Others - RogueLove [v0.24] [Noxious Games]

If you've read my reviews in the past, you know I rank my H-games purely based on if the MC can optimize combat in one frame and get filled in the other. This game can do that, all be it, at a very buggy, and in a punishing way. I was excited, pixel art was on point, music wasn't half bad, the setting was great for a H-game, crawling out the dungeons and fighting bad guys! And, man, THREE DIFFRENT PLAYABLE CHARACTERS? Too good to be true I'm afraid.

This game's attempts at punishing the player are too ambitious and usually ends up making the entire purpose of playing a H-game not fun, by dragging out combat and making a lose condition based on the lust resource. No H-game that has been successful has kept that as a functionality, at least not without a gallery. Gulity Hell, Night of Revenge, Dark Star, Mystic Knight Maya, etc.

Just do health damage, or if you want a lust mechanic, reward the player with aheago art instead of the normal sprites. Don't punish the player for wanting to see what happens if they just stand in front of the huge enemy while being naked, it's a common thought, very common.

You may say, well the games like Max The Elf for example can do this type of combat, but that game plays very differently and isn't drawn out. Each stage is quick and gives the player a new start of that stage instantly, effectively rewarding the player for losing by showing them an animation and just letting them run it back. This game is a hassle, since you start from the very start, with only a few enemies having a animation, and it's a repeated one at that.

Great potential, needs polish, and for the love of God, rework the puzzle and the prisoner conditional, I've gotten softlocked 3 times cause of it. 6.5/10

[v0.18]

Neat concept, absolute failure of execution as it is now.

The most important part-the combat- is so fucked that it becomes turn based:

• Attacking locks you in- can't move or try to dodge,
• Positioning / movement is unclear and easy to get stuck, dodge doesn't reposition properly,
• Melee attack range is awful and unclear,
• Enemies can use spells that don't need to connect to affect.

It's borderline unplayable for me.

Controls feel clunky but actually fun.
I don't fully understand the character creation or why the drow got deleted when iu selected the human to delete meta data. I wish there was more explanation to unlock more races.

So for me the game definitely needs improvement, however its not the worst.


The UI needs some changing for the items carried. My inventory got full and then it started displaying items over my items, which wasn't amazing.

The gameplay got boring after a while. After getting all the H-Scenes in the beginning the game just didn't see much variety.

No offense, however due to the lack of variety and the nature of the game it becomes not fun after a while. The problem that I'm seeing is that due to the game's rogue-like nature there is no "safety net" or boundary that allows the player to try going for the h-scene.

Currently the scaling with weapons and item drops are making me unbeatable to enemies even in new areas. And there are no saves and/or checkpoints for the player so it makes losing your clothing or for players trying to "enjoying" themselves an very high-risk action coercing them to just play the game.

Additionally there needs to be a manual pickup feature for players. The walk onto pickup really sucks when you just finished a boss fight and your gear keeps swapping before you go into the next floor.

Overall the progress in the game is good, however minor tweaks in game philosophy or game design can make it from "okay" to "this is pretty good."

This kinda concept is always nice to see, a good work in progress. I rate this 5 stars because good rouge like games are rare to see these days. Its just a bonus to enjoy content when losing in the dungeon, it makes you keep playing

4 stars? i'm crazy? Yes, but this game is good.
Yes, the UI is awfull
Yes, controls are clunky (but you can get used to it easly, just use the keyboard)
Yes, this game doesn't explain nothing like how you cast magic (keep pressing ctrl, then release)
And yes, is very RNG meaning you could end up with only firsts
But after you get along with this flaws, Is a good challenging roguelike .
I end up 3 levels with only fists, so git gut.

Review of v0.6

This seems like it's had a fair amount of thought put into it, but not enough actual / practical design choices were made. TLDR of this is I'd avoid unless the game has a lot of updates to it.

The good: Decent pixel art and sex scenes from what I've seen, though I didn't find much due to mostly trying to win fights. Ok rogue light elements.

It could really use a gallery / arena to let the player see the content. Probably based on enemies the player has beaten, but I'm kinda of counting that as an early version missing thing here.

The bad. And there's a lot more bad than good.

It's basically like an older school, zelda game. Top down, swing your weapon in the direction you're facing. But your weapon only hits one target, and has no arc. So if your position / angle is off a little bit from your target you just can't hit them since you're attacking nothing by the game's standards. I'd frequently find the slime or goblin I'm trying to kill was just a pixel off, and I'd swing pointlessly.

It uses the 3.5 DnD stats (with no in game explanation of them / that you need a 2 point increase to get a +1). This is just a pointless addition in my opinion. It pretty much could be replaced by just having a +1 damage/ + 1 HP / whatever stat system when you level up. All it does is slightly change the chances of an automatic miss, HP / MP, and chances to avoid both mental and physical sex attacks .

