Others - Hilichurl's Ambition [v1.2.3.3] [Theofrad]

harder than goblin burrows.The game was zero tutorial and want us to play hard management game.All controls and play are not refine well either.Only game was good about was genshin and ai.A lot of things can be improve do it or not was dev choice.So i can`t vouch people for that may or may not happen.One star is harsh so i change it back to two.Game is har?No basic game is really simple if you play it you will get a hang of it,but there are alot of things unexplain and you can test even you test you don`t know what happen for sure.

Did you ever wish your h-game had a gameplay good enough to (almost) make you forget what you started it for in the first place ?

Hilichurl's Ambition is a war management game : you have unites, a map with "bases", and you move your army to attack and conquer various places. Battles are on a grid system, where you have to use the strength and positionning of you units to win. For those knowing the game it is a parody of, you will recognise a very good adapation of the elemental reaction systeme. You also have some ressource management (troops, food, abyss power, minerals, colony building), and when you defeat enemy heroines... well, let's just say that probably what you initially came for.

A few things of note :

- The game is in active development. What this means is that (as some very unhappy people mentioned) there isn't much of an in-game tutorial. Between 1.0.2 (where most rating were made) to 1.1.0, quite a few new feature (and good ones) were added, and more are announced. So it wouldn't make sense to make too much of a tutorial at this point. However, the UI is very easy to understand, and there is both a readme that explains what you need to know, and an unofficial guide reference in the first post that explains the rest. (If you are stick on how to play, read the guide)

- The gameplay is far too addictive for your own good. Beware. You may start a "quick game to see how it is", blink and it's two days later. Unlike a lot of other h-game, this one centers around a real gameplay, and not just filling a counter to unlock the next CG.

- The game makes you earn what you get. Be ready for a few game over before you understand how to beat some of the enemies. But it makes the victory that much more pleasant.

- Some action you might take can have... very bad consequences. It's best to save every few turns, just to be sure you didn't annoy the wrong personne at the wrong time. (We all did it. We all died from it and we all swore not to do it again before being A LOT more prepared).

Is it worth playing ?
It depends on you : if you're looking for a brainless game where you just unlock a collection of CG by clicking "next", you should be on your way.
If you want challenge and gameplay that is far too good for a h-game parody, you might just have you wish fulfilled.

Update for 1.1.2 :
New endgame contend added, new side-bosses added, new CGs added... Some fixes for troublesome situation in endgame colonies, coming with a small preview of the nex big update.

Finally, a few precision, seeing other reviews :
- Bad AI art ?
--> The art looks exactly like with the preview images show. If you don't like the preview images, then the art may not be for you. If the images are not a problem, then you will enjoy the art.

- Instant game over ?
--> Close but not quite : the rules are : if you keep your main base ungarded/poorly garded, something bad may happen to you. If you attack someone that, lorewise, should not be attacked... make a save before doing so, and keep it until you know what the consequences are. If you increase a counter until a new ennemy attacks... the difficulty may suddenly go up. Follow theses rules and you should be fine.

- Game too hard ?
-->There are guides available (link in the first post), and you can ask questions in the discussion. Getting stuck early game is usually because you missed a key mechanic (hence the guides, since the tutorial is minimal). Getting stuck late game is because you need a good strategy for some content (and a lot of peoples will be happy to give it).

The UI is horrid and the tutorial is non-existence. The AI cg is somewhat alright.

I have played for solid 1.5 hr and still unable to go further than the 2 closest node even on easy difficulty, on the base there is a page with 6 room, 2 on top for farm (i guess, idk its not explained whatsoever), bottom left for weekly information, and the rest, although give the impression of clickable on the cursor, doesn't really do anything.

very fun management game i cant wait to see what will be added in the future huge potential right now as all the frame work is in place to make it a long and interesting game to play with alot of rewards along the way

more games like this it's really awesome just like goblin burro but better, the ai images aren't to bad and an be added on later, the game play is fun and challenging, i really hope this keeps getting updated for inazuma+ only gripe that i have with the game so far is the menu not explaining things. and a better description of the visions and how to restore them.

UPDATE: As of the 1.0.2 update, they have added a feature that lets you sacrifice hilichurls for abyss power. This fixes the most game-breaking issue for me, so I am updating this to 4 stars.

ORIGINAL REVIEW: This could be a great game.

Emphasis on could.

First you have to figure out how to actually play it. The game explains very little to you when you start off. I had to figure out how most of the UI and game functions work via trial and error, with several game restarts once I realized I'd messed up something I should've been doing 60 turns ago.

Once you get past all that you can finally start playing the game for real... sort of. We'll get into that.

