(I'd recommend reading my previous review down in the spoiler first)
Updated review on 2.81
I decided to give this game another go and force myself beyond the initial frustrating phase where you're too weak to beat basically any opponents. And it was a weird rollercoaster where I changed my mind a lot throughout, and I'm still honestly hovering at a 3.5 star rating max, but since I think my opinion has improved since my last review, it's only fair to now up my rating from 3 to 4.
A lot of my criticisms from my previous review still stand but I want to give them a bit more nuance here.
First of all, the initial grind up to a level where you can at least go into a fight with some creatures expecting to win and not necessarily having to save every second is really long and annoying. It basically just consists of working for the farmer, going to sleep, working for the farmer, going to sleep, in my case for like a 100 days before my level was anywhere near acceptable.
After that, the game does become more enjoyable. The fights can still sometimes be nuisances but all in all, after a while, I actually seemed to outpace the increased toughness of your opponents and it just got smoother throughout.
A lot more gameplay mechanics become available as well after a while which is pretty cool.
Overall, I even enjoy the story and the characters even though they are sometimes a bit cliché.
Also, I feel like the dev needs to go back and give stronger guidance to the player as to which storylines to pursue and areas to explore first. Playing this, it very much felt like a game that was developed bit by bit, played by people playing it update to update, and coming in late, you feel very directionless and overwhelmed at first and can even have some (not necessarily game-breaking) glitches or scenes that you realize are supposed to come at a later time than you've encountered them. So there really needs be some retrospective structuring of the whole game.
The sexual element in this game was also a bit of a rollercoaster because it started kind of wild with beastiality right out of the gate, then became a lot more tame with a slow build-up, then blew up again with some wild scenes, and finally meandered off to a weirdly tedious and endless monotony that I can only describe as a child-production grindfest. Seriously, it's just weird how much of the later sex scenes just revolve around going around to all your love interests, drinking some extra-fertile potion, and impregnating one after the other, then waiting like 3 days until they tell you they're pregnant, waiting another 3 days until they've given birth, and rinse and repeat until they've reached their pre-programmed limit of children. I guess you don't really need to max out all your children slots but it just feels like the game wants you to do this, like an achievement milestone. And for all that, the sex stays relatively vanilla, which is kinda suprising and disappointing.
Anyway, just wanted to update my thoughts on this game because it sure is unique and I am waiting for the next update, but if it's just gonna be more impregnation grinding, then I'm out.
