Others - Strive: Conquest [v0.10.2c] [Maverik]

A true management, combat, role play game, you can never experience this special game style other than this game.
However, this game is still in development, gameplay mode always change, and you need to keep restarting game.

I will be the one to say it:

Simplicity is the ultimate Sophistication...and this game has none of it.
so much promise yet this game is borderline unplayable with how overcomplicated it it, and how lackluster its tutorials are.

I'm glad for everyone else that got to enjoy it despite that. sadly, I'm not one who can even enjoy a game that's borderline unplayable and blueballs me so hard.

If you like the complex management games that SsethTzeentach usually reviews, this might scratch your itch... obsessively, for a bit, and then you'll put it down and maybe pick it up again and maybe not. Allow me to explain.

Unlike a lot of other adult games, this one does not start off slow. The game begins with the player trying to gather up money to pay off loan sharks (this does not qualify as a spoiler, it's explained in the first dialogue interaction), and this does a really great job of creating urgency and forcing the player to figure out the game systems and hustle to get that bread. Very engaging, took me a couple of tries to feel confident.

But after that gets resolved, for me at least, the honeymoon period was over. The bones of something really good are in here, but the current state of the game (0.10.2 at time of review) is really, and I mean really clunky.

This game is fundamentally a management sim, with the player character taking the role of a disgusting nouveau riche swine who runs basically a woman sex trafficking farm. Just to be clear, I'm not objecting to that second part at all; I personally dislike the story trope of upwardly-mobile characters being portrayed as simultaneously naïve to the evil ways of the high society they barged into uninvited while also being shown as virtuous and clever. It's a symptom of a culture that fundamentally misunderstands the value of hard work and also I just personally hate the middle class in general.

Be that as it may, the player is quickly going to find that being the owner of a woman farm slave harem consists of a lot less of wild fucking and a lot more of tedious micromanagement. Like the rest of the game, this actually works pretty well at first. I can stand figuring out how to optimize wood collection logistics if I am collecting the wood to build a bigger bedroom so I can have bigger orgies, there is a very straightforward effort/reward curve there. But when I'm having to waste precious time clicking through menu screens to re-assign the FUCKING HAMMER to the FUCKING SLAVES so they can HARVEST SUGAR CANE or whatever faster because I re-assigned them from something else for the FIVE THOUSANDTH TIME because this game DOESN'T HAVE A WAY TO AUTOMATE ANY OF THAT SHIT... it gets old.

Industrial Light and Magic, back in the days when Star Wars was still this weird cool thing made by an autistic flannel-wearing guy, had this term, "greebling" for a technique they used on scale models of starships to make them look bigger. Basically it consists of adding lots of little details to models (by sort of fractal-tiling the surface with bits of lots of model kits) to make them look larger.

That's a pretty good metaphor for the current state of the game. There's a bunch of tiny detail mechanics that you can have fun juggling... until your brain runs out of dopamine. There are a lot of mechanics here, and some of them have interesting interactions that will get you to spend time toying with different builds and optimizations and concepts, if you're into that sort of sandbox type shit. But after a while you'll realize that a lot of it is greebling. A lot of this game is complexity with no real purpose or deep interaction.

This game reminds me of a 4X game from the mid 2000s; very fun at first, but as the game drags on the lack of adequate automation mechanics means that each turn takes longer and longer as you need to micromanage more and more variables in your growing sex slave empire. While I think everyone needs to know that actually running a sex slave empire in real life does involve a lot of paperwork and personnel management and other tedium, I, personally, am looking for a game that presents an idealized, fun fantasy version of running a sex slave empire. The moment that the pressure lets off from having to repay the loan sharks, the player is free to explore their own concept of what it means to operate a sex farm... and that freedom rapidly starts to feel like a second job.

Just like a second job, this game aggressively consumes your time. I don't mean that in the fun, "it's addictive, just one more turn!" kind of way. It's sort of like that at first, but as I played for a while I started noticing, and then being irritated by several parts of the game that cannot be sped up. There is no way to speed up the animation of swords crossing and going "ting!" before each battle. It was cool the first time. Maybe even the fifth time. It is not cool enough for me to tolerate for an entire playthrough, not just because I tire of hearing the "ting!" noise but also because watching the animation each battle wastes my fucking time and makes the comparatively uninspired battle system seem that much more like a chore.

