Unreal Engine - PASEC [v2.1.1] [Star vs Fallout]

Lots of good ideas, but really really not worth playing at this point. Very few enemies, enemy catching you is instant game over (have to start over if you want to watch H-scenes), and very little idea what you are doing in the game.
Theres a God mode, but you can't see the H-scenes if its enabled and there are still several ways to die even with it on. Glitchy as well. Really wanted to like it, but I'm done after 15 minutes.

I look at this game and see the very nice pixel art.
I then play it for a sec, i notice that the game runs a little bad,

"that's okay" I said,

I then played for a bit. then I got an SMG and then i got downed by a bug and the game crashed.

"maybe that's a one time bug?" and it kind of was.

fast foreword to that boss battle and, it just constantly crashes after the game over scene, it crashes when I load the game up after exiting to title to skip the scene.

now that's the notable game play issue that I could bear to play


other smaller issues is that the environment is pretty dark, the material counter up top can pop off the side of the screen.

This review was written as of version 1.51

Calling this version "1.51" is deceitful and misleading. This game has the content you would expect from a demo, but with all the bugs you would expect in an alpha.

It feels as though I see genuine passion behind this game, so I feel bad bashing on it this hard. If the bad bugs get fixed and more content gets added, then this game could reach a 3 or 4 star rating, but right now I cannot recommend the game to anyone in good faith.

This game wants to do so many things and fails at all of them.

• It wants to be a horror 2d exploration game with an eerie background music, but it fails so spectacularly at all the design choices that adds the horror elements to other 2d horror games.
  
  You can only save your progress by sleeping at the bed checkpoints, but instead of carefully and deliberately placing the checkpoints throughout the map like good survival horror games, it spams them all over the place so there might as well have been a menu button to save instead.
  
  Once combat starts, the eerie background music gets replaced by upbeat fast paced electro music as if I'm Doomguy who just found a Mario's Invincibility Star, completely ruining the horror mood.
  
  When you reload, your movement speed is barely slowed down at all, completely ruining those tense moments from other 2D horror games where you need to reload while a monster is in your face.
  
  In many other horror games, reloading will discard your current mag. This means if you have not used all the bullets and you reload, you lose out on precious ammunition. This creates a strategic decision of whether to reload between fights so you will face your next monster with a full mag but waste ammo, or to go into the next fight with the off chance of having to reload in the midst of battle. But this game completely foregoes this concept as well by just adding the bullets from your ammunition to fill up your current mag, so you never have to worry.
  
  And then to top it all off, the game throws tons of resources at you. You never have to worry about ammunition or anything else as long as you just do the tiniest bit of exploration
  
  
• It wants to have puzzle platformer elements, but all of it amounts to go to place A to flip lever, which opens place B where you can go to flick lever which opens place C.
  
  
• It wants to have survival aspects, such as hunger, but since the game throws so many resources at you and there are so many places to make food, it is just a mild nuisance.
  
  
• It wants to be like a metroidvania with a big interconnected map, but almost all of it are just copy pasted rooms and hallways that make you get lost due to the game either not telling you where you need to go or the game softlocking, making you think you just need to explore and find something but nope you just infinitely stuck till you restart the game. The game would be better if 30-40% of the current map was just not there.
  

And then there are the bugs. There are so many bugs. Sprites clipping through other sprites. Collision boxes mising from walls, making you go through them and fall to your death if you thought you found a secret and tried to go through them. Elevators not working, forcing you to die or close and open the game to progress. The game crashing when you respawn. The game randomly making your character go back to sleep again after you got ouf of bed, making you watch the 10 second long animation again and then place you back at the bed.

And then worst of all, this game has softlocks that you seemingly cannot get through unless you enable cheats and teleport through the map. But due to the game not really telling you what to do, you can wander around aimlessly within the copy pasted hallways and rooms between realizing that no, the reason the elevator doesn't work isn't because you just need to explore to find an access card or lever or something. The reason the elevator doesn't work is because the game softlocked, and the only way to progress is to start an entirely new playthrough or just enable cheats. Yes I am still mad about this.

1.3 review
Poor menu design (option button not selectable.) and...
No indication of key binds. Select everything until you figure out what each button does.

Crouching and aiming breaks the character 1.3
Could be a good game, but ends too quickly when you get hit and die.
The game shouldn't end when you die, but you teleport to a secret egg area

Like many of the other reciews, shows promise! BUT BUGGY AS HELL!!

Can't wait for the save feature update, and a fix to crouch + shooting and crashing on game fail.


That aside, game does suffer the 'lose to see porn' issue, which I feel could be fixed with an award unlock through the menu after completing certain areas of the game.

Anyways, VERY promising, LOVE the art, and the porn is well animated too!!

