v1.1.05280 Extra version Review
Graphics: 3.8/5 // Girls are beautiful, look the part, and characters look unique. Designs are simple, but that makes them more believable. Clothes also fit well, though there's a distinct lack of bras. Not perfect though; environments are very functional, but not really enhanced or breathtaking. Lighting is decent, not amazing. The models are obviously the stars of the show.
Posing & Animations: 3/5 // Very middle of the road--some animations look decent enough, many are jilted one way or another, and some look either too long or unnatural, but most are at least tolerable. The body poses are decent and functional, but the face posing, especially for the MC, is god-awful. I realize its one of the hardest things to get right--a lot of preset face poses are quite....unnatural, or at worst, warp & contort faces--but it's still important, and elevates a game to another level of immersion.
UI(X): 2/5 // Not the best. UI seems functional, but ugly. Needs a lot of work. There are also some bugs associated with the UI, such as phone backgrounds not cropping to the phone itself. At least most elements are not intrusive to the experience. I think the map for local areas could be improved by making it a toggle dropdown menu (ala House In The Rift).
Design: 1.8/5 // (There will be some overlap with Story in this section) The game really falters on this point. The English is quite readable, so there's that, but the game lags to shit over time, and choices can end up taking up to 2 seconds to fully parse.
Having an effectively intentionally unwinnable fight at the very start of the game feels bad--not necessarily because of the fight itself, but because no matter the choice, the fight will happen, and doesn't really change anything afaict. Makes it feel like choices are irrelevant, which in turn makes a player wonder why this isn't just a kinetic novel in the first place.
Also, card battlers often create more problems than they solve. They require a whole huge list of cards, expansions, multiple additional mechanics, etc. It's often quite inefficient of the players time, and triple the inefficiency for the programmers time, for something that a thousand other devs have already done, and MASTERED.
The girls and characters are doled out at a reasonable pace, but some of them you can't really interact with in any tangible way for long periods of time. This, combined with some of the other minigames (most notably the Photography Club and Insta parody) makes it feel like whoever is developing this, is much more concerned about visuals than game design; it feels as though this is more of a series of vaguely connected DAZ3D renders, rather than a story being told.
The MC looks like he's 15 y.o., regardless of what his dick size is. I don't honestly know why devs do this. It makes any sexual encounters he has appear to be statutory assault. Also, while the horse dick has a thin, spiderweb-like excuse, on a meta level, no woman would be able to fully mount that thing. It even changes shape to contort to a vaginal size. It's offensively extra.
For some reason ,the MC's penis has a voice, and sounds like the fairy sidekick from Long Live The Princess, but male. Additionally, he has a built-in Disney smirk, which offends me to no end. He's not even as cool, funny, or useful as the Fairy, or Pixie from Corrupted Kingdoms, and you can't fuck your own dick. It makes zero sense, and adds literally nothing, only subtracting from the experience with unnecessary peanut gallery commentary.
A lot of time is spent on the internal thoughts of the girls, and I think a lot of that could be removed or trimmed to save player time.
I'm going to put this in design, because I'm not sure where else to put it. But there's an effect in the game that constantly zooms in and out on most of the scene renders, and it bugs the absolute hell out of me. I've seen that a lot of Unity and Unreal based VNs do this for some reason, but this is the first time I've seen it in a Ren'Py game (now that I think about it, this game has a LOT of Unity DNA in it, especially in the UI). It really bugs me in particular as I have issues with informational transmission between my eyes to my brain with certain effects, and the zoom in and out makes me nauseous. Nix it, or install an option to turn it off.
Story: 1.4/5 // This is the worst part. I'll first say what I like about the story, because everything else was garbage.
I liked that the game has an american travel to Russia (even though that's not a possibility now). I don't mind all the cyrillic, and it has an opportunity to show something new that some games don't approach. I like that there exists a serious subplot (The files), and I wish I had the desire to play more in order to see that unfurl--though it didn't appear to be very well executed. I like that there appears to be little limit as to what girls are bangable. There are some real beauties in this game.
And that's about it.
This game is dumb. It is offensively stupid in its writing, plot, and contrivances. And boy there are many contrivances.
The dick voice, the angry-for-no-reason mother figure, the horse-dick and its reasoning, the MC, the first dean you meet, vasya, how the MC's idea somehow fucking works (Laffer logic there, christ alive), how there's so many fights because basically "russian dudebro wants pussy", how it seems like every character other than the younger sister figure is dumb as a paper bag of bricks, the reasoning behind making the MC travel to Russia in order to make it easier to work on for the dev (why not just start there?), how the choices are only there if you want to break hearts, and the game could be entirely linear and not lose anything.....
I could go on and on. The talking Dick is probably the worst offender for me. It makes absolutely zero sense in any context and just exists to literally be as annoying as possible.
This is a very dumb game, and a lot of the story and design choices leave me wondering about a lot of things. But I can't really play anymore of this without being paid to do so. This game is aimed at cavemen.