Combat is a chore, by the way. There are dozens of fairly obvious, and probably several more fairly un-obvious ways to snap the combat system over your knee like kindling and it will rapidly begin to feel like something that merely exists to get in between you and the management and sex parts of the game. Yeah, you read that right; the combat in this game is so bad that I thought the parts where you're navigating a goddamn spreadsheet determining which of your sex slaves is the most efficient at harvesting winged gnoll ear wax or whatever to be more engaging than the combat after a while. I even found the dungeon crawls where you bust into a dungeon, kill a bunch of fools and take the survivors as slaves to be tiresome after a while because of the combat part. Attacking people who are minding their own goddamn business and randomly killing a bunch and then taking the survivors to be your sex slaves should be some of the most asshole-tighteningly cool stuff you can simulate in a game, but somehow this game has such tiresome combat that it makes pillaging and raping un-fun after a while.

My next complaint is all the jank. If you want to enjoy this game, I sure hope you played a bunch of ambitious, but unpolished Flash games as a child. That formative experience and the rose tint of your nostalgia goggles will help you enjoy the experience of this game more, because it's going to be very reminiscent. The interface is fucking obtuse. Why is the screen which shows the character's next level up class not also a screen which shows the classes the character's pre-existing classes? Why is the screen which shows the character's pre-existing classes the screen which is used to determine whether they will prioritize eating fish or vegetables and also how I should sexually torture them that day to break their spirit? Why does clicking vs. double clicking cause such inconsistent effects when interacting with buttons on the screen? Why do some buttons with an "x" icon to close a sub-menu require you to click on the outline of the actual letter "x" inside of the square rather than being able to click anywhere in the square the way it usually works? Why does the interface randomly hang for a split second after certain events? Why are the stats on items and characters not always listed in a consistent order?

I'm not enumerating all of these issues to own the developer or anything; UI design is actually pretty hard, and even a lot of professionally-produced games had horrible UIs in, say, the 2000s. It is a difficult enough art that they hadn't figured it out back then. But even though it is hard to code a great game UI, I would be lying if I said anything other than this game has an objectively bad UI.

I'll try to end this review on a good note, because I did enjoy playing this game, at least at first, and I think there are some good aspects. The text-based sex minigame is... actually pretty cool. The game uses descriptions of what each of the up to five participants are doing and to whom to develop a contextual text description of the sex scene. This is a modest number of personnel for an orgy, but I salute the effort that went into a turn-based orgy simulator nonetheless. The game does not really have a robust system for determining whether what you are describing is actually physically possible or not; whether that is a turn-on for you personally I don't know. Occasionally it fucks up the grammar of the text output for no obvious reason, and fucks up the context buttons for equally mysterious reasons, but that can and probably will get fixed at some point. The Marquis de Sade would lose his fucking mind if he had a toy like this. Well, I mean, more than he did anyway, the guy was pretty nuts.

There are also more traditional game CGs for sex scenes with the main characters, and the art is pretty good.

The writing is serviceable, and I even chuckled once or twice. The main plot quest guidance provided in the journal is extremely robust and I never found myself milling around trying to figure out what it was I was supposed to be doing. The only times I got lost were when I forgot what I was doing because the plot seemed kinda basic TBH and I thought it would be more fun to run a eugenics program at my sex farm instead. But that's mostly on me, really.

Anyway, I hope the developer keeps at it. The bones of something good are in here, and like I said, at first I found that the game really reached out and grabbed me by providing unexpected resistance in the form of an opening act that has actual mechanical challenge and urgency. But after that it was sort of like trying to masturbate with extremely fine grit sandpaper; no matter how much oil is used the irritation just kept building and I gave up.

Very good at the time of the review, solid story, good looking art, nice mechanics, UI could use a bit of work though, the wiki could use some updating, and some bugs need to be ironed out. Looking forward for the finished product

The game is currently in development and there's a lot of work to be done still, but for what it is it's pretty good.

The game does feature H-scenes and nudity, though I wouldn't play it if that's what you're after as the game's primary focus is on roleplay and management.

