Before I start I'm gonna say there will be some mild spoilers in this review since it's a story-based game and there's not much to speak of gameplay-wise. It's a point and click adventure game so uhh yeah. I probably won't talk much about the story, mostly it'll be about how it annoyed me.
Also, my rating is more of a 2.5 rather than a 2. Closer to a 3, I guess.
Now, I don't mind the game focusing more on story. Vosmug did say from the beginning of the development that this would end up being a point and click adventure game with more writing, less gameplay.
The puzzles are there as to be expected in an adventure game. They're alright, nothing too difficult. No mouse control, though. You move the cursor using the keyboard. It's kind of clunky but I can tolerate it. The only time it started to annoy me was late in the game where there's a timed sequence. On top of that it's not immediately obvious what you have to do there, either.
Still, I wasn't bothered by the lack of gameplay. I thought to myself "so long as the story is good and the scenes are plentiful, right?"......right
The story is.... I don't know what other people here are smoking. It's not amazing. It's meh, or well it's fine. It's serviceable. It does its job. The thing is, the story should be more than just serviceable in a story-based adventure game. Otherwise, what can the game even stand on? I think some people here are confusing worldbuilding/lore with storytelling. The lore is interesting, the story itself being told is a pretty generic "heist gone wrong, must escape prison" story.
It does start off interesting with our cyborg protagonist trying to steal something on a space ship and then gets captured by a couple of girls whose uniforms look pretty similar to the ones in Xenotake. They then all get arrested and imprisoned on a large ship owned by the Lunar Guard, one of the three main factions in this game.
After that there's a sequence where they're all like "bla bla bla don't try to escape" and then you can immediately escape via a drone the protagonist has in his leg. You hack the door, escape the cell and from then on you can explore the ship and get more insight into the world. It's fairly linear but there's some additional things you can find which will influence the ending a bit.
There is a fair amount of world building here. Every day you explore a bit more, gain more info about the factions of this universe, do some shenanigans around the ship and sabotage everyone's plans and generally you're being a little gremlin and infuriating everyone.
It's fun but it doesn't last and you realize that the protagonist is less of a clever "my plans are beyond your comprehension" type of guy and more of an idiot who just does not give a shit about anything in general.
You encounter some aliens, help them escape and at this point you're probably thinking "this is when the sex stuff happens, right?". Nope.
I don't know if it was intentional or not, but this game really seems to not want you to see sex happening.
Every time it seems like something is about to happen it just...doesn't.
This is also when I started to get frustrated with the writing. The reason the sex doesn't happen is because the girls keep escaping, and the reason the girls keep escaping is because the protagonist does not really care what happens. He's just an uncaring, emotionless dickhead. He also doesn't speak because he had his vocal chords ripped out or something. On top of that, he straight up refuses to communicate in other ways such as by nodding his head, even with his allies. Does he expect everyone to read his fucking mind or something? The only way he ever communicates is by vaguely pointing in the direction of something and the other characters are naturally all very confused about it.
Speaking of frustration, there is for example one scene where you have to sabotage the access to the armory and set up an ambush using your newfound alien friends. When you gain access to the armory and scan around the room and you see that the soldiers have access to short teleportation technology which allows them to instantly teleport their weapon from the armory to themselves. You look around a bit more and the game outright tells you that there's an extra, unaccounted weapon there. You can not do anything with it, you can't take it and you can't destroy it. At this point it clicks and I think to myself "one of the girls will use this weapon to escape, isn't she? *sigh*" and lo and behold, that's exactly what happens.
Another example is later in the game where you stumble upon a tentacle creature with a machete stuck in its side. You have to use this creature to restrain some of the girls trying to ambush you. You can't take the machete, you can't do anything to the creature other than wake it up. So you do that and the girls come into the room and they get captured and it doesn't matter because they use the machete to cut off the tentacles and escape (though not for long, you capture them right after)
There are a lot more scenes like this and it got more and more infuriating. Basically, whenever you stumbled upon an item that you could only examine and not take it with you it meant that one of the girls would use it to thwart your plans and escape you. Over, and over, and over again! This always happened right as they were about to get fucked.
