Ren'Py - Lucky Monster [v0.11.3 Public] [The Void]

Review of v0.11.3 Public

Lucky monster is one of those games that starts off with a charming beginning that ends up being irredeemably disappointing.
You are a dead gambler who got reincarnated into a goblin in a fantasy world; your objectives? Climb the ranks of your green-ish community, claim chieftain, defeat those pesky humans and amass an harem of women!
An elementary but captivating plot seasoned with a straightforward humor which sadly gets slowly diluted by the uninteresting grindy gameplay.

The combat is insufferably plain; you’ll be fighting against hoards of foes with a deck of cards (which you won’t be able to customize until much later in the game, and even the customization is lackluster). There is no real strategy, aside from spamming the ”damage” cards against the barren diversity of enemies you’ll fight countless times.
You even have the option to choose a companion to join you during said encounters, their contribution to the fights is notably different at least

Enemies don’t give you experience but resources, these resources will be used to conclude quests or to upgrade your cards. And collecting materials is as annoying as you can imagine, except that for some terrible decision, your cards deteriorate over time, meaning you’ll need resources to fix them… and so you’ll have to grind over and over again in a unsatisfying loop.

The game has also a management aspect, where you can send your troops to do the dirty work for you; foraging and securing an area. But it isn’t worth it at all. They grab materials at a snail pace, get killed as if they were glass cannons and they will devour all of your food in a span of days.

If combat and management aren’t worth it, how about the quests?
The quests are repetitive and will just waste your time and patience. Kill X number of enemies, Collect X number of materials, suffer through RNG, get lost in the sandbox with no clear direction of what to do, repeat the same task one hundred times et cetera.
The writing doesn’t help, it’s pushed aside, turning drier and less prevalent than the entirety of the beginning.

If you came here for the sex scenes instead, they are what you can expect to see in the previews on the OP.
I have nothing to complain about it, although I wished there were more dialogue during said animations, they are nicely drawn, shame that you need half a day of grinding to view a couple of them.

I could continue this rant by talking about the messy UI, the cumbersome sandbox, the inconsistency of some AI images, the lack of combat and enemy variety, the paywall, the aggravating bugs but I will end it here.
I don’t recommend it, it’s not worth your time and interest.

One of the best hentai game I've ever played ! The art is just amazing and it has a very good gameplay. Just waiting for the possibility to unlock the art that you missed. Can't wait for the next updates. Keep going, you are one of the best !

too much grindy art good but 2h play 9 scene unlock if u dont pay u cant enjoy the game art 8/10 gameplay 1/10
guideline is 100% useless
i dont want play 5-6 hour just for nothink if u want enjoy you need cheat version so go throw money

Very buggy, grindy and with minor content behind a paywall. Artwork is good but the gameplay loops is quite bad. You will be constantly jumping between different zones with a chance to be attacked in almost every one of them. The card system is very poorly designed. Cards can brake and the repair system is completely broken just like the upgrade system. Gallery is also paywalled and while that on itself is not that bad, you are only allowed 6 saves at all times, with many scenes being not repeatable. Story is meh, dialogue is ok most of the time. In the end a game with potential being chained down by shitty design decision and lots of bugs. Can recommend if it will hit a final release with a lot of bug fixes and gallery accessible to everyone. Until then don't waste your time unless you really have nothing else to do.

Very nice graphics and plot.... Although this game currently has some downsides, I hope the devs will work around those soon. The contents should take more on the forced turn as the only games where the mosters have 100% forced contents are Static and cencored jrpg games. I hope this game will not turn out to be a lovey dovey game as it will not suit the genre............

game looks undeveloped but at least there's animation. Also game looks like it has potential with the amount of characters. Doesn't look like a laggy game .Would give it a try if the game still updates in a year

The art style is nice and the gameplay loop sort of makes sense but unfortunately it's built in renpy so there's quite a bit of jank involved. Let's talk about the huge problem right out the gate first of all. There are literally no options to the player. Text is instant which is nice but that also means you cant actually adjust the sound in game which is a relative nitpick but annoying none the less.

Because this game is in renpy the tutorial right at the start feels sort of like an info dump that just tells you a bunch of stuff before sending you off instead of teaching you as you go. It doesn't really explain much either other than click this to attack, click this to apply luck, now you have a companion, okay bye. Doesn't really explain how luck is applied to certain things other than your health just lets you dodge a single attack. There's this whole thing about the literal manefestation of lady luck being by your side and giving you some of her power essentially but I haven't really found a use for luck other than occasionally dodging a single attack or reviving if you lose a fight. Other than that the jank of renpy ended up applying 4 stacks of luck to a weapon for no reason when I didn't even click the luck so I guess just fuck me, right? The luck of which does nothing to affect said weapon so they'll literally let you just waste your luck on absolutely nothing.

The gameplay itself is a very basic card based game where you have access to 3 cards and your companion is basically on auto pilot and can be both detrimental and completely useless a lot of the time. Your wolf will howl but with no beasts around it's literally pointless, Zana can heal you but instead she might just do literally nothing every single turn. Your companion also comes with two cards that can be either useful or useless. Zana, for example, has a card where she throws a book which states theres a low chance for high damage, but 99% of the time it's just going to hit for 1. Why is that a problem? Because these cards take up one of your three available slots so you're kinda stuck with what you get.

The cards themselves are weird. They're all super vague and are just like "this does damage multiplied by card level" but nowhere on the card is there a level to my knowledge. This makes it extra funky because throwing knives at one point towards the beginning were just doing like 4 damage a hit and completely obliterating everything, and then suddenly they consistently only hit like 1s all the time and are still better than the other cards but I have no idea why they suddenly lost 75% of their damage.

As for the direction of the game, boy do I hate it. There's minimal information available for the player so if you don't pay attention for a moment you might find yourself going "what the fuck am I supposed to do?" Combine this with the RNG of the game, it might take you absolutely fucking forever to do anything. The slave towards the beginning needs 10 rats to make a coat but then suddenly you go to where you can find rats and just find literally no rats within 10 fights, and then finally you come across a singular rat and have to go to sleep afterwards because your health is low. Nobody wants to go hunting for what used to be a common enemy before getting a quest and is now for some reason the rarest fucking thing in the game.

It's playable, the art style is nice, but its renpy jank. I would be more willing to give it a higher rating if it wasn't so scuffed or even just made in a different engine.