The premise of this game is that it's a parody of Genshin Impact, which I've never played. It seems like a fun universe based on my experiences here. You plays as one of the original game's evil factions--apparently that universe's equivalent of goblins. You progress by conquering settlements and capturing various female characters. As you capture more gals, you use them to breed bigger armies with better units. There's an element/magic system that is pretty fun as well. It interacts with almost every single unit type in some way, except your very basic ones. It's a great core loop, but there are some huge flaws right now that prevent it from being fun long-term.

I'd say the biggest flaw is that the game punishes you pretty bad for actually collecting characters to breed. There are 3 types of collectible characters based on the source material--I'll give them my own labels here: heroines, named NPCs, and generic NPCs. The heroines are your main source of magical units and magical characters; the named NPCs let you improve the stats of your hilichurl units; and the generic NPCs can be used for labor, for building up your pool of basic units, or are consumed in the named NPC mechanic. First of all, the game has an instant fail mechanic if you collect heroines faster than you progress on the world map. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if the game gave you more warning, but the warning comes literally as you are clicking the end-turn button that would lose you the game. The other problem, though, is that you don't always have very good control over the pace of heroine encounters. Many of them will come to you, and if you win the fight, they you don't have a choice but to add them to your roster, thereby accelerating the fail state. The second issue is that you have zero control over the breeding of generic NPCs. Every turn, your basic hilichurls will breed the generic NPCs you have in your pens, making more basic hilichurl units. The problem is that there is a food mechanic, and soon you'll be stuck in a positive feedback loop where your breeding of new hilichurls will outpace how much food you can accumulate. Then you death spiral and all your units die. There are various interactions to use up generic NPCs instantly, but you need them to spend on the named NPC upgrades, so you are both forced to acquire and keep generics around to improve your units, but also punished for doing so with an uncontrollable death spiral loop. Not great.

In general the game just suffers from never having enough info to properly strategize. There are hidden "gotcha" encounters that can instantly end your run. There's very little advance feedback of your resources--you only ever get a report from your turn just prior. You don't really know how much damage your units do. Etc, etc.

I guess the final issue I have with the game is just how clunky the battle map is. It can sometimes be incredibly difficult to select your units. Your mouse will be directly over your unit, but the game just won't register it. You end up having to pixel hunt just to select your unit to move it. Very, very frustrating.

I've read some other complaints about lack of H content. There is enough for me but your mileage may vary.

Anyway, as I said, the core loop is solid, but there are some mechanics that need refinement. Or at least some feedback. Until then I have to give this 2 stars.

For now 3.5 stars.

This game is great (in the future), it needs more art, more playble functionality and a better interface, I played for 3 hours and I found a new button.... it surprised me lol because it's hard to understand what functionality you have available. And about that main hall, how to gather that purple stuff, to much time you have to waste for better understanding of things like this i wrote above.

While the general gameplay loop is fun, it suffers from the same crippling problem as almost all Japanese H strategy game (talk about some narrow category...) - surprise "you lose" events.

Effectively, unless you've played the game before, or are playing according to a walkthrough, you will eventually be hit by some unforeseeable event where you are attacked with units that are effectively undefeatable unless you have followed one specific strategy (or avoided doing some specific thing, or made sure to do thing X by turn Y, etc).

Given that such surprise events are fundamentally antithetical to planning and strategizing - both because you need to have information the game doesn't give you, and because it forces you to play according to one specific strategy, removing any actual strategizing - it makes for a poor strategy game.

The core gameplay loop is very good, and without that critical issue, we'd be looking at 4-5 stars. As such, I'll be generous and give it two stars, rather than the one it probably deserves for failing to understand the fundamentals of strategy games.

Looking at the game from the cover and screenshots, one would assume this would be a typical AI slop, in terms of porn which it just typical AI. However the strong suit of this game isn't the porn but instead the simple yet addicting gameplay loop.

On a surface level one would view this game as a simple turn base strategy where you steamroll everyone within an hour or two . However said game instead forces to sit down and actually think about your army movement and if you should wisely take battles or not. Alongside within said battles you actually have to put into consideration the amount of units you lose during the early and mid-game. As every unit lose is painful and forces you to waste AP in order to replenish.

Unlike other similar games of this genre that being goblin burrow, I actually feel like I'm controlling an army and enacting a slow yet painful conquest of Teyvat.

Although the game is clearly still in development I can honestly see a lot of potential just from base management, territory conquest and battles. I would rate these three as the main reason you would play this game. I do warn people don't come in with the mindset that your going to unlock the porn quickly, you will actually need to invest time to earn said porn through conquest etc.

Ofc this game has some janks that being the frankly horrible UI and lack of player guide to assist players in explaining game mechanics. Alongside there is some missing content or personally lack of depth in the combat that being actual terrain which can give buffs or debuff on unit type, or overall balancing the snowball once the player is able to pump out a bunch of doomstacks. But overall I believe this game has a lot of potential and the developer behind said game is on to something since no one really made a Genshin Impact Turn base strategy game before.

