Ren'Py - Sovereign [v0.12.0] [Zinikis Production]

Is it the best? Nah. At where it is right now (.8 at time of this post) I'd say dl it only to take a looksee on how it is coming along and to decide whether put it onto your watchlist or not.
Overall there ain't too much here to go on about. Most other reviews cover it well enough already. This is however one of those that makes up for shortcomings with good CG and models. Good foundation and all that. I look foward to more and wish the developer the best in working on it and hopefully they will live long and prosper enough to find the time to finish it... then I can come back later and up the rating and all that

Literally everything in this game is horribly generic. Generic models, generic backgrounds, generic gameplay, standard mind control plot, and worst of all, characters that are the same as not only any other zero-personality waifu template, but also each other in terms of the shitty generic lines they spew.

There are lines literally copy-pasted from one girl to another, and from one situation into another, which is probably the very worst thing you could possibly do in any interactive story-telling medium, like the ultimate form of dismissing characterization as unimportant when it is basically the only thing that is invariably important to any story.

And on top of that the dev wants you to first read his awful info dump of an exposition before the game earns that kind of attention from you, and then go through a tutorial that annoyingly overexplains an already simplistic and self-explanatory UI, before telling you to engage in the most unengaging, zero brain, zero skill and zero emotion kind of grind one could come up with, so you have to earn the right to access his """quality""" content, which by the way is barely there.

I'm giving Sovereign more than 1 star because it is technically playable and the models aren't the worst out there (if not actually good), even though part of me wishes I could just stop trying to be objective about this whole thing and just dunk this game's rating as much as I can with this one review because of what an infuriatingly misguided approach it takes to porn gaming.

Shameful. Just shameful.

The game is good, the grind is OK it's not too much, the girls are all hot, I feel a good potential in this game.
An advice: I see that you're showing new girls in new location with a " Coming Soon" message.
Don't add too many girls early in the game, at least not before you finished the whole content for one girl, so we will be able to see the whole corruption sequence.

Also, you should focus a bit more on story. Every event about the main story was really good! You should do more of them.

The 4stars is for 2 things:
1- The amount of content. I'm a bit disappointed by the amount of new scene released at each new version. I think I will be playing every 3-4 versions now.
2- The repeatable event: With some girls, each repeatable scene change when you level up the girl. Example: The massage with the mom. It'sgood.
For other girls, (like older sister), you still have the first level event when you do a repeatable event (workout with her for example). The scene is not linked with the level of the girl and it's sad, in a corruption game it's important to see the progression and the change of a girl at every step, not only unlocking new scene at every step.

I like the look and idea of this initially. I like mind control and sandbox games when done well. Sadly this one isn't. (0.71)

Firstly the grind is immense to get anywhere. Even after you have been grinding a point or two everyday I found the reward pretty minimal. It takes ages to build influence and then corruption which I would be kind of fine with if I felt the actions or repeat scenes were satisfying but they just aren't. One of the new options for touching characters is just a "..." Response.

Secondly the game at this point is 4gb but a lot of the readers are kind of grainy and the character models and lighting remind me of games from 10 years ago.

I genuinely wish the best for the dev. There is potential here but the mechanics need overhauling or the repeat scenes actually interesting to make the grind anything but an excruciating boring chore.

The renders of the game seem good to me, but they are very scarce. Also, I don't like at all that the cover spoilers the protagonist's transformation.
The game is not very good, in fact, I only recommend playing it with the money trick, to increase it to 99999 and from there buy UP and gifts to increase influence and corruption, otherwise it would be more boring than it already is .
In fact, in the latest update, you have to go to work quite a few times to be able to get promoted and corrupt your co-worker (who barely changes). To do this you have to go from Monday to Friday for at least two weeks and for 8 hours to be able to advance. This can't be achieved with tricks that I know of, just grinding.
Not recommended game if you don't do tricks, with beautiful but scarce renders and very small and short updates. If you've seen the cover of the game, you've already seen it all.
This review is automatically translated and manually modified. My main language is not English.

