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

Been following this game for a while, played the first one years ago, at first I thought this was stupid and felt the game was another one of those crazy ambitious game from a dev who previously made a good game, but now they're going full todd howard and getting way in over their heads. But surprisingly, nah. The lad actually delivered. And the mods are good

With mods very good, without mods missing a lot of qol. Updates are small and infrequent but it's getting there. Seems like it would do well if the mod and main developers start to work together but that may cause some friction on the money side

A decent manipulation/corruption sandbox.

Kind of confusing to get started, but it's not difficult to get the hang of, just a bit confusing.

Just missing proper animation and voice acting. Right now, the animations basically equate to a breathing 2d image.

my best game. sandbox, management, drug, many girls, costumes, different situations. except model. In this world, I can play situations that I cannot do in real life. This is the reason I like sandbox games, and it is a game that best utilizes the strengths of sandbox. and except model.

It's a gem as far as a corruption/management game goes. It has nice Mom and sister corruption, and optional NTR with them. The customization surely is one of the most advanced out there. It's 8/10 right now, but it can get as high as 10 for sure.

Instead of fleshing out a story, working on an endgame, fixing previously implemented broken things that were shoe-horned in the dev decides to shove in more half-baked broken ideas and more busy work. He recently added in unbalanced economics that make the grind even longer with no benefit. A lot of potential wasted trying to turn this porn game into some weird pseudo-business simulator. Making this basically unplayable without heavy use of console commands to bypass the grind.

I should also add that several taboo quests added in 0.46.0 to further increase the grind are *still* broken.

Lab Rats 2 is one of the most mechanically engaging business management games I've ever played. However, you're probably here for the sex and on that front, and the game is a bit light on content in its current form.

Not to worry though: there is a vibrant modding community (Search: Lab Rats 2 Mods) that continuously delivers a bunch of quality content and QoL features, while the game's creator continues to push the envelope on core game mechanics and balance.

This game is very much still a work in progress, but given the above points, I'm happy to be along for the ride.

Will the author deign to make new hairstyles, figures and things with a personage? Well, such squalor is just .. The game is great! There are simply no competitors! But this nonsense with the fact that 50 people wear one face is a fail ..

This is a tough review to write, because on one hand I really enjoy innovative sandbox games like this that are a big risk for developers, but on the other the difficulty curve is horribly managed and the game feels downright unplayable without cheats.

In a way, the problem is that the game just puts up too many obstacles to get to the good parts. So many game systems are just tuned wrong. The energy system decreases way too quickly, both for players and the NPCs. You can't earn money fast enough. The negative responses to events with family members are way too strict for how difficult they are to avoid.

Basically any mechanic tied to difficulty is set wrong, and some of them are WAY off. Money for example should probably be increased by a factor of 10, or at least there should be an easy mode where it's nowhere near as taxing to manage.

And the problem is that the interactions with the girls, the affection grinding, creating new syrums, managing your business and instituting new policies - all that stuff is genuinely awesome. There is a solid game buried beneath all that crap. Granted the art isn't amazing, and the 5 or 6 intimacy poses get old pretty fast, but honestly those aren't nearly as much of a problem as the game's mechanical problems.

I wish that the lack of content were the only thing wrong with this game, but as it is now I can't recommend playing this at all without a list of console commands.

Game is just the first 5 minutes of playing on rinse and repeat. Gets boring very quickly. Literally the same shit over and over. Each update adds virtually no actual progress content, just more cosmetic changes.

In theory, game sounds good, but the developer clearly became lazy with adding meat to the bone after some part. Each update is minimal addition to sex system, some new reactions to one or another scene, some taboo scenes nobody wanted, technical bug fixes. What was the last time there was actual new content addition to the game? New clothes? Completely new poses or new characters with their own storyline? Where is actual storyline progression? Mod to this game can already offer more than the actual game has x)

As a business managing game, it is par. After the first 10 minutes or so, any and all challenge is gone.

