Ren'Py - Abandoned - Lab Rats 2 [v0.51.1] [Vren]

PROS :
- The game's concept (managing a lab to sell and use for yourself a vast arsenal of sex drugs) is amazing. Seriously, that's the main reason why I played this game that long : I wanted to see how far I could go.
- Some of the characters are somewhat nice and having decent stories. Well, decent for an hentai game that is.

CONS :
- A bit grindy.
- Aside from key characters (they are quite a few), random females can end up with really weird ass character traits. You can often tell which character was handcrafted and which one was randomly generated.
- The sex scenes SUCK BALLZ. No penis getting sucked/penetrating (it just doesn't exist), ugly ass postures (!!!), veeeeery few sex positions. I completely nullify your will to play after a while because your rewards for managing a good business (read "fucking women") is terribly disappointing.

TL;DR : Good concept. Terrible sex scenes.

Great game, if you overcome the initial difficulty curve, you will find yourself with a game that is a masterpiece. True, it lacks images, especially faces, and even different texts, but there are so many possibilities it offers...

One of the best erotic games of all time.

Thank you Vren, from the bottom of my heart. THANK YOU!!!

Pros: Idea is interesting. ++
Business management part is okay.+
Special characters 'stories' are okay.
Cons: Sex scenes suck.--
Generated characters are a bit boring.-
New save for every update. --------

Overall this is a very grinding game especially when it is updated. You need to replay everything you already played. It quickly become very boring.

The single most important lesson for porn games -- and the reason why I rated this low with this game: do not try to push the limits of Ren'Py engine even if you are some real coding master because that way the engine would LAG AS F*CK AND BUG OUT A LOT. This game could have been a real masterpiece had it been based on some other better engine.

This is the game I've played the most out of all the games on the site. The science setting is production advertising and other businesses. True, I only play the modified version it is much more interesting. One of the best games both in content and duration. Brilliant F95.

It's not without it's faults and there is a lot to be desired, but there is a lot of work put into this game that actually works to create an interesting business management and sex game experience.

I do recommend highly to use the F95 Forums mod as it easily triples the amount of content (adding things like threesomes and optional NTR)

Great management game, developing and selling potions to stay afloat whilst trying to sleep with whoever you want.

Somewhat barebones in terms of storyline but the focus on developing the business mechanics more than make up for it at this point for me.

Enjoying this game a lot.
far more than i expected from a heavy mix of text based and 3d art game.

I like the customization options and hope to see more.

The asex animations (if enabled) are very static. Some dont change during different actions. Such as missionary and piledriver sharing the same image.

I really hope to see the creator continue to fill out this already plump game.

I am at the end of my rope for this game after nearly 5 years of watching and playing.

The last few updates have finally taken the serum business model from being a needed background item to a over arching focus so much so that almost all sexual elements might as well be tossed aside for how little importance they are.

The code is done by someone who is clearly a trained and experienced programmer and to his credit his systems seem to be durable even in the face of massive cheating and attempts to edit his code for a better gameplay experience.

That is good because cheating is really the only way you will in a reasonable amount of time see what honestly little adult content there is in the game. The women in this game are little more than paperdolls (at times rather ugly ones at that) that you can dress up and read dialog about but otherwise it is on you to fill in the blanks.

No animations, no renders beyond the paperdoll changing position or getting a cum layer placed on them, and no depictions of the MC. So for all of the thick layers of business management you have to cut through to there is a desperately thin layer of adult content in this adult game.

The UI and the missing parts that should have been in place from the beginning only make the experience worse unless you are someone who has literally played virtually every update of this game for years and remember what vague sequence of events are needed to unlock certain features. (The cousins strip club, the tutoring events, and Nora's special serum traits for example)

There is no mission log, no hints that I can reliably point to that can offer guidance on what to do next, and there are so many little subsystems and variables to keep track of that you can often find yourself at a lost as to what actions do what and how that will change a dozen other actions outcome.

So we have a game that is mostly hard grind work for little adult pay off. Add to that the lack of a main story beyond a few loosely related events that really don't count as a story and characters that 99.99% you don't care about and don't want to even look at often times due to the very rough looks some of the generated women have.

You get for all of this a negative experience whose only redeeming feature is serving as a stress test for just how tightly and complex of a codebase Ren'py can handle.

I was going to give this game a two star rating but after typing all this out its so lacking in actual adult content, the reason why anyone on this site is downloading this game that I can only give it a one star rating.

In a morbid sense of curiosity if by some act of God this game is completed I will give it one last playthrough to see what this games final form looks like.

for 0.50.1

Last played this in 2019 or so. Tried it again for v0.50 (halfway there ???) and it's still the same messy autism project it always was.

The dev is probably highly skilled at Ren'Py development at this point because this game is like trying to paint the Mona Lisa with Microsoft Paint. There's so many systems going on in this game, and it is really janky even on this light Visual Novel engine.

That being said, if you're new to the game, the whole game can be summarized as "There's a serum for that!". There's a lot of fetish content covered which you can implement on NPCs using serums.

By 0.50.1 a lot more content has been added to the unique NPCs (like family) with more unique questlines, dialogues etc. which is good. They don't feel like the other cookie cutter NPCs so much.

There's a lot of serums to choose from (IMO there are too many at this point) but they allow you to change pretty much everything relating to NPCs.

While all this sounds good on paper, it's still extremely hit or miss. If you like management games where you develop your own head canon then you'll probably like this. The problem is that while researching and trying serum combos is fun, there's a lot of busywork involved in trying them out on NPCs. Especially if you don't cheat. The mastery grind is still annoying as ever.