The roleplay aspect is amazing - you can really be anyone you want and the game is generally responsive to it. Want to treat everyone with kindness and respect? Sure, this will cause most of your slaves and unique characters to become genuinely affectionate towards you. Want to be a ruthless sex fiend who mind breaks their slaves? Why not. Want to become a necromancer and turn every slave that you have into an undead zombie that doesn't need any food? There's an option for that too.

Management is currently a bit weaker though - there is a bit of a grind early on to get enough money and materials to upgrade your mansion, but after you have everything set up the game pretty much plays for itself. There is potential for min-maxing by hunting perfect characters for each task in the manor, but it's far from necessary given the relatively easy difficulty of the game.

Characters themselves are great - each of them is distinct, they often have their own storylines which you can trigger by getting closer to them. All in all, it's good time.

The game isn't without criticisms though:

- Not sure if this is just an unfinished game issue, but the combat feels way too easy. Early on it's a struggle to get started, but once you get the skills and level ups rolling in then even with half a party you can take on all the challenges the game provides. There's also a regression of dificulty in later chapters, with you having to fight enemies which are often weaker than enemies you had to face in the first chapter, and I hope that's just placeholder design and not intentional.

- There are some moments in the game where you might be forced to do certain things without an option to opt out, often resulting in out-of-character moments. One notable example is after the elven storyline, if you happen to save a character from being executed for their crimes and take them in, the first thing you do is bring them home and rape them even if you've only been kind up to that point. Another is how most mission conclusions with unique characters will lead you into taking their virginity, which you can't opt out from in case you want to retain your own virginity or keep the value of the slaves/subordinates high. I hope these things will get looked at again after the story is finished being developed.

- Last but not least, the lesbian options in the game so far are pretty lacking. If you're playing as a woman, you can have lesbian sex with your female subordinates but you're not allowed to marry them or have options to use magic to impregnate them - stuff like that. Granted, most of the story events assume you're a white male, so maybe this will get looked into as lesbian story events start getting developed.

All in all, pretty decent game so far, finished all the content in 15 hours. Would recommend to wait for more content or for the game to be finished before playing though.

The game is trying to do quite a lot and does it all sort of ok ish. Building on the first game, it shares a lot of similarities both good and bad.

TLDR: Some sloppy execution and an average game with a good combat and job system that leaves you wanting more but fails to deliver. Maybe check back after more updates.

• Extremely cluttered/dense UI that feels like it is shouting at you.
• Decent character creator and art that could be fleshed out more with additional faces. The character editor/creation window is far too small and everything is so squished its sometimes hard to tell what is what.
• Sex interactions are all text based which is fine if you're into that. If you're looking for any kind of lewd scene you wont really find any outside of the "main" characters.
• Combat is actually well balanced and intuitive. The job systems is well implemented and thought out. Probably one of the things I like most.
• Training system is pretty decent and enjoyable.
• There is a barebones modification system that doesn't really affect much other than feeling like it was shoe horned in from the previous game.

I wish the general lewd scenes any kind of animation or additional body views. It all feels very flat and doesn't draw you in. The characters you create sometimes don't fit well into the boxes due to size, creating a centaur or other creature leaves you only able to view part of their body rather than all of it.

Amazing game.
Couple of problems and observations:

Craft->Enchant->Improve gear is super buggy. Let's say you combine two average items to get a good one
- First, it will actually consume three items (even if you selected two) most of the time (the exception being if these are the last two items). If you have 6 items, it will show 6/2 (which is an odd way to put it, instead of 2/6 as in "two out of six"). You click on Apply and next time you'll have 3 items left.
- Second, new item generated will be created sometimes stashed, and sometimes it will not be stashed (it will show in the item inventory as, let's say "Sword 1 Sword 1", and you can change this if you equip this to a character and then unequip, and it will stash them as "Sword 2".
- Then, also, if you have less than 3 items, sometimes it will let you combine the last two... but sometimes it will not, so you'll need a third item for the combination to work.
- It would be useful to be able to combine 4 good into 2 epic, 6 good into 3 epic, etc. If you have crafted 20 poor items, let me combine them into 10 average in just one go.

