Ren'Py - Mercenaries [v0.6] [WickedGoat]

What I enjoy the most about the game are its story, and how the characters are written (not so much the bad guys). Neither of these is deeply complex, but they're fun. Harem games where the girls have different kinds of relationships between each other and aren't just swarming around the MC always get a bonus point from me. The story itself develops in an interesting direction, but I feel that many parts of it seem to be a bit rushed. The only quest so far that really took its time was the one to secure a permit.

Some other positives are that I personally enjoy the character designs and the humor.

On to the negatives.
The game really doesn't have the smoothest translation. Expect a lot of random pronouns among other errors. Though it's something I can personally look past.

The whole economy aspect of it is pretty lackluster. We send a single girl on a mission that takes a certain amount of time (roughly a minute) at the end of which we're guaranteed to get money. We then spend money on one of three things, improving the guild house (as of writing this only 2 locations can be added,) boosts for the mission system, random items that are mostly needed to progress the quests. In theory there is a progression aspect because better missions have higher stat requirements, but the girls can't improve their stats, and you can only send one girl per mission, so the only way to slightly bend the mold are stat boosting items.

The two aspects that really need improvement in this game are the pacing and the economy, the latter needs a lot more complexity because it would be a shame to have the mercenary aspect of the game be an afterthought.

v0.4.2
I never felt that lost within a game, some have icons where you find someone, others have a guide system that helps...here you just go to each location and skip the day to look if someone is there to interact at one of the time slots, if not, roll back and go to the next location.
Overall there are way to many clicks needed, ofc traveling a location is immersive but doing it xtimes not, same for assigning missions, as far as i can tell each mission is set for a specific girl, so why bother with "select a girl".
Doesnt feel fluid at all...oh and the timer at the mission is something else, nothing to do beside grinding gold, wait for it real time...rather would see that bound to the day cycle, taking up 3 timeslots i can skip ... but thats pure personal.

Updated Review for v0.6

Nine months later, my thoughts more or less remain the same. Tried to give this another go and didn't make it much further. The game, even looking past some of the issues, is just very boring even at its core. Nothing is compelling me to keep going.

I think it's the lack of a good narrative that's really hurting this for me. In a world where demi-humans are looked down upon, our demi-human MC decides he's going to become a royal knight for the racist human queen and gets surprised when after a random 5 year time skip, things don't go his way. Who would have thought.

The MC sucks in that he's just not interesting to play as. Dumb, naïve, never has anything of value to say, and his sole motivation was wanting to follow in his fathers footsteps in becoming a royal guard. We don't learn anything about his father of course, just that he was a real stand up guy!!! Cool I guess. What does he want to do now? *Shrug* "Guess I'll help run this guild because this lady asked me to."

Then it drops you into a sandbox that gives you very little direction before it says "hey go click around aimlessly until you manage to find girls and do meaningless tasks to increase their points."

The translations are still rough, but I will say I noticed improvements on that part since when I first played. Still missing those sandbox quality of life features such as having icons for where girls are or any form of quick travel. I do think some of the models are cute and that's about the only real positive I have to say.

I admittedly did not play very long, but I just can't get into this at the end of the day. It seems like this is going for the more simple and mindless sandbox type of game, so if you're looking for something like that you might enjoy it more than I did.