a computer game and is focused so far on the rape-play fetish), and what amounts to a short video involving slugs but doesn't involve YOU THE PLAYER in any way (other than being deliberately stupid in order to see it)- both with the same love interest. The male MC can have coitus interruptus with a different LI, and there are reports of other scenes as well but I was unable to get them. And then the whole tease/denial/femdom module. Here is the thing- the Dev needs to spend some serious time going to websites that specialize in this kind of fetish, because this is one half assed implementation that needs serious help. Jack off instruction games are not new and those who enjoy them do so for different reasons, but they DO have many things in common that make for a quality implementation. Just putting a beat meter up with a slide show is NOT a quality implementation, ESPECIALLY when given the option to opine on an image, it won't even remember if you hate something or not. Am I close to cumming? no, because you killed my boner 3 times in a row, and further I told you that each time. Learn from other games what works and what doesn't!

All in all, this is a massive undertaking that is too caught up in its own head to be enjoyable. The dev throws literal gigabytes of pictures and animations at you, but then makes it impossible to enjoy those pictures and animations by locking them behind impregnable choice logic or poor implementation. The current plot points sound interesting and intriguing, but what we are presented with shows every sign of being a huge let down of constant tease with no payoff. And perhaps that is all this is- a very meta way to do fem dom tease and denial on a community of players in the real world. If so, bravo, very well done.

This is a very, very slow burn. Three chapters in and the most you can do is express how you feel about a particular LI, in a "sort of" romantic way. If you do try to speed thing along you are either literally stopped or it happens in an almost noncanonical VR sim. I'm all about the build up, it's why I play these games, and I am not expecting to dive right into the lewd scenes at all but this is something else entirely I think.

It wouldn't be so bad if there was actually progress that you could make per chapter but as it is you have one, maybe two, actions you can do with your LI of choice per chapter on account of the VERY limited amount of time you are allotted. The story plays out like a VN at the beginning of the episode then transition into a free roam in the afternoon for the second part of the story phase then a third free roam to do what you actually choose. Which turns into one available action before you are forced to the end of the update. One cycle every time, and just looking around rooms takes time away from the already limited amount, whether something significant happens or not.

For some reason the Dev has put an introductory questionnaire between every chapter that effectively does nothing but break immersion. It serves no real purpose at all. Everything that is talked about in the breaks are explained again during the actual gameplay. Aside from the combat controls which are very simplistic as it is. It could be done with just a quick tut the first (and only?) time a combat situation arises.

The story is fine by me, I rather enjoy the SiFi jargon personally but it go into to many details that are irrelevant to anything. I guess to me it focuses to much on the main plot, that as of right now is all but non existent, and the connection and attachment to the actual characters of the game are all but ignored. It is described as an engaging story driven game where your actions and choices matter but you have very little actual say in anything that happens, and even less time to do so.

Its disappointing really, on account of how well done some of the actual connections a portrayed. But again everything that has to do with romance and character development is put on the back burner, so much so that you can't rightly even form an attachment to anyone. Apparently the remake was done to improve graphics and to add new content as well as add removed content back in. I never played the original but if it had less content than this than it must not have had much at all.

Having said all of that. It's not a bad game per se, but it really needs to have more player agency and more evenly distributed content between story and LIs. Especially if the chapters are going to be so forcibly short. With a bit of work this could be a five star game for me but it's not quite there yet.

Its not bad but not good either.
The art is great, i dont know how it looked before the remaster but as it is now it looks pretty good, some nice animations, some pointless animations(like doors opening, or kicks or punches).
The writing is ok, the world it self seems pretty deep and well established, but the characters talk too much unfortunately, and most of the conversations lead nowhere, at least for now.
I generally hate games that require multiple playthrough just to see every available lewd content, there is already very little of it in it and limiting it this way just ruins the game for me. The choices you make have a real impact on the progression of the story which is nice, but also forces you to skip or abandon certain character paths by doing so.
The lack of lewd content is quite disappointing, and the chapters being constantly interrupted by the developer is also immersion breaking and insufferable.
For all those high ratings i expected a whole lot better, but still, im curious to see where it goes, if it ever gets to be finished, which seems to be really far away.

The game is multiple choice VN with some sandbox elements.