Annoying things/Bugs:
- Factors are not considered into the slave price. I can have a slave with all Excellent and it's not more expensive than a regular slave.
- In the slave shop when selling there's an "Enslave" button, that only appears on people that already are slaves of you, and mainly does nothing that I could see, but certainly doesn't enslave.
- Battle is too slow. I've grinded enough to have a powerful team, but I avoid conflicts because each fight takes too long. 10 seconds applying the buffs to characters, then every spell has to show an animation, etc. Please add a QUICK FIGHT button/option.
- Factor upgrade is slow too. The animation where it says what upgraded and shows the stars can't be skipped.
- Same for recruiting (when leaving a slave on a place to do recruiting), which also requires combining mouse and keyboard. You have to wait for the options to draw with quite some delay.
- Official support for a bigger house would be nice. You can have 7 fishers, 8 hunters, etc. but only 30 persons in the house.
- Kids always have low tame/authority unless they're things like bunnies.
- Factor upgrade price seems to only go up with growth factor, so this is the last thing to max to save money.
- Quest says Lilith home town, but doesn't say where that is and I can't find it.
- Can't see the sex of newborns. Instead of just "baby" you could say "baby boy/baby girl/baby futa". Sometimes I can click 1 while the name message appears and some names will suggest the sex, sometimes I can't guess. And I need that to know if I want to train them.
- When there's one unknown sex trait, the others remain hidden sometimes.
- As soon as one enters the "Classes" screen, there's no way to check if an upgrade can be made immediately, and you first have to click on any class to see on the right if you can unlock it.
- Scrolling different characters on the classes screen, removes the class filter.
- The improvements to the Exotic Slave Trader are super expensive and don't seem to do much.
- Only being able to get subordinates from the guild, and not being able to coerce/push/trick subordinates into slavery, and them having subordinates kids only.
- My character was upgraded on a previous patch. It seems that values have changed, so now if I go to "Upgrade body" I get "Upgrade points 0/-15" and the "Confirm" button doesn't let me close it, had to restart the game. Add a "Cancel" (or close) button please.
- Cloth from work shows as "cotton"
- I can buy a slave that wouldn't collect grain for me, but I can order it to be fucked by other slaves and this has no effect on their "Spirit". Probably if their tolerance is depleted there should be an impact to their spirit, and they probably shouldn't like much sex actions until it's unlocked.
- Good sex should have an impact on training as dating has.
- No way to raise spirit while training (and why positive does lower spirit?)
- My character is a male, but it says "Being a Breeding Sow, MyChar will be certainly able to get pregnant from it..." (it should say the girl's name)
- Some actions allow you to go over housing cap temporarily (you can't finish the turn), like having kids. Some others don't (like purchasing). This is annoying when you try to do an early factor upgrade and have to have 1 free space just for that.
- No recall button on some places like Elven Capital due to interface differences.
- Enchantments not counting to item price when sold
- Sometimes some windows (for example, when looking at a slave when recruiting) will ignore the esc key

Nice to haves:
- Hints on where to get things (where do I get ancient bone at start, etc.) would be useful.
- Auto equip tools could be nice.
- Remove equipment from slave when selling/sacrificing/dismissing.
- An option to have a secondary job or show Tailor(rest) when there's no crafting enqueued/no materials for crafting.
- When training it says something like "Wits +15". It would be good to know if it capped.
- Some ordering criteria when doing factor upgrade or some filter.
- Being able to buy more houses in other zones would be nice. And nicer to get to rule and own most of it like a true King.
- When crafting, seeing the number of current items (useful in things that have only one recipe, say, belled collar).
- In the enchant and improve gear, it would be nice if the gear had a different color depending on its quality.
- Order items to craft by power and not by name and split tools, weapons and armor (current category gear is too broad).

An excellent game with many interesting mechanics and good story. There are a lot of things to do, and your possibilities sometimes can be limited only by your imagination. Various classes have different output, so you can get something or someone in more than one way. Rare thing for sure!

Interesting game, and I recommend playing it, but there is one BIG problem!

If you look at Strive from the perspective of a normal game:
- Few mechanics that really affect gameplay, you can get by with only a small portion of these mechanics and get through the game to the current patch without any problems.
- VERY easy game, I when I first started Strive, I thought it would be difficult, the game would give me the challenge of having to load saves dozens of times. But no, literally two hours of play and I have already earned more than 20k+ gold, and carried all the dungeons, playing only through magic, it is too unbalanced.

