VN - Ren'Py - Completed - Spy X Taxi [v1.0] [White Paw]

It looks like it could have been good. However the model of this game seems in line with EA. If you don't have the Patreon version, don't tempt the option. Too bad, the animations seemed so well done but the loading-screens do not make sense as they just seem to slow everything down. And based on their EA like mindset, I wouldn't put it past them to slow non-Patreon versions by forcing a loading screen for 5-10 seconds any time any visual changes are made. Also there are some dead scenes, like when Lana Corbin is asking her age, it errors and auto answers.
And I want to remove the MELE passengers.

The art and animations are great. 5 stars.

The game part is just bad. It's 100% random who you get of 7 girls and 3 random dudes (who you can't disable without joining Patreon...), with obnoxious and unnecessary "Loading..." screens between everything you click.
It's a probabilistic grind-fest and it feels like it.

You will spend at least 1 hour just waiting in screen transitions in order to see 7*3 = 21 animation sequences.

Once you've maxed out relation with one of the girls she still shows up - you can't reload while driving, saving and loading are disabled, presumable to prevent save-scumming. In a porn game.

I used console hacks and it still took ages to get through RNG.

Game version: 1.0 Final

TLDR: Too much grind for too little content. Nothing for the quick fap. Overall still enjoyable because of the laid back game tempo and the game mechanics itself.

The game is built around interviews of your customers (there are even three (?) males, which are completely redundant; they are artificially stretching the game time), each correct answer gives you affection points which in turn unlock new scenes with them.
The bad thing about this mechanics is that it takes quite some time to "level up" with one of the women because each successful interview only gives you very few points. You can speed this up by buying them gifts, but this also does only gives (too) few points.
The UI and game mechanics are fresh and it almost feels like an interactive game.
The overall graphics are too bright and shiny for my taste, also the animations are not bad on the one hand, but there is way too much shaking of the camera in them so it feels uncomfortable to watch them on the other. I think it's because it focusses on the character too much.

P.S.: I never found out what the energy bar in the upper left was about. It never depleted and never influenced the gameplay in any way.
And the "Remove Mele (= "Male"?) Passenger"-cheat didn't work reliably

There are 7 girls with 3 sex scenes each, which isn't a lot, but each scene has around 20-ish animations and they're quite nice so I'm not complaining. It's a short game but that would be OK.

The girls' traits and personalities are nicely distinct despite the short amount of dialogues/messages.

Everything else however is pretty bad.

The story is pointless, you're not really engaging with it during the game. The MC could have been a taxi driver instead of a spy pretending to be a taxi driver and the game would have been the same.

The game is a boring grind. I enabled rollback (using unren, because the option is removed from the preferences), and I cheated myself a shitton of money (this cheat would be available for Patreon supporters by the way) and still found all the clicking and all the transitions tedious. I also edited a variable to remove the male customers (another option that would be reserved to Patreon) because fuck them, they're just a waste of time. You have all the answers from the start by the way, so the quiz game is just "look at your notes and click the right box".

The UI is functionally good, but visually atrocious, with glowing colours and glitching text. I also found the UI noises mildly annoying.

The constant camera movement is a bit too much. Maybe just a bit here and there would have been cool.

The text has a couple of typos but fewer than many other games.

The code has a couple of bugs and continuity errors. Ariella says "Nope." when you give the correct answer to one of her questions. Both Ariella and Mellisa have their gifts misspelled in the code, so giving them doesn't trigger the intended reward. Rhea will always say it's her first time when you fuck her selecting the first scene. You'll keep looking for the snake tattoo even after you have already discovered the spy.

In some games the grind is good, because it's fun and engaging. Not here. This grind is just tedious and the game would be much better without it. Scrap the stupid quiz and make the MC discover the girls' traits through dialogues, you know, like normal people do. Make each interaction with a girl unlock her next phase, there's no point in clicking through the same shit again and again just to fill a completion bar. Maybe develop their stories a bit. Then you'll have something actually enjoyable.

Nice idea but needs de-grinding. 40 minutes in and the only thing I have to show for my work is a slowly incrementing 'affection' bar for each girl.

Very bright color palette.

Metric units, didn't see any way to change to US/Imperial. Doesn't really matter for game purposes, as the ranges are so narrow as to make it guesswork anyway.

No Skip or Back buttons.

There's the germ of a nice idea here, but execution is lacking.

Very unusual and beautiful game. Fresh breath of air after repeated VNs with the same monotonic plot. And it's not purely VN, which also good. Great and magnificent animations. Cons: after some time camera movement can make nauseous. At the end game becomes grindy