Pros:
Very good art on some of the characters (engineer/ensign)
It's a cool setting with lots of potential
The sandbox "maps" look really good (shame they are under used)
MC can be white or black/male or female (great to see that in a game but it works best in sandbox type games)

Cons:
The pilot of the ship is one of the most obnoxious characters I have ever seen in a video game
There's tons of redundant dialogue
There's no basic in game soundtrack, the few moments that have sound it's really low quality
The cutest character in the game is your sister
Chapters are very short and repetitive
There's no gallery
Little H content
The MC behaves likes a clown
The game is not even finished and already got a remaster

Final thoughts: Game has been in development for a long time and only circa 30% of it is done. The developer puts most of their energy into creating different paths for the story instead of first making a solid game. What this means is you're going to have to repeat the game a lot to try different options. If you play through the game once like most people will do, you will miss a lot of the content. I was really looking forward to play this, but it was a disappointment. The game should be reworked to become a sandbox, and instead of "paths" we should simply have side missions for each character.

Very good renders. Story is quite good. Interesting and mostly relatable MC and LIs (did not interact much with the bimbo stereotype, I assume she is less interesting). (Seemingly) meaningful choices (did not play more than one path, so not sure how much the story can be influenced. Also, I played a male MC, no idea how well the female MC works). No actual sex yet on the path I played, but that's OK. UI good, game mechanics fine if sometimes a bit confusing to me (the whole combat mechanics part seems quite useless, during free-roams I was not always sure whether there is a concrete objective to fulfil or whether you just have to take in the atmosphere etc; but it was always fine in the end)
Mediocre music (generic epic stuff)

Note: Review is from the perspective of playing as a female protagonist, pursuing lesbian content, which seemed sensible since all of the routes are women, right? And it has the lesbian tag? Well, it didn't turn out that way. I also followed the walkthrough and tried a few different options/paths while playing before finally giving up. I played through Chapter 3 remastered version.

I like VNs that try to push a bit beyond the boundaries, I like Sci-Fi, I like female protagonist games, so it seemed like a good game to try, but I was let down immensely from chapter 2 onward. Mechanically, I see little point to the "combat" portion, which only shows up in chapter 3 for one scene, but seems pointless to me. I don't understand why this needs unique mechanics and buttons and all that, it seems like it'd be easier to just resolve it with traditional Visual Novel formatting. Again, I'm all for pushing the boundaries, but not just for the sake of it, there needs to be a point in it, and it seems to me there wasn't a lot of thought behind this aside from "novelty". The searching mechanic is similar, while it helps offer optional world-building and enhances the investigative aspect of the narrative, it makes repeat playthroughs tedious and takes up a lot of time (and no doubt dev time/effort). And since none of it is required, it feels meaningless in the end. It's kind of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, since engaging with it makes dialogue a bit more interesting, but the process itself is tedious and repetitive. This sort of thing is better for a top-down RPGMaker game.

The characters range from dull to awful. There are three main girls you can significantly interact with right now as a woman, and I chose Sarah first. Big mistake, she's the ditzy blonde stereotype taken to 100x. Now, this wouldn't be so bad, if it didn't make the parts where you try to interact with her through her VR and tabletop gaming absolutely insufferable. These segments struck me as promising at first, because hey, I like those things too! Then I actually got into the games and learned that trying to do anything with Sarah is a nightmare. It's like playing DnD with a horrible stereotype of "the worst DM ever". Mechanically they also have some RNG mechanics, which are annoying and tedious to sit through. Not to mention they serve as a vehicle for her rape fantasies, which is rather disgusting, but that's a personal taste thing I understand. However, it was very annoying that this was apparently the ONLY thing I could do that even slightly excited, there's barely any opportunities to flirt with her and what few you have do not get a good reaction. As for Annie, I don't have a lot of say about her except that I'm not really into trying to press myself on a girl who up-front tells me she's not a lesbian. Chris is tolerable, though honestly dry and dull at this point in the story, I was just not interested in whatever she was talking about at all. The other characters are pretty minor at this point, not much to add.

The narrative moves at a glacial pace, with only a tiny bit happening in each episode. You can control a lot of what you experience along the way. The art's very good. I just feel like there's nothing here "for me", even though it's the right setting for it, and it seems to be set up to try to draw people like me in. Besides that though, I feel like the character writing is pretty poor, because I'd need to be really invested in the characters/story to be drawn into all the minutia it tries to throw at me, and I'm not.