If you look at Strive from a porn game perspective:
- Just over 5 pictures 18+
- And all sex scenes are described by text, no pictures, little variety and no fetishes as such.

Maybe in the future something will be added, but I doubt it, although the story is present and it's the only thing that kept me in the game. If they add mechanics, complicate gameplay, so that many had resistance to different magic (it is, but not all), in general, complicate the entire gameplay, plus add something new for porn game.

P.S. I played more with mods, and oh my god, the game became even easier, I downloaded the two most popular mods, they too much simplify and already simple game.

There is already quite a lot of story that makes you keep playing. Love the random characters in combination with a few story characters to spice it up. I'm a big fan of procedural/random generation and the (paperdoll) slaves and dungeons scratch that itch.

As of version 9, it's an above average 'jack-of-all-trades' sim. Everything about it is alright, but not outstanding. The sim aspect has a lot of options, but you basically can't ever fail and the generic sex scenes are incredibly dull. The combat has many classes and abilities, but once you get an assortment of elemental skills and decent gear nothing is a challenge anymore. The built-in paper dolls are passable and you can use your own art.

It's moddable, though I found it breaks the game very easily so I wouldn't use more than some QoL mods. If the storyline ever gets finished it'll be a highly regarded game, but it's been in development for many years at this point and it's still on chapter 2.

I think my problem with this game is just that I don't like games where you create new characters yourself. They're always incredible repetitive, and it's made a bit worse in this game because it's text based, so you just see the same dialogue over and over.

You can add pictures, which helps, but it's also a hassle.

Great game, but not at the prequel level, and far from finished [at least the save break from 0.8x to 0.9x, and may break again after v1.0, so the game right now is kind of a trial/demo than a finished game yet

Feels low resolution, the character creation is extremely limited, and has a ton of individual hair options that most of them don't even fit with each other.

Since you spend all your time in the UI. I can't recommend it since the UI is simply unacceptable and a huge downgrade from the first game.

Recently, I retried the game. It's not as bad as I remembered it to be.

Version 10.1

My current thoughts on the game are the following:

1. Fairly involved management and progression systems.
2. A lot of races and a variety of characters.
3. Radiant quests and dungeons are fun (even though you have to manually delete them every time).
4. The sex system is extremely basic, and characters react in the same way to the same things. The little difference that traits make is barely noticeable, with barely any training or variation in sexual development.
5. Some of the class skills are immersion-breaking levels of unbalanced, making one wonder if any thought was put into the design process.
6. The main character and main servant begin the game extremely powerful for some reason, no matter the difficulty.
7. Most bosses in dungeons are weaker than the mini-bosses in the same dungeon.
8. The clothes are gendered, which might be hit or miss depending on personal preference. I personally don't like it.
9. The UI and the poor explanation of game mechanics can make the game hard to approach for a lot of people, and it could definitely use some improvement.

All things considered so far, despite the lack of polish, limited erotic content, and mind-numbing balancing, I can't rate the game lower than a 4 because there is a lot of good stuff in there worth exploring.

This game has a sad case of game and porn syndrome. Too much porn happens for a flash and then its empty again. This game has reinvented its gameplay from strive 2 but its porn is exactly the same, a text box that you click to make sex happen. Why is there a action based around rewarding people with sex and then a sex scene does not happen? Why do you not punish slaves in a scene? Why does everything that could be hot over in 1 second. Much like their first game, this is a sandbox full of the wrong kind of sand.
This game is too focused on being a narrative porn game where you manage slaves when it has such potential to be a sandbox porn game about managing slaves instead. My opinion, less art, less story, more pornographic mechanics.

