Unreal Engine - Overbreed [v0.1.1] [Overbreed]

Overall: A promising start for a beautiful game marred by horrific bugs that make progress frustrating at the best of times and impossible, or gaslight you into thinking your PC is crashing, at the worst. I would not recommend touching this demo in its current state unless you are really, really in love with the characters on display knowing you will not be doing much outside of the screenshots displayed.

The Good: The graphics look amazing and the character creator is no less phenomenal with how easy it is to make your own character. Current character creation options seem to be limited by either this being a demo or the first steps of the system.

The Bad: Clunky gameplay as the parasite that shifts between tediously obtuse and plain unwieldly thanks to controls reminiscent of the original Resident Evil... that need to be used for some light platforming. The mouse-shake minigame being partially responsive adds to the tediousness with how often it will be performed.

The Ugly: As of the demo available during this review, Overbreed is frustrating to the point that it is almost unplayable due to some of the light issues with how tedious gameplay as the parasite is, the cringey Fallout 4 dialogue options that are taken seriously instead of as a tongue in cheek parody, and the main issue: THE GREATEST ENEMY TO YOU IN THIS GAME IS THE UNRESPONSIVE OBJECTS YOU NEED TO INTERACT WITH. I understand this last point is likely a bug that will be fixed in due time and will amend my review to reflect this, but when it takes MINUTES to open a single door or speak with an NPC to make progress in this game, what should be a 5 minute process ends up taking 15-30, long enough to kill any excitement you had until that point and replace with endless frustration.

The game has some issues central to design choices that warrant it being 1 star, even in a demo state.

- firstly, in terms of fixable issues, elements such as the repetitive, buggy mini game-involved with host takeover is a pain. Controlling and moving around in parasite form doesn't feel great (tight platformer jumping sections, trying to find 'gaps' to dash, etc. All with fickle directioning). Additionally, The dialogue and menu controls are non reactive. The reason why these are contributory to a 1 star review is that in a 3 year time span, It doesn't feel like it was internally/close circle play tested.

-- a secondary note to the fixable, the tag set of what you have to be 'into' broadly for the game requires you to be both bisexual and furry just to get through the demo. Then layer the 'primary' tag of pregnancy over the top and your venn diagram gets increasingly more narrow. More of a personal note, but the game would do well to have an option to toggle/skip certain content. i.e. skip the penetration minigame for certain genders, species, etc.

- secondarily, direction. from a narrative flow perspective absolutely nothing makes sense. There is porn logic then there is "huh the specimen is missing! I will go into the containment zone then never mention the strange behaviour or that the specimen is missing again!". The specimen by original description was having trouble bonding with a host, but most characters (minus the guards) bond well enough to be controlled.

- moving on to more core issues. Even on maximum graphics settings on decent graphics card, The game still looks janky. A lot of it comes down to how the engine deals with rendering level of detail possibly? It is just a guess because on low settings, 13GB of VRAM is still being eaten to render Playstation 1 graphics. Might be personal machine issue, but Unreal Engine tends to have a reputation. On engine visuals; at least put in the effort to frame and light sex scenes properly instead of expecting the player to do it for every scene.

The game could be a 3 star game, There is certainly a good game buried in the demo. But I don't forsee it as so many of the issues feel like systemic misunderstandings of game design decisions and road-mapping. A tighter technical demo that ended when you finished the platformer section of the mating-prison probably would have showed more promise as the section that comes after (the retrieval minigame) is the combination of some of the most frustrating elements of the demo.

In conclusion, to me, a demo should be showing off technical and/or narrative direction. But both feel confused in the demo.

Non contributory to the rating, but the logo having 3 stripes in it throws me off into thinking it is the 3rd instalment in a series.

After hearing about the development of Overbreed on these very boards, I decided to jump in and support the project on Patreon to see if the exclusive content and early access builds were worth the monthly subscription. The indie scene on Patreon is always a mixed bag of abandoned concepts and hidden gems, but I am happy to report that this project leans heavily toward the latter.

From the moment you launch the current build, it is clear that the developer has a distinct vision. The furry models are ok, not good. However, the human models are fantastic. The gameplay loop is where you can really feel the "Work in Progress" nature. While the core mechanics are there, there is significant jank, as to be expected. All in all though, This game is more feature complete than most start out as, which is a win in my book. Supported.

This game has a lot of potential. After 3 years of development, this got dropped out of nowhere, and I'm amazed. It's like the game Slitterhead the mc is a parasite and can take control of everyone, but mostly you control the futa you created. The concept and the animations are great + breeding, breeding and overbreeding everyone around you. Kinda very original.. Sadly, it's full of bugs, gameplay is sometimes annoying hard/confusing, optimization sucks and whatever, but I hope it gets better. I nevertheless had much fun with this mess