Pre-Review Disclaimer: I am not a native English speaker, so the following review was translated by DeepL.
The rating is around 4 out of 5. I played 0.8.3.4Tier4 for about 40 hours.
Overall: the game has a lot of content but is very grindy and contains the vast majority of fetishes (the vast majority that can be thought of on F95) as well as slave and investment management and world dynamics. The game still tends to favor breadth over depth at this point, and many of the systems need to be automated or refactored to increase gameplay and reduce repetitive grinding.
Pros:
1. ambitious worldbuilding about the evolution of a deserted postmodern human colony. The coup plot is very interesting.
2. rich character building with huge amounts of text and varied backgrounds.
Cons:
1. very grindy, with a lot of repetition required for both combat and managing investments (factories, taverns) or developing characters.
2. lack of variety in erotic scenes: many characters don't have special erotic paintings and most of the erotic scenes are just repetitive in the huge amount of grinding. I basically skipped them all.
3. the economic system is too simple: the current economic system is basically empty, players can easily earn millions or even tens of millions of wealth and the whole economic system does not change in complexity depending on the player's actions. the economy of Ikaanos is basically related to only three traits (Prosperity, Corruption, and Control). For example, let's say I open a factory and manufacture guns in the game, and the selling price doesn't seem to have anything to do with demand or production. I sold 5000 rifles instantly to the market and it's price was constant, which made the late game unchallenging.
Suggestion:
1. deeper personal plot expansion and world construction, especially the management of the aria government.
2. more intense business competition and economic system to make the later stages harder without affecting the earning of money in the early stages. Possibly more missions like assassinations and sabotage need to be added, and the protagonist will be subject to more business sabotage operations, which grows non-linearly with scale.
3. more erotic scenes, more fetishes (body modifications?, Mass brainwashing?).
4. most importantly, the game need more automated operations. It's nice that the game is set up with automatic bathing as well as assigning other slaves as trainers to help with training. Why not adding auto-fighting or rule-based auto-training? Could take a look at the free cities game, which would trivialize the grind and put the focus on character plot and world evolution.
Overall, the game has a very attractive setting and a nice framework with a lot of potential. However, it lacks detail polish and story depth, and suffers mostly from non-automated grinding.