This is a great little game in development. Really with a game in development, minimalism on a bunch of features is to be expected, bugs are to be expected. Despite the soft locks, hard locks, crashes and such, it still demonstrates itself to be more of a game than many in the genre.

I'm a fan of side-scrollers. I really like the aesthetics of alien isolation with the ui, which fits well with solo female protagonist fighting alien horrors on a space station. Even with the reduced detail on the characters and the scenes, I still had a jump scare relatively early on. There are elevators, vents, an eat/sleep cycle, crafting, gun-play.

Is it sexy hot? I suppose it's a matter of tastes. Currently there's ryona defeat, a bit of voyeurism.

On almost every front, it's a space that can be explored further even without story. Would love to see kinks ironed out and added. This is one that has plenty of room to grow.

There's the bones of something potentially great here. It's right up that alley I love of games like Captivity and Hell After School 2, but somewhere along the way, the polish and untangling of spaghetti code seems to have taken a backseat to the rest of the game.

Constant phasing in and out of terrain that leads to instant death falls are probably the worst part of the experience. There's one section in particular after turning the generator on where the upper console of an elevator is phased into the floor completely. The wouldn't be an issue, if that didn't also mean that the elevator stops at the console... just far down enough that you have no hopes of jumping up to the floor above. And the console ON the elevator won't send it back the other way. So that's progress lost for the sin of getting on an elevator and getting softlocked.

Also of note, some enemies track your position, even when they're in completely different rooms, since they're still technically on the same screen. So, if there's an enemy meant to be positioned part-ways into a room you're about to enter, they may have already sat themselves in front of the door. Cue rapid button mashing and hoping that the collision of your and their models don't send you either through the floor, or into an unwinnable loop of knockdowns. When faced with this, I found the best solution was to mash out of the grab, then immediately hit up to go back through the door. This usually makes enough breathing room to either give the room another swing or move on.

The English translation is fine, except for the loading menu tips, which range from 2000s texting lingo to straight up Yoda-speech or worse.

To reiterate: great potential. Fucking rough though.

Constant game breaking bugs, combat is terrible, porn is good but it's not enough to carry the game. I want to say this game is worthwhile, but it's simply not. If there weren't game breaking bugs every few minutes then it would at least be 2 stars but as of now if you try and play it you can expect any random action to break the game.

Rev @ PASEC [v1.3]

I watchlisted this for its potential, but its current state is Oof.

Art's nice. I dig it.

Writing is a problem; I give the scenario a pass but the tooltips / hints / UI elements / everything else is almost incomprehensible. Don't try to teach yourself english by reading a teenager's tumbler post.

Porn is win. I just wish it didn't feel like it only appeared in a loss state.

Gameplay is hyper-oof. I hit the first gamebreaking bug within the first room (crouch + aim caused the sprite to split at the waist and root in place). Saving has a >50% chance of causing a cascade of errors and crashing the game outright (seems to help to wait for the lights on the intro screen to finish animating?) and controls are just bad (try to kite an enemy and then turn around + fire = fire in the wrong direction) (vertical jump height seems tied to horizontal move speed?)

TLDR: Concept proven, now move on to polishing. A lot of polishing.

I sadly can't recommend this game right now. Clunky combat, the punishment for defeat is way too big of a time loss, and the movement is not that great either. The scenes are well animated and the whole artstyle is nice, but it's not enough to carry the game by itself.

Demo Release Rating

Art style is nice, I'm a sucker for 2d pixel stuff, so the mix of sprite porn and game over end screen pixel art animation is a major plus.

Combat is simple but works well, I can appreciate them trying to go for a slower pace, a way to dodge would be nice though.

Decreasing the volume in the club would be appreciated alongside with options for saving and clearer ways on healing.

Overall I'm excited to see what this project will end up in the end.

[v1.3]
Well...

Developer repairs/makes one thing and several more "holes" become visible.

And it's definitely an alpha version.
Not a full release.

-Story, Originality
You are a woman and you have to beat pervert aliens.

-Renders
Cool 2d pixel art.

-Sound
Some basic sounds.

-Playability
Several rooms with repeatable design and a lot of loot without any use.
You can eat (but why?) [since v1.0]

-Performance
Runs okay.

-Bugs
=There are some small animation bugs;
=WHEN YOU RELOAD ALL ENEMIES RESPAWN (And I died to a softlock bug);
=I tried to hit bugs at the club, got smacked, fell down and softlocked;
=Fell down after reloading, gameovered, reloaded and game crashed.

-Animations
Picel animation, that looks good, but is too far away to see details.

-Voice Acting
No voices.

-Grammar
Didn't see any mistakes.

-Amount of content
Developer tries to make a demo after posting it...

