Based on the (as yet) unfinished v20.1
My usual disclaimers when writing reviews on here are that A. I am here for the "plot" not the plot and B. I am very picky with visual novels and think broadly they can be very subpar. So, take both of those into consideration for my review when thinking about this game.
Pros
- Fully animated first-person 3D porn – Let’s just get the biggest pro out of the way right up front. Last Hope is an honest to goodness first-person video game with you actually controlling the protagonist and walking around interacting with the girls. I’m going to absolutely rave about this in the review body below, but for now let’s just say: this is fucking amazing.
- So… Fucking… Hot… – Godamn the porn in this is fucking great. Many, many different sex scenes, three scorchingly hot women (assuming you enjoy the big-boobed bimbo variety) and then throughout the game it feels like you are constantly unlocking and expanding the repertoire of hot stuff you can do.
- Caters to a decent amount of kinks – Along with there being good variety to the sex scenes, they also eventually cater to a lot of my favourite kinks: risky sex, impregnation, roughness, domination. I could always do with a bit more options here, but what’s there is great. Plus, it’s one of those games where the sex feels “intense” and “sexy” and not just two people smushed together because the plot demanded a sex scene now.
- Fully porn logic but is very aware of that – The premise of the game is that your spaceship is disabled and stranded and in order to fix it you, as the only male on board the ship, have to fill up the magic fuel tank with buckets of your cum… I feel it goes without saying how ridiculous this is. However, because it leans into that, it makes the whole thing just kinda fun and sexy. It’s obviously a dumb sexual fantasy, but YOU KNOW WHAT? Turns out that might be 90% of what I want from an erotic game? WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED?
Mehs
- Animations and graphics – There was a very big overhaul of the looks and graphics of the game an update or-so ago, but I still maintain that it’s not exactly the prettiest of games. If you take a still frame from the game and compare it with RenPy renders, it absolutely does not stack up and looks much more plastic and fake. The animations also feel significantly more stilted and display a lot more clipping and the like than other big games. However, you have to remember that this is also a completely fully animated game, so obviously it’s never going to look quite as pretty as something which relies on just still images.
- A bit dark – I think this was part of the recent graphical overhaul I mentioned, but the game’s environments recently just look the tiniest bit too dark now. Just EVER so slightly.
- Spaceship min-game – The spaceship shooter mini-game is actually surprisingly intuitive and works remarkably well. However it isn’t super clear why you need upgrades for it and how the timer of the ship works. It’s also almost entirely a complete side-show to everything else and doesn’t really feel like an integral part of the experience.
- Computational power – I had to install this on my gaming rig and let me tell you, that bad boy is a beast. It handled Last Hope ez pz without break a sweat. However, for people who generally don’t need much computational power for the standard F95 RenPy fare, I get the impression it does not run as well on some machines.
- Characters and writing – Let’s be reasonable. The game is porn with the most absolute bare-bones of a plot. The characters are pretty one-dimensional and the plot is nearly non-existent. BUT that’s not what ANY of us are here for…
Cons
- Maybe slightly too few characters – I feel like this game had the potential to be a complete first-person harem sim in space and as such it in fact does not feel ambitious enough. Maybe of course the dev is wanting to move on to different projects but I really do sort of wish there was more options. Towards the latter half of the game you do get introduced to a couple of alien babes, but I actually have to admit I was less of a fan of those than I was the main girls.
- The ending is terrible (currently) – Apologies, parts of this may require spoilers. At the time of writing this, Last Hope has just released its final chapters and epilogue. Broadly speaking this rounds out the “story” of the game moderately well and wraps up everything that had been going on. However, there are a few aspects of this which are extremely anti-climatic and I’ll go into more depth below. What I will say though is that it is possible this may be fixed through addition of more fixes/content down the line to expand the ending. We have to wait and see, but at present this is potentially genuinely the worst aspect of the game.
So, let’s start with some specifics about my issues with the end of
Last Hope. I feel like currently this actually might be one of the most disappointing parts of the whole game so it bears expanding on which I dislike what is currently there:
1. The actual ending feels extremely rushed, after 19 versions of build-up it feels a bit like the dev now suddenly just wants it to be over and so the final chapter is done in about 5 minutes. There’s a kidnap, a quick firefight and then the good-guys win! Hooray! Maybe it’s silly to expect more from a ridiculous porn-first game, but it does just seem like there could be more to this, like the dev could have taken more time over it and lingered in it a bit longer.
2. On the other side of things, as it’s a porn-first game, it ALSO feels like the porn ending of the game was ALSO disappointing. In particular there has been 19 versions of building up to the fact that you can sneakily and secretly get all three of the girls pregnant. This ought to have been a massive reveal. Maybe one-by-one they discover you tricked them, or maybe even they actually decide they want you to deliberately get them pregnant. Some kind of massive 4-way impregnation-marathon. Stuff like that. There’s none of that. Instead what you get is a group talk of “oh we’re all pregnant now, that’s funny” and then in the epilogue the actual pregnancy baby-bump that is added to all of them is just really, really ugly (because it looks nothing like a baby bump). I could handle the plot end being a bit disappointing but the fact that the PORN end is so flat was a really disappointment.
Like I say above, there seems like a decent chance this will be expanded and improved on in future updates. The game’s development isn’t quite finished yet (as I understand) so my hope is that the dev wanted to just put the framework for the end of the chapters in place and will now go back and expand some of the optional side content. Fingers crossed!
I feel like beyond my frustrations with the ending, my review of
Last Hope is going to centre around a couple of main points. First of all, allow me to reiterate: if you insist on great story and writing in your erotic games, this will not scratch that itch. It is dumb, it is silly, and it has absolutely no reservations about that.
As it is though, I honestly think
Last Hope might be one of the most fap-worthy games on the site. The porn here is just absolutely stupidly hot for a few very good reasons. Like I say, the fact that it caters to a lot of kinks and allows you to have intense fuck-fests with three bimbos at your discretion is just amazing. The camera is a tiny bit janky, but you can literally move it around yourself, so that makes up for it.
More importantly though is the whole first-person perspective thing. I do not think I can stress enough how much this adds to the immersion of the game. I feel like the best games on F95 know that what we really want is something where we take the role of a character and self-insert a bit. They write sexual fantasy so that the readers can live out their crazy harem fantasies through a visual novel format.
Now add in the fact that you can move around as well as the usual discussion-tree format and it just adds that tiny extra step of immersion, that tiny extra step of allowing you to self-insert and imagine yourself going around fucking these girls on your spaceship. I’m not kidding when I say that this alone may seem so basic and simple but it really does add so much to making the porn just more immersive and that makes it just more STEAMY.
I think the biggest take-away here for me is that if
Last Hope had been a RenPy visual novel I think it would barely have justified a 3/5. Everything else it does it just pretty average and not super exciting, but you add in the fact that it’s an actual "game" and frankly it’s novel, exciting and potentially one of the games most worth playing on F95.
It’s early days of course, but I genuinely hope we see more games like this which just lean into the full erotic experience but in a fully-realised first-person video game fashion.