Imagine a TPS game set in a classic space horror setting - The Alien, especially inspired by movie Alien 4 and game Alien: Isolation. Lonely space station falling apart and overrun by deadly monsters, military experiments gone wrong, enemies jumping from the vents or ceilings, captured humans "glued" to walls with hive resin to be used as hosts for next generation of monsters, dark or flooded corridors with environmental hazards and a lonely female protagonist trying to survive in all of this, armed with sci-fi themed guns while running around, pushing buttons, searching for keycards and doing typical stuff you do in those type of games... You know what I'm trying to picture here. Now! When you have this picture in mind change 3 things. First thing: everything (even coffee cups and trash bins!) is covered with colorful, bright neon or LED lights. Second thing: almost every survivor is more interested in swinging and fucking on every occasion than rather than actual surviving. Third thing: instead of Xenomorphs the mentioned space station is swarming with bloodthirsty and more important extremely horny half-werewolves who wants to bang everything that survived their claws. And this is pretty much what Project Werewulf is about.
PROS:
+ I would say pretty interesting story. For a game that isn't RPG and divides action between shooter, survival horror and h-content there is still place for storytelling. Some in random dialogues, some in datapads with logs, some in npc quest-lines, so you have to dig yourself every part and put pieces together in your head.
+ Nice looking and sexy MC that doesn't look like typical hentai doll. Sure you have plenty of games where heroine is simply sexy and sexualized but it's rare to get the athletic girl with muscles who has some realistic look. Sure in some animations and poses her body parts sometimes look odd but apparently making that perfect in UE5 is not that simple and Dev wasn't impressed with the default models so he decided to create his own by doing motion capture of an actual model. In other words MC is based on a body of actual living person and even if animating her isn't 100% perfect it still looks pretty cool and good to me.
+ Decent combat system. Yep, I know. Sometimes it's janky, sometimes hitboxes are weird, sometimes MC or enemies do some actions or animations that are completely dumb and pointless or move with a grace of wooden log. But overall, for a small indie Dev quality is pretty good. If we look what kind of crap large studios produce now, and how many games with much worse and janky combat are old classics people still play... Seriously, there is not that much to complain here. Personally I enjoyed it even if it wasn't perfect and honestly you can play it only for that.
+ Pretty good sexual content. Always fully animated, with full audio, different poses, many scenes with whole bunch of friendly or enemy characters alike. Again there could be more interactions, more variations, more kinks, more toys and devices but what we have is not bad.
+ Decent background and environment audio. Not awesome but ok. And... We also have actual voice acting, not some AI crap. MC and few chosen characters have voice actors dedicated for their spoken lines, while rest repeat some generic phrases. Sometimes they go "overdramatic" with emotions to a point it sounds completely cringe... But usually it's quite good.
+ Dress-up collectibles? Yeah... It seems to be a theme for some time, that 3D action games with female protagonist have mandatory lootboxes with clothes scattered around entire game. So we have this here. Bunch of clothing for the start and much more pieces to collect, and then you can mix them for the setups of your liking.
+ 2 types of zones. Combat zones are survi-horror themed linear missions, most of them repeatable where you complete objectives, collect items, push the story forward or just shoot stuff for fun. Safe zones are peaceful locations for free roam, some side activities and majority of sexual interactions with NPCs.
+ Updates! Despite final release Dev is still updating the game and have entire roadmap of future updates with more locations, more clothing, more NPCs, more scenes, more missions.... And at the same time we have fixes and changes requested by community. More important, none of this content is in the form of paid or separated DLC - you have the newest version of the game, so you have everything included there.
CONS:
- Poor characters. I know it's not an RPG game but if the Dev decided to implement individual characters with their own VAs and quest-lines who have some relationship/friendship with MC I'd love to have more interactions and more story associated with them than just short chat and banging scenes. Now they're pretty empty.
- Poor ending. I know that ending is a gateway for the planned second part of the game... But I would prefer to see it at the start of second game rather than here, especially since after completing the game, story rolls back to a point before final mission putting it in some kind of limbo, where we can repeat majority of the game endlessly for new content and tactics... But at the same time we loose access to some other content and scenes from previous "chapters" and for them we still have to repeat entire game anyway. So it's kind of meh solution, especially since the way game's core work, we have only one single save slot available for everything and it auto saves at certain moments so we can't have bunch of saves for different playthroughs in different parts. There's also no gallery/dream memories mode. I don't want to spoil the ending but if you complete the game, you'll probably know what I'm talking about.
- There are whole bunch of other minor issues I could list... But. Some I mentioned already, some aren't that important to list in detail. Generally by the time I write this, Project Werewulf is still unpolished here and there... But Dev is still polishing it at the same time so it's hard to tell how many of those will be in the final final (or true final) version. For example when I started to play after final/official release, character customization and wardobe menus were awful. Now when I completed and collected everything that was released to that point they got much better. Still lot of small things to polish left but again nothing major or game-breaking.
To summarize, Project Werewulf is pretty good for a small indie Developer with limited budget and ambitious project to mix h-game with other genres. It's not extra great, it has some issues, but for the amount of work Dev put and is still putting to make it better I really appreciate it. It's one of those games made with passion rather than a cheap AI cash grab with adult content. Basically this is kind of love/hate product. You either assume (and that will be accurate assumption) that Dev wanted to make too ambitious project that would be a challenge even to a large studio and failed to nail it in many aspects so you dislike the game. Or you realize that for the level of challenge it's still quite good for such limited resources and simply enjoy it as it is. Personally I had fun playing it and I will surely play again when more content and fixes will be released.