Wait a minute...
Why is it not a demo?

Is this supposed to be a full game?!
What the?..

OOoooofffff...
If I was mildly disappointed before, now I am very disappointed.

Its bad even by hentai game standards.

Empty locations that i just assume are meant to waste my time. Random mechanics glued together to simulate gameplay (sleep and hunger in a sidescroller action game... really?). Its very buggy, dont really need to elaborate here. And yeah if all that isnt enough to discourage you, if you die you have to play everything from the start so you have to walk all the way through the empty and boring locations every time you want to see a short game over animation.

Its overall an awful game, the only decent thing is the animations but im not willing to suffer playing this game just to see some nice animation for 5 seconds and then walk through empty halls for 10 minutes

This is why games have alpha and beta phases before skipping straight to 1.0. *IF* you can launch it. it's very poorly made with very good animations. there's not much else to say really

you can feel the "Devs first game" energy with this one

Nothing screams "Unreal engine" more than when game that has enough pixels to count them on my fingers barely reaches 20 fps.
Art is good, although because of heavily pixellated graphics can often be tough to parse.
Gameplay seems alright, although the game barely works right now. Options crashes the game, keybindings are absolute ass and not remappable.
Overall, this gets 4* purely because art is alright and bugs with pregnancy is my shit. If it didn't have these, it would have been a 1*. Keep an eye on it only if you are interested in the tags.

It's still too demo to rate better.
The control of the character is crooked, trying to enter the settings, I accidentally turned on first-person mode, on one of the floors I just walked through a wall, fell and died. The graphics are mostly not stylized or beautiful enough, the animations look great. Why so many loot and completely empty rooms? It's not great that after the first defeat in sex, is immediately gameover. Well, there is no way to save, because it is still very demo. In general, it is too demo to be good, and too demo to advise the developer of something useful. Keep working on the game and work on a more uniform and cute styling, because so far the picture is good only for technodemos.

I have been following this artist for about an year now. His pixel art is amazing and the game has big potential. In this version a small portion of his animations are added and it is his first beta after all. The story and theme are just my alley as well as the monsters and pregnancy. Voice and sounds are ok but he needs to add more ambient sounds.

Please add a save option, for the rest I love it. I really like the idea of the creatures that are there, the idea of it being some sort of lab with more messed up creations and/or insects, tentacle-like monsters or mutants that can & will impregnate the protag in order to turn her into a spawning bed or seed bed!

V 1
Disclaimer: I have been following this artist since Mid 2023, so I'm going to try to be unbias as possible.

Using Unreal engine for a 2d side scroller game is definitely a strange choice, especially one for a first time dev. From what I can gather Unreal engine was the training he received. Whether that means he deliberately chose Unreal or this was the engine of choice for a class he took is unknown, but I hope he can use it to its full potential, especially for an odd gamestyle choice.

As for the game itself, it definitely feels like a game demo: Controls are not responsive and you'll be fighting the character to simply turn left or right, there's barely any guidance on where to go, and the crafting and survival mechanics are just placeholders. I'm not sure if its due to the engine choice or the dev not knowing how to optimize his game (probably both), but you'll also find that this game is surprisingly demanding on specs. Its not a 4090ti killer, but very old PCs shouldn't expect to run this game smoothly.

Currently the only thing going for this game is the animations and pixel art. Star vs Fallout strength comes from his art & animation and his fetish for mind control and parasitism. Combine all this and it could make for a very interesting game. But currently there are only 3 enemies with 1 h scene each and 3 game over scenes. If you are only here for the porn, you are better off going to his Pixiv or Fanbox and finding the rest of his stuff there instead.

Despite everything, for a first time dev this game isn't too bad. For a demo it gives a solid framework on gameplay and the setting. I've played 1st release demos that played way worse and currently the dev is very active. But between the the dev's lack of experience and the niche fetish and style choice, I can also expect people to view this game poorly.

Review of Version 1.00

Space! Here take weapon someone needs help! Oh aliens are also on this station.

Cons:
-No saves, no checkpoints.
-Slow game. Usually not a problem but without a checkpoint system its really dragging.
-No gallery mode. Did not beat the game, was just too frustrating starting over.

Pros:
+Nice pixel art. The artist used every pixel and he needed to. Because with these amount of pixels, if you dont choose wisely you dont even know which hole gets fucked.
+Nice enviroment design
+Easy to understand gameplay.

All in all I started it. Did not know how to save. Got to the thread. Found out that there is no saving system. Letting me getting fucked by worms and said to myself: "Sadly I wont do that for every enemy I encounter. Good bye Pasec."

Usually I return to games I like, to watch the animations or play through it another time. But this game only gives one of these two factors that a game needs to have a place in my collection and my freetime.