I was going to give 4 stars to this game based on the fact that I don't think the sex scenes are up there with the best games. Having said that, this game is great for another reason. It lets you do your thing and explore it however you like once you get to understand how it works. It excels at giving you control of a business, and adds quite a lot of different possible interactions with the characters.

The fact that it can be modded easily because it has a great codebase (best I have seen from this kind of games), made me delve into it, and learn from it.

Overall, if you want a quick fap, this might not be for you. However, if you give it a chance, you can discover a gem.

Easily the best harem management style game to the point it might actually beat Free Cities in its current states, and one of the best games on the site.

There is one glaring downside thought, which is the very steep learning curve that may easily require restarts on playthroughs after sinking in significant time without any content.

But if you are lucky and figure out how to stabilize your cash flow, the game is incredible.

v0.44.1

Game kept showing up on my pregnancy tag searches so I gave it a try.I played it like 3-4 hours and not too far into it I believe at is where I gave up.There maybe MINOR SPOILERS.

Boy...too much management.Too too much.I'm up for a little fiddling around the game mechanics but this one made me put my dick away and start strategizing about how to actually run an efficient business and a social life.

There are 5 divisions in your company which produce and sell serums.R&D,Supply,HR,Marketing and Production.Right out of the bag at the beginning,you realize you have to hand pick randomly generated employees for each division with high enough corresponding skills to respective divisions in order to establish an efficient business.They come along with their own likes and dislikes like their opinions on certain things,their individual stats that include obediance,slutiness,love etc. , negative and positive traits and expectations from you and your company(salary and work condition wise) that you have to take into consideration while hiring them and you have to meet with their requirements in order to keep them working for you.You can do everything in your company on your own which is preferable at the start but it gets tedious AF quick.

You get to decide how much research is done,how much supplies you order,how many serums you produce and how many of them you want to sell or keep...like holy fuck you get to decide everything going on with your company.EVERYTHING.You can automate and speed up the most of the process but that requires hiring employees that come along with their horseshit that needs to be put up with.You have to think about every inch of detail in order to make ends meet at the end of the month while also trying to progress with the story.If there's such a thing.

At home it's no different.You live with your mom and sister later comes along your aunt and her daughter and of course they have all their individual shenanigans going on with them that you have to pay attention like the employees you have to hire.GEE no wonder why the dad's not around.

While juggling with all the management bs in the game,each day you slowly try to raise the people's appropriate stats so you can fuck them.Good luck finding the time for that tho.

Every person you come across in the game are open to corruption and sex.That's a plus.I guess.

Renders and model designs are outdated and their attractiveness ranges from horrendous cave troll fighting in the front line for the Isengard army to fuckable at best.

I've found the sexual content trivial and lacking.Like most of them consists of basically 3D women on a stock photo posing,changing positions,dressing or undressing according to what you choose on the dialog options.

No animations.

I ended up using command console to cheat my way trough the game.

I mean...I'm not saying this game is generally bad,definitely there's much effort put into it and for the sake of objectiveness I get that this kind of games have their own genre with their fan player base and this one maybe on the top list of that genre like that one B rated indie movie %90 of the planet's population oblivious to the other %10 is a cult follower but I wish some of that effort put into playability aspect of the game.

Maybe a casual difficulty setting could be implemented in the game which streamlines most of the tedious stuff and make it easier for people who just want to enjoy the content while still dealing with superficial managing.This current state could be still there as a hardcore difficulty(surely how it felt like for me)for people who prefer it.

At this state,game is absolutely not for new comers or casual players like myself.

great game that only gets better with time. it checks all of my boxes, has mechanics I don't mind playing through again with new versions, and usually has features I look forward to upon new releases.

To start with, I should say it's a perfectly serviceable game, and an interesting one at that. The mechanics are strong and enticing and fun. My issues, however start with the art, which isn't exactly appealing, and the lack of characters. The first game shined because its characters were hot and it was fun to see them degrade. In this one, the focus is away from specific characters and more on randomly generated ones that are basically interchangeable.