There's no inventory at all. You can wear one upper gear, one lower gear, and one weapon. There are also scrolls, which I think are also limited to 1 slot, but i'm not sure since I found very few of them. So you can't carry potions to use later (rare drops as well), or take extra gear to sell. You also automatically switch to any piece of gear you walk over, so if it's a worse piece of gear you need to walk over what you want again to use it.

Shops have 4 items every time, but you have literally no way of knowing (at least I didn't find one) to know what you're buying (except potions). That chest piece could be better, could be worse. Who knows what that scroll does, you can't even see a name to guess at it / know from already seeing one.

Item drops seem really shit to me. I may have just had bad luck, but there was almost no healing potion drops in the 3 decent runs I played (getting to the third floor or more). The chests (which require a separate key drop to open) seem to have a massively disproportionate chance to drop weapons. In one run I got like 8 drops of the SAME weapon, and 1 of coins and a potion. Overall from every run I think it was like 70% weapons, which you can only have 1 of so it's pretty useless when there are only 2 weapons that drop (that I found) with identical stats.

Magic is either completely useless or healing. When you level you get a magic spell, depending on the level. The ones I recall specifically are blue (ice), red (fire), purple (evil / darkness) which all are a since projectile fired forward, that do almost no damage and take a long time to charge. And they can miss, just like standard attacks. The green spell (earth) creates an AoE DoT effect, that enemies pretty much hit once and then sit behind until it fades. White is healing, which is very useful since it actually gives you consistent healing and mana potions were the most common in my runs. If you decide to double up by selecting the same class of magic again, it's still shit because I didn't actually see any changes to what the spell did at all.

There's no settings menu I could access. It's shit to not see one in the main menu to begin with, but then it being a useless / non functioning button in the game is just shitty.

There's no in game controls list / instructions. Again ,just a shitty thing to not have something in game so the player doesn't need to tab out and open a text file to figure out how to use the spells they randomly picked.

The bugs are quite annoying. My first run I got to the boss and it was the Megabat, which I hit a few times and then it left the map to do one of it's attacks, then never returned. I didn't see that bug again, but still annoying. Then my best run, reaching level 4 of the dungeon, I go to a room and there are severed hand enemies. Of no apparent reason they divide into smaller versions on death, making them almost impossible to hit since the pixels you need to hit are reduced and they move fast as hell. Then the room wouldn't open after I cleared the room.

Game has potential but it's just so badly designed. I like the idea of an isaac styled roguelike with porn elements but I don't think this is handled that well.

The controls really urk me because of how concentrated they are in the keyboard. Wasd to move, f to attack, e to interact, q to read, shift to charge magic, tab to change spells. You have an entire keyboard to work with and yet they're all in roughly the same spot. I get that its porn and they probably wanted to go with a one handed game but given the nature of it I would prefer an actual control scheme that works like everything else as normal but arrow keys to move.

On top of that the rpg elements just don't sit well with the overall base design of the game. What I'm mostly referring to is the completely pointless missing mechanic like you need dex stats. The fact that you need to approach enemies and actually physically hit them should speak for itself. A miss is just a miss but the fact that you can hit something and it counts as a miss is just dumb when you consider the awful hit detection. It's an absolute slog to deal with when you're fighting the slime king, for example, and you miss 4 times in a row on his completely stationary core. It's already bad enough that I have no damage on floor 1 but then my only chance to do damage on his weakness is negated half the time just because an accuracy system was programmed in a game where you already have to physically be accurate. There's a reason a game like binding of isaac doesn't have an accuracy stat, the game is already designed for you to simply be accurate. It doesn't need this level of rpg elements involved.

Other than the janky hit detection drop's are pretty awful which kind of set you up for failure. It really is feast or famine because you really could just go entire floors not getting any upgrades simply because every chest you get needs a key and you get no keys. Not to mention whether or not you get money is completely up to rng. Plus the boss chest itself doesn't even guarantee you anything good or helpful, managed to kill a boss and was rewarded with a chest that had 2 coins in it, how lovely.

Additionally the UI is fucking awful. It's absolutely horrendous. Like 50% of the screen is nothing but these huge windows that don't need to be there. The chat box is completely pointless because unless you're losing on purpose you're literally never going to read what's going on. I don't need to know that the cold dank air is chilly to my suddenly naked body. The stats box doesn't need to be there when it can be simply attached to a pause menu or something if I ever need to see it and in turn the removal of that box would allow the map to go a bit higher up out of the middle of the screen. Equipment should be to the right of the health and energy bars and the character preview should be a toggle option because I really don't need it taking up all the space it is. It really is just a clusterfuck of windows with no optimization to make it look good.

It could become a good game but it really just has so much work in so many different fields. Gameplay needs to be polished up, the UI should be adjusted and customizable, balance needs to be messed with. Although with how many games they're working on I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this game to improve.