I don't usually leave bad reviews on games. If it's not what I like, or if it doesn't land with me, I just move on. But I felt like there's not enough warning labels on this repulsive work. And it really did seem promising for the first chapter, then immediately took a nosedive.

90% talking and chapters are shorter than my patience for it . Women all but say they want sex and to quote "Meet them tomorrow" only when you do you have to guess what line of questions and answers you give (None are pertinent to sex)to have sex, then there is the "Lets talk in broken Aussie or British slang" grammar errors. evidently this developer wants to make a AA game not a porn game. I wish I got the 3 hours back I wasted on this game.

The story behind review: I found out this game won review of 2020, so it must be good right?

Review warning: Sci-Fi is not my cup of tea. If you like Star Wars and Star Trek I can imagine this is one of those games you might want to try out.

So about the game. There is a lot of material to explore. Each character is individual in very visible way which you may like it or not. There are plenty of paths to take, you can befriend or blackmail characters, have sex or not. It is up to you. In total this game feels more like a novel than a video game. I believe it will take couple of times to explore every option.
I didn't play very far, as said Sci-Fi doesn't interest me, but it seems like there is some short of mystery plot will revolve around and you need to solve. Game is hinting all the time something is off, is it true or are you nuts? Go and find out!

Version - Ch.1 to 3 Remastered.

One of those games quite hard to rate. You can see there's a lot of work behind it, with tons of variations (you can play as white/black male/female MC and there are different content for each one, as relationships will grow differently) and an actual mistery plot, which is nice and refreshing for those like me who want something more from their games than just a bunch of sexual acts. You can discover 'clues' during the sandbox segments and some actions during those events are alternative, meaning there's a high replayability value. Also Dev says those events are fully skippable if you want (which means there would be another way to solve the mistery for those on the non-exploring side, I guess). Add the 3 crew members as love interests plus the 5 base personnel, all with different traits and interactions available (there are tons of convos and choices with them), and you get a quite complex and wide game that would keep delivering some unseen content replay after replay.

Which, of course, means that after 3 chapters and 2 years of development (although the game has experimented a great overhaul that explains that 'low' speed), when you reach the end of the available content you feel a bit dissapointed as plot hasn't advanced too much and lewd content is still on the short side (which is not bad, as relationships are developing after just 3 in-game days). But I wouldn't feel bad about it if I didn't notice all that 'filler' content: the hidden magazines and TV shows are generally a waste of dev's time and resources and the result is not as fun -for my tastes- as might be intended (although I guess there's some insight on the overall plot in some of them), and the 'Dev talk' segments at the start and end of each chapter are a bit annoying and not entirely skippable, although you can skip big chunks of them. I guess Dev's diehard supporters might find amusing to know something more about development and whatnot but for a casual player they break the game's rythm and, honestly, the brief tutorials to explain new functions could have been built in an in-game environment.

Which leads to me to the final 'meh' aspect of the game: the visuals. And I'm not talking about characters and environments, which are more than OK. But the design of the player's UI and working pad makes texts frankly hard to read: it's your old green digital text (in tiny size) over a small black screen - what 'futuristic' meant back in the 80's. I truly suggest a bit more effort to be put on changing that and a little less spent in interludes.

Overall, a 3 star game for me as it is, but it sure deserves a fourth star to reward the undeniable hard work and the story potential. Dev says she wants to create a game that players can play the way they want, and so far she's succeeding as she's creating a complex world that reacts to player's actions and show/hides info accordingly, which would lead to a quite immersive experience (if you can look past that fourth-wall breaking between chapters). Heavy Five would probably be a must play whenever it's finished, but it will be a long wait.

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Fell in love with the avatar, and the girl/woman behind it... never saw a game developer so responsive and present as Notty...
On top of that, great game all around. well worth playing (and supporting if you can afford it, wish I had the means)

This game stands apart form other VN's you've seen.

First off, the artwork and renders are fantastic. They're very well set up, detailed, posed, and executed. An absolute pleasure to look at, and the girls are nice too.... It's only the second game I've found where you can choose your gender and the first that lets you choose your colour as well. This sets you up with 4 different paths to start the story with. Added to that, each character has at least three "personalities" which opens up tons of more options. This brings a massive scope for replaying. The story and character development are excellent with fun dialogue.

The game also features unusual animations in places I've seen no other VN do them. There's also rudimentary combat, virtual role playing, and an excellent fem dom path.