I know, Lab Rats 2 got its die-hard fans, because the dev actually is creating his own engine for this game. This might be admirable from a technical point of view, but from a gamer’s perspective I can't recommend Lab Rats 2.

I played Lab rats 1 some years ago and despite honey select models, it was a nice little game with an interesting university/science-lab setting, but a lot of grind and redundant tasks as well. Anyway I was still able to enjoy that one back then, despite the shortcomings.

The successor Lab Rats 2 is worse in many aspects. For the time being (after 3 years of development) there is almost no story present in the game worth to be mentioned, apart from some scripted events, which are triggered at some points of the game. This is sandbox/open world gone wrong! Yeah, yeah I know, it’s about to come or the mods will provide this as the die-hard fans always say…

But instead of creating more scripted events, which would make the game more interesting or developing something like a real story to begin with, the dev focuses on adding more and more grind to an overcomplicated pharma-lab management simulation anyway. Adding “clarity points” was the latest silly inclusion to this game, which just happens to be another grind-fest next to the already existing mastery level, regular serum research and slutiness level of npcs. Seriously who has got fun, doing this?! Even with enabled console cheats this isn’t fun.

I’m ok with the management aspects of the game in general, but this is already a silly grind-fest and grind needs to be siginificantly reduced, but the dev still adds more and more to this. After all your serums are your bread and butter in this game in order to be able to do something fun with the npcs.

Having mentioned those, these are probably even the worst aspect of the game, even before the unimaginable grind for the time being. The most often completely random and very few given npcs are even uglier than the old honey select models of the predecessor. Those random looks of the npcs with random personality traits and random clothes will most often result in a complete ugly freak show parade. I can hardly imagine, how someone could possibly enjoy that. As soon as you hired like 10 women for your company, you will notice the lack of real variation in the faces or hairs, despite them being randomized. Sex scenes are also rather cringe since the mc isn’t visible, which leads to women fucking and sucking thin air in strange poses.

Additionaly the UI isn’t very user friendly. I really see no reason to get into this grind-fest with ugly graphics and non-existent story. The new releases keep disappointing me and show me that the dev clearly took the wrong turn with this “game” and shows no intentions to turn back. It’s just about adding more grind and more overcomplicated mechanics to a “game” which is no fun… Therefore Lab Rats 2 is a really poor attempt of a game.

I love this game, as it has almost all mechanics I would like, fun to play, nice and long game loop, recomended, also if you play it, use the mods and bugfix much recomended, it is said that in the future it will be easy to add user content which in my opinion will add a lot to this game

v0.42.1

Decent little game, very nice mechanics. Dosent have the best fap material in terms of renders, its always a small image to the right.

Other than that, it has good mechanics. Would recommend just for the game aspect, not really for the fap though

Great game, fun mechanics, horrible charactermodels... The creator (Vren) keeps adding more and more interesting mechanics to the game pretty regularly. My only gripe is the models, but I can disregard that flaw (mostly) for this excellent management/corruption/harem game. Well worth supporting!

Story is mediocre. Occasionally has some scripted events that give reason for things happening. But overall not much happening from day to day.

Gameplay is very grindy, but you have a couple of things to do so it's not absolutely terrible. The problem is that raising girls slutiness is random chance. There is no guarantee even if you use a serum. What's the point of using a serum if it's still random chance?

Renders are alright. Nothing amazing. Body parts poking through the clothing is the worst. Wish there were more clothing options. Can't buy anything in the store. Nothing sold in the sex shop. What's the point of the city at all?

The management features and work policies are cool. Serum construction and research is pretty messy. Needs a complete redesign to make it more user friendly.

User interface is horrible. So many clicks to do anything. Looks terrible.

Sex gameplay has so many dead ends in the dialog options that you need to save before you engage in it or else you will just waste your time. For example, if you decide to change position you can't just cancel. You HAVE to switch.