This review is for version My Days in Bel Aire 1.0
Summary: if this developer never creates another adult game, he will be doing a favor to the adult gaming community worldwide.
Review: My Days in Bel Air is yet another game that seems like it was created by a 17-year-old boy to be played by 13-year-old boys. To call this game garbage would be an insult to actual garbage. I've invested about 6 hours of my time into this game. It's yet another sandbox where players have to keep checking every place and every time to see if something will happen with no logic. It's just another time-wasting snooze-fest. I've checked the discussion thread and I'm stuck at basically the same point(s) everyone else is. This game is supposed to be complete [Edit: the tags have since been modified], but there are game-breaking bugs in it. I'm sorry for anybody that patronized the developer or paid for the game on Steam. This game seems more like it was abandoned without being finished rather than actually being completed as the thread title suggests.
So now for the pros and cons.
Pros:
The girls in the game are pretty, but unfortunately, they're kind of all alike. They all act like sluts and, with the exception of the maid, they all look like stereotype lesbians.
Neutral:
The lewd scenes in the game are OK, but there aren't very many and they are fairly vanilla but not very erotic.
Cons:
The user interface is crap:
- Almost every action is laggy. Clicks don't result in an instantaneous action. The game isn't complicated at all, but it's annoyingly slow, especially when players are repeating the same scenes/events/dialogues dozens or sometimes hundreds of times.
- The GUI is redundant. The sandbox locations show which characters are in the location, but then it also shows them in larger sizes when the hovering over the location. What's the point?
- The user interface is tedious. It makes the player manually click to progress when it's not necessary. For example, when you start a dialog with another character, the character's dialogue appears, and the player needs to click again to make the list of dialog options appear. There's no need.
- Animations are un-skippable once they've started. Some repeatable scenes have long animations and if you don't select the "skip" button before you reach the animation, you have to wait 15 seconds or more for the animation that you've already seen 100 times to complete.
- Sometimes the game shows players when appeal stat for a character increases, sometimes it doesn't.
The inconsistancies in the overall development just seems lazy and it cheapens the whole experience:
- Monique shows MC her panties in the living room, but acts surprised/annoyed when he looks up her skirt by the pool.
- Time-of-day and day-of-week disappear while watching the surveillance cameras, but since the player can skip time while watching the surveillance cameras, knowing the current time can be important.
- Skipping time while watching surveillance cameras doesn't automatically take the MC to the kitchen for breakfast/dinner like it does when skipping time from any other location. Why?
- The volume control changes the volume for the game, but not the volume while viewing the menu.
- The game has the same boring scenes and dialogue over and over. Not even minor changes to mix it up.
- In the quest where MC tells Monique not to wear panties, she is supposed to not wear panties all day, but she has panties on in some scenes, then doesn't in others.
- When checking the surveillance cameras, if there is something new, there is a (!) shown for the thumbnail of that room. It's great, but that should be implemented for every room in the sandbox all the time (not just the surveillance cameras), which would eliminate the frustrating grind where the players repeat events for no reason because they don't know if something will change.
There are bugs:
- Sometimes the game displays renders from one scene while showing the dialogue of a different scene. It happens when clicking on different things too quickly and appears to be a race condition in the code. I think I missed an entire new scene because of this bug.
- Renders seem to be missing where the screen is black. E.g., the scene for the heart event for Miriam in the Kitchen at 10:00 on Saturday where the player can choose legs, feet, or rack.
- Players are waiting for fixes to known game-breaking bugs, and most players don't even know they've encountered a game-breaking bug because the game overall is so bad.
There are some WTFs:
- When MC blackmails Monique and tells her to masturbate in the bathroom and later to not wear panties, she doesn't see that as odd.
- Miriam sees Monique not wearing panties and so she spanks Monique and calls her a "horny bitch" and treats her like a slave? Nothing in the game before this makes this seem normal/acceptable.
The grind is excessive:
- For the most part, events for specific quests seem to occur only once per week, but there's no logical reason for it other than to force grind.
- There is no useful feedback to the player. The hints say what to do, but when the player does it or tries to do it, nothing may happen for several weeks of in-game time. There may be thresholds for the Appeal stat to get an event to trigger, but there's no indication of it. Players can grind for an hour and be left wondering whether they just completely wasted their time.
- Players can sometimes see when appeal increases but that has no value if the player doesn't know the threshold required to trigger a specific event.
- My experience is that there's just way too much grind required by the player for the amount of reward the player receives, and it all boils down to lazy development practices.
- Maybe some of the frustration would be solvable by fixing the hint system, but the grind would still be excessive.
Most of the "gameplay" loop is mashing the skip time button to grind "once a week" events over and over.