An intensely addicting strategy game hiding beneath the curtain of a porn game. Only two nations available, and the game is already fascinating, with four more completed nations waiting to be released and a fifth one that will eventually start adding to the pool.

You will be so engrossed in trying to figure out breeding chains and supply lines that you will realize it turned seven in the morning two hours ago. Keep an eye on this one, it only gets better from here.

This is pretty good, I accidentally spent all day just playing it.
The main issue is that it's missing descriptions on how a lot of things work, and the english translation is lacking or missing in some places. I wish I understood the game better.

Really good strategy fan made game of Genshin Impact Parody made by example of Goblin Burrow. You imprision girls, they get taken away you your cave and get raped by your units to birth more units, you have generic NPCs and Heroines from OG game. Heroines has ability to birth you stronger units after you defeat them. I guess i finished current game content(v1.0.1) on easy difficulty, since i obtained every heroine and counquered every teritory to 100%, here are props and cons for this game by far:

Props:
+Genshin impact world: its fun, fantasy and goofy, with cartoony aestetics
+Tactical combat is actually good, made on simple hexagonal battlefield with diverse unit roles
+well balanced tactical gameplay, Progression, base organisation, resource managements

Cons:
-Lack of explanation or information. Game doesnt explain most of mechanics, and doesnt display certain info: battle stats like spell damage or scaling, heroine resistance loss, which is important, because once they are broken, you cant really repair their element, only corrupt them, and a lot more
-UI and Artwork Clunkiness. Its really clunky, you will probablly miss some of ui features if you are new for this game and it might frustrate you so be prepared
-Although combat is fun, it can be frustrating, sometime its based on luck if you are trying to beat certain enemies, sometimes you prepare your base to beat Lumine, but actually Alice is comming and she obliterates your squishy damage dealers, certain units can jump around map, or run away, and even if you experiment with units, if you are weak, you will need some luck to catch them
-Auto battle feature butchers your units like it needs them for thanksgiving

+-AI artwork?
+-2 frame animation, without moaning effects, but its voiced
+-A lot of unfinished features, which might show promise that this nice game might be improved in future, its nice Dev might be interested to entartain us further, despite it being fan parody game

Conclusion:
For fans of Genshin impact and tactical game this might be 5 star game. I like tactical games and i played Genshin casually as Free to play and stopped, but i still liked this game. 2 frame H-animated sprites are well executed, and if you are okay with your heroines being impregnated and violated, this game is for you.

I ignored this one at first because AI porn doesn't usually do it for me, but on my second pass I decided to try it and I'm glad I did. I've played many dozens of games on this site and only a small handful have had a genuinely engrossing gameplay loop; this is one of them. (I'm into turn-based games and resource management, so your own mileage may vary.)

In terms of areas for improvement, in my opinion the biggest thing is to make the battle UI a bit smoother. A lot of the commands are janky and don't give enough feedback, and a few seem to be bugged, for example sometimes the game thinks that I want to move and shoot when I only want to shoot. I think this should be a higher priority than more content since it's an interface that the player spends 80% of their time interacting with. Nonetheless, off to a very promising start.

Amazing and well planned strategic game.
Balance: A little bit easy.
Minus: -AI images.
So far this game is top tier, have some bug (But the game still in oven so not need to rush it),
-Dismissing unit button is hard to find.
I can't wait to see the complete game.

Had quite a bit of fun with the game as a fan of strategy and 4X games in general. Though the game itself is still a bit rough, it has a solid basis. Will await further updates to see how it pans out.

To go a bit more in detail:

The combat is not that complicated but it lends to be fairly complex if needed and fairly fun, using Genshin Impact reactions as its basis, as well as a formula based on the number and power of the troops present in a unit.
A really big flaw in this though, is the inability of the player to freely choose the starting positioning of your own unit, which should really be fixed as soon as possible.

Second thing is power scaling: you start in Mondstadt, if you manage to get through it, the rest of the game is a breeze comparing to the pain in the ass that is killing Venti and Jean.
A more reasonable approach would be to instead expand outwardly toward Liyue as well, while managing Mondstadt, but you only have 5 AP and you have resources to manage, teams and replace and so on. Splitting your attention can have miserable results, as being attacked on both sides is both an annoyance as well as adding to the grind (as you have to fight elite enemies manually every turn unless you want to lose half your army).

From a game design perspective, I would advise either make each nation far more powerful than the previous one so as to not trivialize it, or to hugely debuff allied units until you obtain the Gnosis of the previous nation, so as to give a clear path for the game to play out while also permitting people to start invading new nations with more advanced units for the weaker characters (like Xiangling for example).