I really wished to enjoy this game more than I have been and have popped in once every year or so to see the progress. However, my opinion of it could be best described as ambivalent at the absolute best. The management aspects are fine. It's certainly not challenging me or activating my neurons, but it is entertaining to an extent that I find acceptable for an unfinished game, current development time aside. Similarly, the combat is serviceable, albeit slow and repetitive.
The grand issue with the game is that it's barely erotic. It describes coitus with all the prose and imagery of a high school textbook. Furthermore, there is little reactivity to, well, anything. Play a female character? Well, you turn into a man during scenes with unique characters. Are you a dainty fairy with a virgin pussy getting railed by a massive-cocked centaur or vice versa? It makes little effective difference. Hell, it's not really even referenced. Are you or your slaves being used as sextoys daily down at the local brothel? Are you beating your slaves six ways to sunday? Does your slave have massive tits and ass? Have you trained your sex slave to the point were they meekly accept literally anything? None of that means anything from an erotic standpoint unless you can get your rocks off to values being incremented.
I mean, sure, there are regular scenes, but that is absolutely not why I would be playing a game such as this. The game needs writing. It desperately needs an immense amount of it. Down a cocktail of iron, viagra, cialis, maca, horny goatweed, yojimbo, L-arginine, or whatever else people use for boner fuel. I don't know. Do whatever you need to do get some creative juices flowing and write mountains of smut for a wide variety of situations. As it stands currently, I would need to edge for a week to even have a chance at nutting to Strive: Conquest.

What a terrible step back from the previous game. Even though at a first glance it seems to boast more options and a better management experience, it is in fact stillborn.

There is no soul in this game. The travelling system of the previous installment was half the charm of the game, and it has been violently ripped out in favor of a soulless dungeon crawl with an undefined number of stages, and meat walls of battles that force a certain playstyle (evasion builds) if you want to start as a fighter character. Sure you have more choices later, but by that time, tedium kicks in.

As for the management of slaves what in the ever abusive dark gods is consent? Loyalty? We are playing at best a Stockholm syndrome inducing rapist-slavemaster, what made the dev team think that this direction was a good idea? I read previously that random enslavements were not possible but at least that is not the case with me, I could find randos to enslave. Its just that the old system with the map, the ropes, etc. was far more engrossing than what ever this is..

So disappointed because as Director Krennic said : "we were on the verge of greatness, we were this close" with the previous one, and now.. the future is bleak..

If you, like me, found some guilty pleasure in the kinky escapades of "Strive for Power," brace yourself for the sequel, "Strive for Conquest." Remember the first game's UI that felt like deciphering ancient hieroglyphs? Well, the sequel decided to one-up its predecessor by introducing a UI that requires a PhD in Hieroglyphics to navigate.

Let's talk RPG combat. In "Strive for Power," it was as barebones as a skeleton in a biology class. In "Strive for Conquest," they've decided to keep it that way. The non-unique/non-story-related sexy times are less yawn-inducing this time, but good luck finding them in the labyrinthine menus. It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack if it was also made of needles.
The developers must have thought "bigger is better" and cranked everything up to 11. The result? A game that's as convoluted as a politician's explanation of tax laws. For those of us who enjoyed the simple, kinky fun of the original, "Strive for Conquest" feels like being handed the controls to a spaceship when all we wanted was a bicycle.

And let's talk about the tutorial. It's like having someone explain quantum physics when you only asked how to change a lightbulb. The game has transformed from a cheeky adult adventure into a management sim that requires more serious commitment than most of my relationships.
What did I want? More spicy scenes, memorable characters, a more crucial role for the sidekick (sister or childhood friend), improved combat, and shinier graphics. What did I get? A game that feels like trying to assemble IKEA furniture without the instructions.

In conclusion, "Strive for Conquest" is like ordering a pizza and receiving a gourmet salad. It's not what you wanted; it's more complex than you expected, and you're just left longing for the simplicity and guilty pleasure of the original cheesy delight.

A worthy successor to the O.G. masterpiece among 'adult games'.

Game is similar to its predecessor 'Strive for Power'.
Has a larger variety of different mechanics, yet at this point in time some of them feel unbalance and/or unnescessary, probably, cause they are not yet fully implemented as intended in a meaningful way.

Gameplay is interesting.
Combat is simple, yet engaging.
Art is beautiful.
Characters are memorable.
Allows customization.
Experience is rewarding.
Game has a wide variety of things to do.
Currently it is unfinished, so is yet to live up to its full potential and its predecessor's success.
Even so, it is quite an interesting game to play even now, although you have to be ready for it to leave you wanting more.

A worthy successor, but obviously unfinished yet - 8/10.
(Game is in v0.7.0a during this review)

This review is on version 0.7.0a.

For every step forward Strive: Conquest makes, it takes six or seven back.

I was a fan of Strive for Power, and liked it quite a bit more than I like this game. Its only real issue was that it had a very small amount of content, so if they had just kept updating that game with more unique characters and stories I actually would have been way happier.

