I wanted to like this game. I really did. But after spending almost a year in game, I'm done with it.
Biggest problem is that it is grindy as hell. Every stat is scored on a 1-100 scale, and they all move a single point at a time (with a few rare exceptions, and even then, not more than 3). To compound the glacial pace of stat grinding, is the fact that the game is awash in superfluous and needless stats. Your slaves have a Acrobatics, Dancing, and Performance skills. They have Academics and Science. Gardening and Domestic. Why? The game isn't interesting or dynamic enough to justify having 3 different skills for what all amounts to the same thing, which is being nimble in front of an audience. Academic and Science is almost worse, as they're effectively carbon copies that only matter for jobs at the Academy that are also effectively carbon copies of each other. Domestic and gardening being split means you can have slaves who can take care of literally everything around the house, except for the backyard (and vice versa). This applies to the player as well, with both an Artisan and a Blacksmithing skill to govern crafting. It's all just such a waste.
Combat is serviceable at best, and garbage at worst. Melee is pointless, as all it does is force you to waste a turn closing with the enemy before you can even attack, and the best melee weapon is comparable to a low-tier ranged weapon. Want to waste a whole turn closing the distance to hit an enemy for 26 damage without armor penetration using a Power Katana, or just shoot them for 30 damage on the first turn with armor penetration using a .30-06 rifle (which are also dirt common and easy to loot)? At best, once you figure out how to cheese the system, the combat is boring. At worse, it is stupidly broken and lacking in any tactical depth. The only strategy you need is focus fire, because all combat boils down to a 'how many actions do you have per round', and the easiest way to make sure the enemy has less is to focus fire them down one at a time. There are no attack types, no specials attacks or skills, no positioning (outside of the mandatory one for moving into melee range that further gimps their awful utility). The combat just isn't any fun to engage with, keeping in mind that I have had fun engaging with some janky assed combat systems in my time (e.g. I love the combat of the classic Fallout games).
Also, the Feral Charuck is just a Deviljho from Monster Hunter, and that inordinately annoys me.
Everything is a money sink. Everything. Everyone has a daily wage, or other upkeep costs that demand money and resources. Investing in Aimee's store takes tens of thousands of dollars, and what do you get after you've dumped the equivalent of multiple copies of top-tier weapons and armor worth of value on her shop? You get a passive income of *drumroll* $225 a day. This nonsense (even on the 'easiest' setting) is what made me use a save editor to drop a couple million into my funds, and trivialize all of the money grind. What do you have left when you're not trying to grind money to afford to pay your staff and build up enough to do shit like send your slaves into orbit (another 15K) for their personal quests? You're left with all the time in the world to focus on grinding up those stats, and even when money is no object, it is still obscene how long and boring it is to make progress. You see the same content repeated dozens upon dozens of times, and any novelty that it had is quickly lost among the deluge of grinding the same actions over and over again for those measly +1 stat gains.
Also, the shopkeeper Aimee is just Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn, and that inordinately annoys me.
Another thing that is lost in all of the grinding is any uniqueness among the slaves. They look different, but you end up going through all the same motions with all of them. The only difference is how much of a grind is it to get them to where you want them to be. But once a slave is broken or close to it? They're all effectively identical. You just have to wade through yet another set of traits that are also gauged on a 0-100 scale that you need to deal with, but now most of them cannot reliably be altered. Now we're dealing with a 20% chance per orgasm during bondage to possibly get a +/-1 movement with something like the Vanilla trait. That's just what this stat grind needed, poor RNG. Now some of these are a spectrum, starting at 50 and having mutually opposed effects kick in if you hit 25 or 75. Unfortunately, there are quite a few traits here that could be folded into this spectrum scaling that aren't (e.g. Submissive and Dominant each having their own 0-100 trait), leaving you with a metric fuck-ton of stats to deal with. But ultimately, outside of the little you might get from a slave's personal quest, they have zero distinctive personality. Once you start breaking them down, they all say the same things during sex; they're all just palette swaps (and a few of them are incomplete palette swaps, with lots of missing images for various interactions).
I didn't feel like I was roleplaying a character. I felt like I was trapped in a boring 9 to 5 soulless office cubicle job.
So unless you're up for an obscene grind to get anything done, and you're really into the same rote bondage roleplay playing over and over again (or you're really into sadism), there's just not anything here I can recommend. There are other erotic RPG's with much better combat, far better characters, and way better sex scenes. The only thing that makes this game kinda standout is the premise, which it largely fails to deliver on and still takes a mountain of grind to reach regardless. If the grind wasn't so bad, it would be serviceable for those who really get into these kinks. But as is? It's an insulting waste of time to reach what mediocre content it does have. The game isn't bad per se, it just absolutely is not worth the time sink needed to see any of it.