The thing i really have a gripe with is resources management. We need a way to turn off breeding (as simply killing off hillichurls would be absurd) because food is a runaway train that always turns into a wreck, even at max level farm. Same goes with actually gathering resources, as while sweep is useful, actually having some mines/farms you can conquer and put teams of Hillichurls on would make a lot of sense.

As for the art, is don't really have a gripe with AI, as i understand that not everyone can draw and has to make do, but the way it is delivered gets pretty boring, fast. I played the game mostly because i found it fun mechanically and a novelty, but i found the interactions with the characters themselves to be very lacking and uninteresting.

All in all, the game has been pretty fun and i have high expectations of its future. Good luck.

great game not hard to understand basics and conquering land is fun this is one of the few games I spend 2 days to finish my only advice would be is to not go after boss girls as long as you can especially the one with bombs you need corrosion army and maybe same champion to kill her over all its and good foundation for game all I want is more content

Absolutely solid foundations, but I definitely would not call this a 1.0. I really like how theres genuine strategic gameplay to it, and the game has to be praised on that alone - its there, and it works well for what it is. However, the game is utterly begging for a comprehensive tutorial - before you start playing, do yourself a favour and look for a guide in the comments here, because without that so much goes unexplained (and even with that, I am still left with questions.). There is also the fact that I feel that the UI really should be worked upon - its quite unintuitive, and sometimes rightclicks wont register when I want them to cause Im not right clicking in a specific area. I will also say Im not a bit fan of the ai cg - I personally found that the unit pictures were fine, and same goes for the non-unique gals, but I found the ai cg art for the main gals in the actual scenes and close ups wholly uninteresting (but then again, I tend to not find ai cg unappealing in general, so this may just be a me thing). Eitherway though, Im looking forward to seeing how this gets polished and worked on in the future, cause Im a big fan of it conceptually.

I like some old style game where you discover the game yourself with minimal explanation. Especially on management and strategy games it feels good. If you are looking for something with mix of visual novel looks somewhere else. This game is good old strategy & management game. Art is AI assisted which is okay in my book.

It isabsolutely playable v1.01 with critical bugs fixed.I would suggest going more heavy on management for future releases because same gameplay would eventually be boring since there will be many nations. I hope there will be more variety in future releases.

It's a great Genshin parody strategy game about world conquest, breeding girls and growing army of creatures. I think the pros outweigh the cons enough to receive 5 stars.
Few words of advice to new comers, try first on easy because it's not easy at all, there's a lot of UI/UX jank that needs to be understood first to enjoy, but once you do there's lots to be done. Take it slow and don't rush, threat can go down and it's best to manage it well before you get crushed early by Noelle or Alice.
There's a good amount of unit variety, both on player and enemy side, some battles even expect to engage with elemental system borrowed from OG material. There were moments where I thought this game is simply unbalanced and I can't win, but then would find a unit that fits the scenario well and it just clicks. Maybe except for Cloud Retainer, she sucks. Breeding and corrupting is enjoyable if you're into that, I'd prefer if it wasn't AI art but eh, it's aight I guess. Didn't encounter any bugs myself, it's just that battle controls are a bit counter intuitive, I'd expect being able to select units and then choose action, not click to move or hover over button to be able to use, especially with sometimes poor hover detection that happens when units are all grouped up. These are mostly nitpicks, once you get used to it, it's okay-ish.
The biggest complaint to have at this point is absolute lack of tutorialisation, but that's it really. There's a text doc inside game download with some explanations, I reluctantly looked into it after my 2 failed attempts. Can't wait to see what more will come from this.

Apologies in advance, english is not my first language.

Amazing game with actual gameplay that feels rewarding. I wouldn't say this game is 1.0, more like 0.1 but don't let this discourage you. The game already has well over 10 hours of gameplay. I completed the game and it took me like 15 hours, maybe more? There is a looot of content so far and the foundation for more future updates is already well laid down. Really addictive game. The only downside right now is no guidance about how everything works and even with the readme file of the dev, a lot of it stays confusing.

The good parts:

This game is so damn satisfying. From your lair to how combat work is simple and pleasing to see. There is actual gameplay and thinking required. Not much mind you but the balance is perfect as it's simple once you get it.

The strategy is there and you cannot brute force through everything so you have to carefully manage your troops. Against hard enemies, this won't cut it but if you upgrade your troops then you definitively feel the difference and this just feels rewarding for the time you spent to breed them.

The breeding is what I love. Each heroine you capture has a certain inclination toward an element so having a lot of heroines means more choices which means stronger troops. You can also break them mentally or keep them sane for different results so its up to you to manage and/or decide what you want.

I like the art, sure it's AI and most of the time I hate it but in this case it's well done and it fits well I feel like. Some may not like it, up to you.

The bad parts:

Pretty much what a lot of people says, the game lacks instructions on how everything works.


Overall this is a very good game, the best I had in months and I am a regular on this website.