[small minor edit 03/22 -- Just removed the engrish caveat paragraph as the more I went through the more the translation project shines in cleaning up what I remembered the game to be when it came to it's writing. Not to say that the writing is particularly good, and there's still heaps of awkward engrish everywhere but the translation project very much helped clean things up.]
When waltzing down memory lane on smut alley, I found myself stumbling on a relic of the past, one that felt as though it was a monumental statue in a sea of ruin.
If you forgive the rather melodramatic opening, you can perhaps see my bias when it comes to this review, there's going to be some rose-tinted angles that are probably going to crop up at the edges. That's mainly in consideration of its history on the site, alongside it being one of the first games I gentlemanly acquired back in the day. Way back in the day, come to think of it. Also I also cheat in this game as it utterly demands it, I have played this game w/o cheating and I’m telling you it’s not worth that trouble. More will be said on that later.
Anywho, onto the game.
To help give context to this game and why it has near five stars and a large amount of people flocking about it despite it being abandoned for more than two years, we have to dive back into old F95.
In old F95, there used to be sub forums for games, not just threads dedicated to them but whole sub-branches that spoke to the ye olden means of what forums used to be. This game was probably the largest out of the bunch, with many threads dedicated to figuring out how to progress with the many women you find, and many dedicated on translating the game more properly than MTL can ever do. Alongside that, there were probably many users asking if their game was broken or not. It probably most likely was.
You may still ask though, with it being one of the bigger games back in the day, why have I not heard of it recently? Well...mainly because as you can see it has the big ol' abandoned tag on it. And on top of that, the main creator (in a weird hand of fate way) only came back by the time I started writing this review. So it's been dead in the water for quite some time in spite of it being one of the biggest real-porn games ever made.
And maybe finally, you may ask (again), why was there so much effort for something that looks incredibly tacky? Well, if anything, it was the first real-porn game to actually be halfway decent in spite of it's problems. I'm sure many users out there still hold this game dearly (as much as you can with a smut game) when they think back on it, but then forget how God-awful it's mechanics and time management were in relation to how real-porn games are now.
So then, what is this ethereal, Russian QSP game? If you already guessed, it's a role playing sandbox. And it holds all those problems that are associated with that and QSP mingling together. You play as Sergei, a guy that just recently graduated and completely fumbled his prom. After that, you pretty much are setting out in the big world as a young lad, ready to pretty much do anything and everything.
That thus translates into basically lewding every gal you see. Don’t forget though, you’re in Russia so at some point you either have to go to the university or arbitrarily, later down the line ingame, you will be forceably conscripted as a gameover (just don’t forget to sign up for Uni by August and crank your performance to max in the cheat menu). From there, you basically fly through the areas, find new girls, look up walkthroughs and feel out their stories.
The above sounds simple enough, but, the game only works like that if you have a cheat engine. Without it, things can be rather tedious, slow, and ultimately sloggy. With the cheat engine, it still feels sloggy-ish, namely in having to skip time, repeat events and eventually raise levels either through grind or editing variables, but it’s much better than doing it raw (for once).
Just to explain the grind without cheats, you have to grind out money to then grind out uni to then grind out characters when you have time in between. You also have to grind your own stats such as strength to then grind out other character stats once that barrier is satisfied. All with this not really being explained (hidden variables and what have you). All of that is literally just filler in between the lewd. Some jobs do introduce you to new characters, but again the function of the grind is just padding ultimately.
So, don’t hurt yourself in that regard, get the translation project patch, it comes with a built-in cheat menu and instructions on how to use it. It helps mitigate everything in terms of that, and allows you to play the game as fast or slow as you want (so much so that you can actually break it if you’re not careful). And utilize the walkthroughs, this game is a minefield when it comes to events happening at certain times, and/or other events needing to occur that are completely unrelated to the quests at hand.
Anyways, in consideration of the lewd, it’s both great and rather vapid. There is a boat load of it in this game, that file size is insane for a reason. Everyone has their own pics, vids, and gifs that stick to the actresses/characters they are to be, there are little to no bits of porn that break the contexts as to who’s who. Yet their story(ies) are still rather thin as to who everyone is. There's enough substance to have people somewhat contextualized for what they are, but nobody really feels like a well fleshed out character in this game, especially since a lot of this game does boil down to porn. Nothing too too egregious, considering that I think the main sell of the game isn't story and substance, but the absolute amounts of porn it's burgeoning with, with scraps of "plot" to justify it.
And finally, even with help from the cheat engine, and help from guides and walkthroughs, everything at the moment is subject to being outdated and/or fractured into other bits. What I mean by that is some walkthroughs discuss the early routes of characters in previous versions that are currently more fleshed out in the current .29 version. You have to still do some digging for this game, whether it be through archived threads, or through posts on the main thread to fully understand how far some of these characters go, or what you need to do to further progress with them. I recommend buying all the items at the mall/shop in the beginning, it helps get past a lot of those smaller nuances that hang up quests.
And with all that’s been said, would I recommend this game ultimately? It's hard considering that this game bounces from being a 3 to 5 star experience constantly. There's a lot of nice routes to take, a helluva lot of content, a million girls to pursue, and many neat contexts to enjoy lewd events that are good enough in what’s being portrayed. Yet on the flip side there's also the interface of QSP in all it’s crustiness, the quests themselves have to followed to a T, and the cheat engine is mandatory unless you just hate yourself. On top of that, you have to just hope things work at times considering that the game can just be weird in triggering events to happen, or, sometimes things just don't trigger at all and you don't know why. And that ultimately, a lot of this (and trust me there's a lot) is just porn with vague engrish alongside it. There's a very noticeable mixed bag feeling with this behemoth.
I will say if you can accept all of that, knowing you're going to have to prep to play this game (walkthrough, cheat engine, engrish acceptance, time, grind, etc), then yes, you can experience the nth amounts of smut this game is providing you and most likely enjoy the hell out of it. Overall though, I recommend it only if everything I said sounds like a fun afternoon rather than a journey into masochism. 4/5.