I think the game is very good, I played the 0.7.1 version. Maybe an easier access to the status of the targets would be good, for example a picture in a corner with the rough data like corruption level, relationship level or a tracker for even the different targets.
All in all, however, a good game.

It's a sandbox game but this one had me hooked. The concept/story is great and has good potential, especially if you're intrigued in becoming a great sovereign(master) with a plethora of ladies(slaves) to influence onto your dick.

I'm critical when it comes to character model appeal and these ones are quite noice (the Mom ). There are a lot of ladies(slaves) you can find in the game but alot don't have content. Luckily the Mom has the most content so concentrate on her.

The game is obviously at early stages as you can see alot of areas like the school hospital etc have no content, but it shows there is a lot down the line. So now i'm waiting with bated breath until the next update.

Overall entertaining game with pretty ladies(slaves) and decent gameplay elements. Look foward to when the Mom goes full slave.

I enjoy grindy gameplay (Shoot me please), but the in-between needs to have some substance and there's just nothing there. The dialogue is generic, none of the characters are fleshed out and share the same replys at times.

All you do is click the same stuff endlessly, so an arbitrary number goes up. There's no life to this shell of a game.

I am sorry, but you need less grind and more depth to make this even remotely playable.

Review as of v 0.6.0

sovereign more like Grind-reign

I don't like write negative review here as most devs are trying to learn things while they showcase their developing games here. But this seem warranted

Pros -
female character renders look nice
objectives/event tracking is clear and easy to follow through

Cons -
where do I even begin?
game banner art is deceptive marketing at best.
-banner art depicts Emily from normal dress to pierced & see through bikini. But game only has up to pink slutty dress. so last two clothes and corruption tiers are not available. "why would you fall such obvious ploy" I hear you ask , but in my defense game file size being 4gb with no animated scene (only static images) I least expect the banner art to follow its own game premise

-Too much Grind
in normal play through you will be grinding for money, strength & intelligence stats while trying to rack up much influence & corruption points possible.
Sadly I cheated seeing how slow the game progressing only to realize that there is not much content here

-bad game optimization.
while the content seem so less game size being is 4.45gb made me curious to check the render file size. Each image is 4k resolution averaging between 11mb-14mb. I have seen other games with 4k images that have 5-7mb without loosing quality. I shudder to think what will happen when game has more h-scenes

Has the makings of a good game but it's bogged down by WAAAAAYYYYY too much grind. Have to click through multiple frustrating interfaces in a sandbox that's too big for it's own good, just to make very small progression. Very repetitive tasks.

Big time grind with no animations. Renders aren't to bad. I like the story idea. Take out 80% of the grind and add in some story telling. It might be good. If this is a first time dev. I'd say it's a good start. Not a game I will return to.

Too much of a grindfest, you repeat the same events over and over, day by day, and then you are rewarded with a tiny scene that progresses your relationship with the character. Some of the girls look hot, that is the only redeeming quality in the game, avoid at all costs.

V0.5.1

Overgrind is my chosen description
i got bored with the grind after barely an hour with all the to and fro
not a fan of the mechanics.

visually it is fine. no wow factor for me but not a complete eyesore either. all characters are a cutout image on a background. event art is slightly better but poor angles chosen. it just becomes background to the grind though.

the plot is your basic adult corruption game plot and the writing is poor. needs some thought put into it.

the heavy grind quickly removes any enjoyment, and in it's current state, it also has little content with characters. only the mother has any content worth looking at and even then the images look unworthy of the related grind. mechanics just seem too much for such unrewarding imagery and story.

It would be a terrible game 6 years ago when that kind of game still dominated the genre.

-There is barely a story.
-Progression is linear and boring (dress sexy -> touching -> make up -> ...) and always the same order for every girl. If you seduce a girl with a massage then every progress will make the massage sexier and sexier.
-Characters are barely decent
-No animation so we have 3 renders for every sexy scene
-To go from place to place is a grind on top of the grind you have to do to up the stats and when you chose to kiss a girl to grind her influence ......... you don't see the kiss.

If it's to put a total of 30 sexy renders in a game, just do a visual novel and don't bother developping a game.

