Review for MILF's Plaza (Steam_13d version):
This is my third time starting this game from the beginning, but the first time made it through all of the available content without hitting a game-breaking bug. It could be a 4-star game, and it may eventually get there, but it's been an execution nightmare.
Story: 3/5 - It's better than average, but overshadowed by poor writing. I think there's supposed to be a lot of humor, but it gets lost in translation. Still, it's more original than 90% of adult games. However, the title doesn't really go with the game, at all.
Writing: 2/5 - It's barely better than garbage. The opening splash screen of the game reads, "The game currently has some problems with other languages (not English)." The irony is off the charts. There's a ton of broken English and misspellings and poor translation issues, but worse, there is a lot of dialogue and menu items that display in Russian.
Renders: 4/5 - The artwork is very good. It has some consistency issues, but they don't completely break immersion.
Animations: 3/5 - Animations range from jerky 2-frame animations, to something more reasonable for the artwork. I'm not sure if they improved over time or if some scenes just got less attention from the animator.
Audio: 4/5 - Music is better than average. Occasional sound effects are good.
Gameplay: 2/5 - Most of the gameplay is average, but the grind can be insane. I played the last playthrough in "story mode" and I don't think the dev really understands what story mode should mean. This game was designed for grind and the game is grindy as fuck even in story mode. The general problem is that there are only 3 usable time slots per day, combined with using 1 time slot to travel. If the MC goes anywhere outside of the house (except the building next door), it takes 1 time slot to travel there and another time slot to travel back, plus one time slot to do whatever it is that needs to be done outside of the house. The MC really can't do more than one thing per in-game day. The balance of earning and spending money is stupid, too. Small items are insanely expensive (e.g., a chocolate bar for $100). Opportunities to earn money are extremely limited. The MC can find stashes of money around his house and collect around $20 per day. Once the MC has $40, he can "gamble" (the casino is not really gambling, it's a memory minigame) to get more money, but once he has $300, the game doesn't allow gambling and the MC has to sell drugs to earn more. This is a contrived way to ensure that players constantly grind for money and don't just spend a couple weeks of in-game time to get as much money as they'll need in the game.
Bugs: 1/5 - This game has been a nightmare of bugs for me. Twice, I ground away for hours and hit a bug that completely stopped progression and finally gave up. There are several character events that are missing dependencies to the character's storyline, for example, Christy's "Nightmare" and "Night Games" events have dialogue related to her not being ready for vaginal sex, but you can get those events for the very first time after MC has had vaginal sex with her. Also, in the case of Night Games, the last two levels of the event aren't even implemented, but it doesn't even make sense to have them after MC and Christy are having sex. There are dozens of dialogue boxes attributed to the wrong character. The opening Splash screen says, "We quickly fix bugs." but many of these bugs have been known for over a year. Just look at the changelog following the first 1.x release where the game got a [Completed] tag. It's almost all bugfixes, many of them softlocks. This is a game that I originally recommended to not even bother to start playing until it got the [completed] tag. That might be a mistake, because even after being completed and receiving more than 10 bugfix updates, players are still complaining about bugs.
Other:
- There's a crazy quest dependency where MC needs Igor very early in Christy's storyline, but Igor gets kidnapped as part of Mary's storyline, so if players don't start Christy's storyline earlier, they are locked out of progressing with Christy until they almost completely finish with Mary's storyline.
- The ending scene could easily be the hottest scene in the game. However, it has exactly two renders, no animations, and 160 lines of dialogue to click through. What a let-down.
- The existing content hints that there was a ton of planned content that just never made it into the game for whatever reason. This will always leave players feeling that the game is unfinished... because in reality, it is unfinished and that's why I would never rate it higher than 3 stars.