NPCs have their own stats that need to be handled. Take the pregnancy mechanic for example, there's birth control effectiveness, peak fertility date, decreasing fertility based on age etc. The game could benefit from simplifying a lot of this into something more normie friendly.

As the last time I played I quickly reached a plateau where it just got too boring. There's not much to do once you've got your Tier 3 potions and tried them out. In a more traditional game there would be some overarching plot where you would, for example, try to take over the city using your serums but there's no such thing here. The main motivation is still "running a business" which isn't that fun IMO.

Currently on my 4th playthrough, version 0.50
And I have never used cheats since it somewhat defeats the purpose of this game in my opinion.
This game is a business management simulator with corruption as the main fetish. The closest comparison I'd say is HHS+

Negative:
-Can be very grindy
-So grindy that I skip through most of the sex scenes
-UI is ugly but not the worst I've seen
-Models are meh, some look bad some look okay, but all of them look kind of weird. Good enough to jerk off to, but far from beautiful
-only a handful of unique NPC with attached storylines
-little endgame content

Positive:
-Fun and rewarding management gameplay
-Top notch writing. Girls have different personalities, and somehow the text is more of a turnon than the visuals. When I first got this game I was mastrubating all day.
-Tons of fetish content
-Rewards creativity
-Multiple cool systems: Running the business, outfit designer, dating system, sex minigame etc etc
-Overall while grindfest very rewarding

Verdict:
Do play if you are into the tags/fetishes, mainly corruption, and like truly open games. NTR entirely opt-in btw.
Do not play if you are looking for a story game or are opposed to grinding a bit.

The first game was ok

This one was made like: "lets put some crackhead whores faces on tube-man bodies and then we see..."

I've been waiting for the devs to build some better girls on the game but the machine the are using to do the game is shit! It will never get better!

But you know, some guys like the game and will do a comment telling you to download. Do it at your own risk.

To be compleaty clear I'd probably give this game a 3 but overall I think it can be good just not my cup of tea.

The game offers a decent range of customisation and free play.
However it doesn't feel all that fleshed out. This maybe my own bias here but you don't need to give me 60 characters when I barely care about any of them. Clipping errors happen on wardrobe items, there are about 5 personalitys, and a few unique characters.

Personally I would advise grabbng the mods for the extra content and the cheating though that might be me wanting to jump to the good bits.

I like the customization options for all the girls, and the taboo system, it is a nice addition especially for the incest fans ^^ The gameplay is kind of fun, I enjoy running the business. It could probably be a bit more balanced, getting rich is a little too easy. The faces of girls are somehow a bit odd looking, they could use a revamp to make them look a bit younger.

Im a fan... Although there isnt really any b-g scenes i can still appreciate the scenarios and things available to do. Have not played the first one but i see no need to at this point in my venture with this game, hope theres a lab rats 3 in the works but most likely there is not.

The main content is grind.

I do enjoy the corruption aspect to it and am a fan of the pregnancy content.
I am wondering if there is a secret... grow up potion for your children. I don't think there is. I'm just too degenerate xD

Anyway,

I played for like 3 hours before starting to use console commands.
Then I played for about 4 hours a day for 3 days. Give or take.

I am at the point where it feels like it will just be endless corrupt them all but it's the same anyway kind of content.

Did I enjoy it? Mostly.
Do I recommend it? eh. If you want something to keep you occupied. Don't expect anything too amazing.

That said, I can see this game took a lot of work. It's pretty cool. I just don't like the grind focus that much.

I loved the first game and definitely wanted more but every time I play LR2 I just find it's a disappointing management slog with almost no interesting story or porn. Many things about this game are tedious and/or boring. The character models are generic and uninspired. Honestly if you're going to waste so much time do this little with Daz? (I think) you might as well just spend your time doing so much more in Honey Select. Sure the models don't look the best but to my understanding it's much easier to do everything in it. I'd MUCH rather have at least the non random characters have specific outfit sets to match corruption levels instead of having to tediously build outfits every time. At the very least have the outfits pre generated and ready to go and make creating new ones optional. While making money isn't all that hard researching at a speed that makes the game enjoyable requires cheats. Hiring and assigning the same 5 randomly generated characters is uninteresting. Having to fiddle with what's being produced and what's getting sold and the thresholds for it is always a pain in the butt. The UI is a pain to navigate requiring extra clicks that just don't need to exist. Transformations are just bigger tits, height, and marginally thicc which is seriously lacking in the possibilities of what you COULD do with a sciency corruption/transformation game. It's also buggy with some quest lines just failing or maybe that's as far as they go? I don't know because there's no in game guide to remind you of what should be happening with the various story threads that do exist. The game feels like it has progressed very little in the years it has been in development. I stopped supporting Vren on Patreon a long time ago because of this. Even with the mods it doesn't make it make it worth it.

TL;DR go play Holstein Girls instead. It's really great and even has replayability via its many ending variations and achievements. https://cowgirldev.itch.io/holstein-girls

This game is so good. A little buggy at times but definitely creative and fun to play. I love management games and serums and mind control are so fun in a game anyways so this one has it all. I think a little more story could be added but its always coming out with updates so we'll definitely get there but that is really my only complaint.

Some great ideas. Performs well.
But 1 star since it's abandoned.

As others keep mentioning,
Lots of bugs
Lots of spelling errors

Not really worth it since you have to start from scratch any time there is a new update.

The first Lab Rats was much more fun as well as a much lighter game play experience.

The good: great architecture and compelling ideas .
The bad: careless artistic modeling and lots of bugs .
The game experience was good .
There is room for improvement in the developer 's technique .

The author stopped updating and used an excuse called "open source production".
And yet he continues to receive donations on the P site.