Despite the fact that this game appears to be 3-5 years too late from a graphical and gameplay perspective, it is strangely compelling and addictive. For now not much of BDSM content is shown, but the very idea of MC corrupting/enslaving his whole family is very intruiging.

I hope we see soon start to see some interactions between the different family members. Right now all progression paths are completely isolated and very similar in style (makeup->massage->dress-...). MC fucks his Mom and kisses her in public on a date but the sisters (or anybody else for that matter) is completely oblivious to that.

Great game, some repetitive gameplay for some hot scenes is a decent tradeoff. The game at current (0.5) is at a very decent state with a fair amount of content, and a huge potential. Dev is responsive and friendly, so thats a bonus.

Well the game is great, not too much grinding. It's still an early version, so much of the text and, frankly, gameplay, is likely works fine.
There's still not that much content but it's definitely getting there.
Looking forward to future updates.

I think game modeling is great
The difficulty of the game is average for me.
Looking forward to future updates
Looking forward to subsequent slave routing or other routing
and more optional costume changes.
Well done. I will support it (if there is a STEAM version)

Very solid bones here so far, although rough on the writing and gameplay side. Similar to Corruption in premise, scope and style. I actually think this game will be quite good if it is consistently worked on and reaches the potential it's set up for itself- this specific flavour of very gradual corruption is a niche that is hard to get exactly right and I've found that similar games like Corruption go a bit too far, a bit too fast so we'll see where this one falls. I've been burned enough times, but I have hope it'll be finished. I like the models a lot, the setting and story is neat without being obtrusive and the number of girls that appear to be planned is quite ambitious.

It's still an early version, so much of the text and, frankly, gameplay, is likely placeholder, but a writing pass will be sorely needed at some point- outside of the dedicated scenes, where the writing is passable, the characters are devoid of any sort of individuality or personality. While not a priority, I think it would make the overall grind a bit more tolerable.

The grind itself is not egregious, but feels a bit unnecessary. This is definitely the kind of game where you go into the renpy console and just set the values up to the next threshold to see the next scene, and you're not really missing anything worthwhile by doing so. Either speeding it up or giving some sort of variety on how influence and corruption is gained would be much nicer than needing to cheat to make it bearable.

I waited until version 5.0 to try this. It's still pretty rough around the edges but I like sandboxes and the character models look hot.

Positives
- First time where the side characters aren't hotter than the main characters
- First time where the "landlady" isn't gross-looking but is actually pretty fucking hot. Good job.
- It reminds me of the classic old school, incest, sandbox games but with a modern update for the renders.

Negatives
- Not the worst grammar but it's still pretty bad. Maybe get a proofreader. If the game gets better, I'd probably just do it for free. Don't be afraid to start a sentence with "But" , "However", "Still", "or "Although" instead of saying "though" all the time. It just starts to sound like some sort of verbal tic.
- Some bugs were encountered. Seems like typos made while coding. (Mini-UP ends up costing the same as UP, Jeanne or whatever-her-name-is is called "Landlady" at some point, etc.)
- The game mechanics are there but just aren't that elaborate and feel kind of pointless. Feels like they're not quite there yet.
- Oh right. Also, gets kind of confusing when you can rename the "landlady" but not the "house mates". But honestly, any modder with spare time could just handle that. It's not really the dev's problem.

Some possible suggestions and other things I'm just neutral about
- A mini-hud or something that connects to the character hints so we don't have to go back and forth between the game and the character page.
- No animations. Not a big deal and I know how time-consuming/intensive it can be to render those so it is what it is.

Conclusion:
It's a basic plot line you've seen before. Nothing to write home about but nothing to complain about either. I kind of miss games like this that don't try to have such deep and "romantic" stories. Most devs can't write for shit so it ends up corny melodrama rather than deep and sometimes you really just want to see hot characters. This game delivers on that.

Honestly, terrible grammar and spelling usually turn me off immediately but I have a soft spot for these types of sandbox, corruption games because one of them being one of the first AVNs I ever played. Still, better proofreading would do wonders.

There's still not that much content but it's definitely getting there.

(Half-serious about proofreading it. We'll see what future updates look like.)