Review for Midnight Paradise v0.18 Elite:
Summary: A good amount of content and above-average adult entertainment. It's worth playing if you've got the 5+ hours of time it takes to play (as of v0.18). It's kind of heavy on feet, anal, and male-domination content but most of that is optional. It looks like the game has gone through at least two distinct under-the-hood reworkings that have caused inconsistencies and confusion and it really feels unpolished for a game that's been in development for over 4 years. The only thing that's really holding it back from being a solid 4-star game is inconsistent updates and breaking save-games too many times. By the time it's complete, I expect it will be a good game; it's just not there, yet.
Story: 3.5/5 - It's a better-than-average story, but there really isn't all that much of a story as it just seems to be dragging due to other things. Most of the characters are likable and the MC isn't a complete moron.
Writing: 3.5/5 - The writing is also better-than-average but still not really good. It has some typos and translation errors. It's unfortunately frequently overshadowed by hard-coded relationships (landlord, landlady, tenant, and roommate) that override the player-entered relationships and sometimes don't even make sense (e.g., "my twin roommate").
Renders: 4.5/5 - The renders are generally really good. I like that more effort was put into the stuff that is most important for this type of game. The models for the girls are good, but I wouldn't call them excellent.
Animations: 4/5 - Animations range from above-average to excellent. However, the models almost always have excess distortion in lewd scenes.
Gameplay: 2/5 - In general, the ideas for gameplay are good, but the execution is relatively poor:
The good:
- Nice looking user interface. This one of the best sandbox interfaces I've tried. It looks good and it's easy to use, with only a few flaws.
- Good hint system for both the story objectives and the repeatable events.
- Indicators for choices that show which repeatable events the player has already seen.
- Rollback works across most choices.
The bad:
- The sandbox itself effectively exists to force the player to grind through the progressive/repeatable events. I spent about 5 hours playing from start through the end of v0.17, but there is maybe only 90 minutes of gameplay if you eliminate the grind.
- The storylines for each objective are mostly linear and there are many dependencies between the various storylines that block progression on stories for no apparent reason.
- The triangle/arrows to navigate "back" out of a room are small and not consistently placed on the screen.
- The dialogue/interaction choices have a checkmark to indicate when the player has exhausted all content for that choice or "(New)" when a choice becomes available. It's a great idea that saves players the trouble of keeping track of which content/events/interactions have been completed, especially when there are grindy events. However, it's not consistent and there are a few interaction screens where the checkmarks aren't used.
- The map should be available from anywhere, and it mostly is, but there are some locations where it isn't (nightclub, Sophia's home, Jane's Home).
- The game is grindy as fuck when trying to play through it all at once vs. just the most recent content. There are many events that occur only one time slot per week with multiple overlapping events in the same time slot, so player constantly have to play through another week. The game desperately needs a GUI icon for "skip to next day" that works anywhere and will cause the MC to wake up in his bed the following day.
- Most events must be manually initiated by clicking a choice or a GUI icon but some just trigger automatically. More inconsistency.
- Events in the Objectives list happen out of order with the repeatable events. E.g., a girl will say that it's her first time having sex with the MC even though she has sex with him weeks ago. There are a many of these chronological errors.
- The phone. Few games do well on phones. This one is no exception. If a player accidentally does a rollback right after closing the phone, the entire phone conversation will have to be repeated. Are there any players that think having realistic time waiting for a text reply is a good thing? Waiting for 5 seconds with "..." flashing on the phone and then a message pops up is a waste of time.
- I restarted at v0.17 because save games were broken again. This is the third time I've been burned by broken saves in this game.
Bugs: 3/5 - I only encountered 1 quest bug on this playthrough which was a progressive repeatable event that the hint system showed as never triggered. The game choices always said "(New)" no matter how many times I chose the option and played through the event. [Edit: this was fixed in v0.18]. Other than that, the main bugs are the hardcoded relationships that are everywhere. This game has been in development for over 4 years and gives players the option to change relationships, but the relationships are still hardcoded in dozens if not hundreds of lines of narration and dialogue.