Worst part is that you know it's going to happen. There were so many times in this game where I thought to myself "I'm walking into a trap, I should not go here. This is obviously a trap" or "I should pick this item up otherwise someone might use it against me" and the game does not let you. Failure is the only option. It pissed me off to no end. You have no choice but to sit there as the game blueballs you with scenes that seem like they were gonna lead to sex and then the girls escape at the last second. I really wish I could grab the protagonist by throat and tell him "FUCKING TAKE THAT ITEM WITH YOU, THEY'RE GONNA USE IT AGAINST YOU IF YOU DON'T!"
The game's all like
"Sike! You thought you were gonna see some chicks have all of their holes plowed by these tentacley facehugger-like creatures? Too bad, they were standing right next to the button which increases heat in the room and stuns the creatures. Too bad so sad" You reload a save, thinking you can prevent it but nope. There's nothing you can do. They escape.
"Oh you thought this big dog-dug creature thing was gonna capture the engineer and have its way with her? Oh too bad she just took out a gun and blasted it to pieces lol"
I'm not angry just disappointed. Everything is so underutilized. You gain access to mutant powers and the protagonist doesn't do much with them other than restrain the girls, fuck them a bit(without even a visible cumshot) and then leave.
You gain access to an insectoid you can control manually and there's no sex scenes with it, you only use it like twice or three, maybe four times in the entire game to restrain the girls and never do anything beyond that.
You lead the girls into traps and they manage to escape almost every time. On top of that they manage to catch you with the dumbest possible shit too. There were a coupel of times where you could actually read and listen to logs saying that they will ambush you in the next room and there's nothing you can do except be ambushed like a fucking idiot.
The sex scenes over all are also very lackluster. There's less than 10 scenes and they're pretty vanilla too. There's a couple of doggystyle and missionary positions with humanoid aliens and a few average tentacle scenes, on top of that it seems like he re-used assets for the tentacle scenes. They look pretty samey. Only vaginal penetration too. No cumshot animation or anything, when the scene is supposed to end it just cuts to black and then they're suddenly covered in cum.
There's no variation to them, either. You don't get extra buttons for changing positions or even a cum button like in Ghost Hunter Vena or Xenotake. All you get is two different speed options: fast or slow.
The ending itself is also pretty meh. So as it turns out you stealing that thing in the beginning was a job for the redhead chick from Xenotake. Yeah, this is a sequel to Xenotake but I figured that was obvious from the ship architecture, uniforms, alien designs and a small minor detail of oh you know...the main faction from Xenotake being in this game lol
Yeah I said ending, not endings. There's only one. There aren't actually three endings like other people said. There's only ending and you get more of it depending on how much you explored. At 50% you get pretty much nothing and it feels like the game just ends early
At 75% you get a sex scene with the redhead chick and then it ends. This is the ending I got.
From what I saw from other people's comments the 100% ending is not much different. You just get a bit more story and some closure and that's it. Same stuff, pretty much.
Don't bother. Gallery also sucks but that's to be expected right now. Vosmug always had crappy galleries in his game and the good galleries in his older games were only added later after the games came out. I don't blame him for this, he has made it perfectly clear several times in the past that he hates creating galleries. I'm not sure why but oh well, maybe we'll get a good one like 6 months down the line.
As for bugs? Well I guess I'm the luckiest person here because strangely enough I actually found no bugs at all. None whatsoever. I crashed once but that's it. Game ran fine otherwise.
TL;DR this is "Missed opportunities:the game". Mediocre/serviceable at best writing, subpar and lackluster sex scenes. Underutilized mechanics. Extremely disappointing. I can't believe this took almost as long as Ghost Hunter Vena to make.
I mean, not like I feel cucked or something, but it just doesn't click. I just don't understand what's the point of it? If you add a male MC to the game, why not making him bang everything he sees? Isn't this obvious? Isn't this the whole reason of having a male MC in a porn game? Yeah, instead we have a porn game with a male MC who's not interested in sex. Nice.