Based on the (as yet) unfinished v0.17 (although at time of writing I haven’t even completed chapter 4).
My usual disclaimers when writing reviews on here are that A. I am here for the "plot" not the plot and B. I generally dislike visual novels. So take both of those into consideration for my review when thinking about this game.
Pros
- Absolutely oodles of content – If you’re looking for a harem game where you can bang dozens of girls and then get the chance to fuck them all more than just once, then you’re in luck and this game has you covered.
- Tonnes of sex scenes – It takes a little while to warm up but by chapter two you will regularly be fucking lots of different girls in lots of different places. Plus the sex is all at least passably fappable. Killer7 is under absolutely no illusions that this game is all about the sex first and he wants you to just bang every single girl possible and for them to all willingly join your harem.
Mehs
- Character design – Killer7 has seemingly made a real effort to stretch Honey Select as far as possible and make his girls unique. Unfortunately, this hasn’t really worked too well. A good number of the girls look pretty generic (Sandra and Becca immediately jumps to mind as being super forgettable) and then some of them, where more work was put in, there’s something a little bit off about them. E.g. Maddie’s hair actually makes her look like she’s bald with blonde hair floating about an inch above her head. Very weird. Not exactly a negative though, because clearly some effort went into this.
- Neko sister – One of the BIGGEST focuses of the game (at least in the first few chapters) is your sister Lucy, a girl with cat ears/tail/eyes. I’m not massively into Nekos as a kink so this didn’t really do much for me, but it wasn’t exactly a bad thing. The reason I even mention it though is how weirdly out-of-place it is. For all intents and purposes, this is seemingly a totally normal town/world… Except you have a neko sister… Like… Really? Why? How? What…?! (It’s worth saying, this is absolutely nit-picking on my part and probably over-thinking a bloody porn game).
Cons
- Terrible choice system - Your choices are always limited to "do I want to choose the good option or do I want to be an absolute prick and not even get any of the sex scenes?"
- Characters are all the same – One of the most egregious examples of this I’ve ever seen in any porn game. EVERY single character behaves in just about the exact same way around you:
Girl: “We’ve just met, but tee hee I am foaming wet at the gash for you to pound a baby into me and use me like a cum-towel!”
Protag: “Uh what, did she say what I thought she said?”
Girl: “I’m just kidding protag! Or am I tee hee...?” (This line specifically is said verbatim about a billion times)
Protag: “I probably shouldn’t read too much into that.”
Girl: “Right now we have to go on precisely 3 dates and then you can fuck me to your hearts content and I will be forever in love with you forever and ever.”
Protag: “As I am nothing but a good guy and gentleman I don’t actually want to have sex with you until the third date anyway…”
- Characters are stupidly one-dimensional and have zero motivations outside of the game – One of the absolute worst examples here is sister Lucy again. Her character trait is “she was bullied as a child for being a Neko”. So now her entire character is THAT one trait. She spends literally every single day by going to the beach and just sitting there. Like… Apparently she’s genuinely that fucking boring and has that little desire to do anything with her life. All the other characters are no better really. Sandra’s character is “she likes cooking and also falls in love with you at first sight.” Maddie’s character is “likes exercise”. Mary’s character is “is a slut, but only for a few chapters before she falls in love with you and you have to have dates with her like everyone else”. The main character does not escape this either and has literally nothing go on for him outside of wanting to be in love with everyone.
- Perfect humble protagonist – After playing WVM, I thought the erotic-game world had peaked in terms of a perfect protagonist with the perfect dick who everyone falls in love with at first sight, can do no wrong, and is the ultimate super nice-guy gentleman who will fix absolutely everything purely with his presence and magic jizz. APPARENTLY I was wrong because My New Family is exactly the same thing but many, many orders of magnitude worse.
- The dialogue, good lord the dialogue – Fucking hell… There’s so much of it. It just goes on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And it’s SO baaaad dude.
Protag thoughts: “Hmm I just woke up and it is a lovely day, I should go have a shower.”
*The protagonist goes and has a lovely warm shower.*
Protag thoughts: “Hmm. I should go downstairs have Sandra's delicious breakfast.”
*You go downstairs and Sandra makes you a delicious breakfast*
Protag: “Hey Sandra you are very beautiful and special to me.”
Sandra: “Oh my gosh protag, that’s so sweet, I love you forever and ever. MWAH”
Protag thoughts: “Goodness I am so lucky that I have a girlfriend like her. Hmm, I should go and have a swim.”
*I go and have a swim*
And this goes on. FOREVER...
I’ve said it before that I’m here for the porn, I make no excuses about that. I want my games to be porn first with a smattering of story on top. The more I play around on here I do become aware that the absolute best games are those which have more than a smattering of story and are well-written, but I still maintain that if I’m playing an erotic game, it should be porn first. And there are many examples which achieve this.
If the game doesn’t have the best writing, it can still be entertaining and at least a good fap with tonnes of sex, so in theory I ought to have enjoyed My New Family at least more than I have rated it. And I genuinely initially thought I was going to rate it in the 3-4 stars area (3.5 being the sort of standard for great harem sex with no plot).
Except as time went on the writing just grated more and more. Looking at the ratings for this game is genuinely stunning. The amount of people praising the writing and characters just blows my mind.
TRUST ME. They are wrong.
Every character is the same person, every character has one trait that is absolutely beaten to death and they all latch onto you in the same absolutely ludicrous saccharine way. Even as someone who enjoys it when my porn games are silly, it no longer felt unrealistic as much as it did simply stupid, and worse BORING. It might as well have been you fucking a dozen clones, because that’s the level of difference between the characters.
Only ONE female was remotely interesting (Fiona) but she’s a side-character who rarely popped up. Equally the second most interesting was also a side character and she was literally a bad guy for the first 2 chapters and then becomes much less interesting.
The dialogue and flow of the game is so absolutely tedious. Even if the relationships weren’t so overly sugary sweet and dripping with perfect romance for each other, it would just be absolutely exhausting to play because of how much text filler there is and how little actually happens. A whole scene might be going to the cinema with two girls and talking about absolutely nothing for 20 minutes.
As time went on I started skipping more and more of the text just to get to the good stuff and suddenly I realised that even the sex wasn’t that good any more. Without any build up or context even the fucking gradually became uninteresting. And then I also realised that actually, even without the normal story there generally wasn’t build up to the sex. It just went from “let’s watch TV together and make shitty jokes” to “okay now we’ll have sex”.
The more I think about it, the more I actually realise that I can’t justify giving this even two stars. I was going to do so purely because of the amount of content and how much sex there was. But if the sex is bad as well, then there’s literally no reason to enjoy it.
Maybe. MAYBE it will get better in later episodes, but I seriously doubt it.