The only cons I have are minor. I can't believe I'm saying this but there's almost too many choices and paths, it's hard to keep track. Fortunately you can rename the pages in the saves (don't forget there are more than 9) so you can keep track. The other minor gripe is that the game forum is on an old style web forum and not Discord.

This game is certainly one of a kind and doesn't seem to get the recognition it deserves. Notty is doing a fantastic job! Go and support her Patreon like I did.

Without a shadow of a doubt one of the top five games available here.

Pros:




Cons:

VERY highly recommended.

This is a review of the remastered section, I have not downloaded the old version.

I was a bet heistant to try this at first, but now I'm glad I did. This is a fun game with a few sandbox elements that don't detract from the game , the story is really interesting and I enjoy playing as a woman and then woo a Naive Ensign (but I digress). There's not a lot of sci-fi VN's around so I always enjoy them more as a sci-fi fan

The renders are always vey high quality and the animations as well. I'm told that there are hamsters to hunt around and find so I'll need to find them again sometime.
As someone who has never played a game of DND in his life I really enjoyed the DND or COC in this game with the Ensign and I like forward to corrupting her into liking women.
Nottravis the dev is a very nice person (although I may be biased because she's a brit) .

The game itself doesn't really have any sex scenes yet (or at least not on the route I'm taking) other than a description of an orc ravishing a character. However my inner pervert did enjoy the scene with everyone stripping down to their underwear.

TL: DR Play this game if you like a great story, don't play if you just want to get into the sex quickly.

This is a great game you can decide your protag race and sex which is rare. This sci fi word is interesting as well as the story. Choices are matters and conversations are good so the whole thing well writen. Render and girls are beautiful. Game is slowly with lewd content but there are some hot scene yet.

have you ever played a game so goooooooooood, that you are impatiently waiting for another slice?
for me this is the game... and also the reason I created this account.
The story is one of those believable sci-fi tales of what could happen in a distant feature, humanity colonising space and the struggle that comes with it.
I've played the remastered and the original chapters. And I'm pleased that niether protagonist feels neglected in the re-mastered version,,,
the superb quality of renders.... have you ever seen dames in game so gorgeous yet realistic and believable? and don't get me started about Becca, my pp was signing in joy when learning the ropes of the game.

assets and environment: those are heavily tewaked daz assets, but everything fits so perfectly.. the animations had me from the start... this game is definitly a labour of love

lewdness and sex: there hasn't been any sex in the remastered, but if there was, it wouldn't be believalbe. the writing is full of wit and innuendoes that make up for it....

To ophion we ride

An enjoyable start to a story of crazed space chaos. Strong at immersion, the characters feed of player choices which invokes vivid emotions through expression, dialogue and perhaps most importantly implications to the main story. (I learned the hard way what can happen when a thoroughly disgraceful and unworthy officer boards a space ship.) I feel the warmth put into the game through the attention to detail touching all aspects of the experience. It has been a pleasant surprise, highlighting what can be achieved when a developer who thinks outside the box is greeted by players open to new experiences. What an elixir of happiness I stumbled across!

A fun, well-made sci-fi adult vn. The writing is consistently good, the story is written with humor and heart as well as intrigue both in the plot and between characters, dialogue choices impact the characters reactions towards the mc as well as the story progression and the character cast is great, each with their own backstories and personalities that play out well between each other. The visuals, especially in the new updated version, are well done with some good animations thrown in there both sexual and story related.

The game looks fun! It appears it will actually have a story and the characters do have ... character. I certainly do enjoy that more than a perfunctory excuse to get different pictures of boobs.

The characters look good and the renders - well made. The game is in first person view which looks good, *but I am somewhat conflicted about.*



*Personal taste note: For my first playthrough I picked a female MC because I rather enjoy looking at lesbian content. I both don't want to identify with the female MC and I'd prefer to see her. POV might probably spoil some of the fun for me in the naughty scenes in this case.

Review based on Heavy Five [Ch. 1 Remastered]
The wait for the remaster have been worth it, I was adamant to not play the game until the remaster release when I found out about it a few month ago and I don't regret my decision.
The renders and animations are great, the writing is excellent and I didn't expect to like playing a female MC so much (I might even like it more than male MC).
I really liked the branching paths and clickables, I don't think I've ever seen a sandbox game done that well, generally it's an afterthought but here it feels truly woven into the narrative.
I can't wait for Chapter 2 to see the consequences of my choices and meet the staff on Ophion