But instead we have Strive: Conquest, a game in development for several years at this point and...not all that much to show for it, to be honest.

I first played the game roughly 2 years ago, I believe, and it was fine. There was more tedium to the game, more management than the first one, but it was alright. The UI needed some work, a lot of stuff was half-implemented and would break your game, but I figured I'd be pretty happy with it once that particular issue was solved.

However, I never went back to it, because I just didn't want to replay up to the point where the game broke.

So it sat on the back-burner for a couple years. Until now. And damn, I'm gonna have to put it back.

My understanding is that in the past two years the majority of development time and patches to the game have been repeated reworks to the game's systems, to the extent that it would regularly break saves and require people to throw it out and restart. That happens in game development, sometimes you just can't bring things over. But reworking the same stuff repeatedly for years? Come on.

And it shows in the gameplay. Tooltips contain innaccurate information of a previous iteration and were never updated, systems clash with each other, numbers are all over the place with no explanation as to what they mean...

And there isn't even too much more content than there was when I played it previously, but dear God there are a lot of bugs.

I'll put it succinctly: "Strive: Conquest" was a better game two years ago.

Now it just doesn't seem to know what it wants to be.

"Slaves" refuse to do even the simplest tasks unless you butter them up and ask them super nicely, having a dedicated system to unlock their ability to do basic tasks like...put on gloves. No that was not a joke at all you actually cannot put gloves on a "slave" unless you unlock it by being very nice to them and saying nice things.

Want to have sex with your "slave"? I hope you're ready to first say nice things to them to increase their "loyalty" points, then spend those to unlock their ability to go on dates, then go on a date with and sweet talk them in an attempt to get their "consent" high enough to sleep with them. That was a joke by the way, you still can't have sex with them, because they don't have their "Sex:Basics" unlocked, so you're going to need to get more "loyalty" points for that. Also you can only have sex once a week until you increase your "sex" stat by doing all this repeatedly to actually have sex...erectile dysfunction is a bitch, ain't it?

I generally try to avoid speaking impolitely when reviewing a game, but on this occasion I believe it needs to be said bluntly and thus I will do so: Loyalty in its current function and the associated training system is straight fucking trash and the game would be better off if it burned on the cutting room floor.

If your slaves have a high "obedience", they should do what they're told, because that is quite literally what "obedience" means. "Loyalty" as a stat should come from providing slaves with decent lives and should slow obedience drain. "Fear" should be a stat identical in this function and work off intimidating your slaves. You can be both feared and loved.

In terms of "training" them to perform specific functions, the class system is more than enough as classes give bonuses to related jobs.

The last major thing I want to mention is the absolute disregard for player customization. Now, you can set your race, your gender, all that fun jazz, but when it comes to CGs? White human male. That's it. Your skin color is green? Sorry you have a tan dick. Female? Sorry you're a male for this scene (in this regard, even the pronouns suddenly switch from female to male, which is especially jarring - though this does appear to be a bug). I am really left wondering, why even give the option for players to select races and gender when you aren't going to respect it? Of course, it doesn't end up being that big of a deal because there just aren't many CGs in the game (which may be another big negative for those who dislike a focus on text), but it really makes a statement about the quality of the game if it can't be bothered to maintain player choices. There are a couple easy fixes for this of course, either coloring the penis properly and making it appear as a strap-on for females, or just not show player gentials and focus on the character in the CG, but the game doesn't even do that. It really is insulting.

When asked about properly addressing player gender on the game's official Discord in March of 2023, the developer's response was "not likely to happen any time soon as it would double the amount of art and writing", which is, of course, not how that works. It would be a minimal increase to writing, given that most of the game's writing is not accompanied by any CG (realistically the writing increase can be measured in mere minutes). The art piece is a fair argument, but also incorrect, as it would often be a small portion of of the CG (assuming you aren't showing the player character in the image, which in this case, you really shouldn't be), not a complete redraw, and let's face it: If you're going to give the options, do it right.

Funny thing is, if you manage to work past all that - and it is a slog - the content with the unique characters and storylines is rather enjoyable (though several character's questlines are very poorly designed), which is the only reason this is getting two stars rather than one.

Still, as it stands now, in "Strive: Conquest", the one getting Conquered is you.