Others - Completed - Strive for Power [v1.0d] [Maverik]

While I like this game quite a bit, I think it lacks in some places.

Story is simple. Good, in mine opinion, but too short. It's just a few quests for the guild, a plot to discover and choice to stay loyal or betray the mage order. And that's it. While it could be expanded quite a little bit more. On the loyal path, after becoming the headmaster of the Wimborn order, to find those two siblings with thier associates, stop thier plans to make civil war and bring them to justice. Or, on the traitors path, to take down the rest of the loyalists in the area fast enough before they make powerful resistance and prepare for arriving of the royal army.

The game have very nice system of managing your manor with, of crouse, your slaves. But there is, in mine opinion, poor choice of jobs they can do. No option for making supplies, which are simply dried food, forging weapons and armor in forge which you could build near your manor, or making building materials in your lumberjack camp near forest. There is plenty ideas of jobs. And, which is funny, MC can't do any of them. Just fight and explore.

And about the fight. The game is easy, in mine opinion. While the start is quite harsh, mostly because of poor agility, low armor and bad weapon, after a hour you can easily fight one battle after another almost without losing single point of health. And if you ran out of energy you can just use spell to restore it and continue your jurney. I shouldn't complain about that, MC is in mage order after all. Mages are powerful, right? Well...

Most of those spells is not that useful. Not even single one is multiple targets. All are single target. In the end you will forget about them, because good old warhammer is better in smashing your enemies.

Also with few spells there is actually no point to manage your manor anymore, because you can just defeat some bandits or elves, make them the perfect slaves and sell them on the market to make a lot of money, and I mean a lot of them.

And as I mentione amove bulding materials. Player have to obtain points to upgrade the manor. I think it is quite stupid, because it is easy to obtain them, while it is also quite anoying.
I think building materials obtained for gold is better idea than points. They can't be cheap, and of course player have to make or buy them a lot to upgade manor and obtain them even more to build new building. This could easily make better balance, because amount of gold you can recive from selling slaves is quit large.

This game have an great potential. I would give it 6,5/10.

Hook:
Manage a fantasy brothel/harem and explore and do quests in the well-realized world around you.

Best:
Many customization options for PC and NPCs.
Lots of sexy activities to participate in and send your slaves to.
Can load your own images for the generated NPCs.
Pretty good mod ecosystem. (But can only load one mod concurrently, atm).
Active and responsive Developer.
Completed main quest line and repeatable semi-random sub-quests.
Very erotic sex-system with a mix-and-match "infinite combinations" style of sexual iteration with anywhere from 1:1 relations to 8 person (or creature) orgies.

Worst:
UI is functional but plain. Sometimes too much clicking to get from A to B.
Learning curve is steep in default difficulty. Progression is slow in the beginning.
Generated NPC girls have no images by default. Must DL an image pack or make your own.
Game is 'feature complete', so don't expect any feature updates besides minor bug fixes.

Score: 8.7 / 10

ver: 5.20a modded + image packs
date played: 12/30/18

Quick review:

This is a slave management game in the vein of Slave Maker and Jack-O-Nine-Tails. It's got beautiful art and you can add more with image packs. It puts you in the driver's seat as a (potentially) rapey male dom, which I appreciate. It's loaded with quests, character storylines, and personal slave training.

It needs a little more content, and a small amount of grind creeps into the game. It's not perfect, but it's good. Love it. This is now the bar for slave management games as far as I'm concerned.

The Management part of the game is near flawless.
The performance could be better but the author is working on it so that wont be an issue anymore.
I really like the written characters in the story, I just wish there were more of them, or at least art for the existing ones' scenes. No blue-balling in the game eighter, the leveling system works for me, it seems well thought out, I never felt as if i was too powerful, I always had to think if i wanted to engage in a major fight or not. THe art style is really charming and semi-realistic as well, it fits the whole dark middle ages fantasy setting pretty well. Some polishing might be warrented though, some of the scenes seemeed rushed.

Some grinding, mostly can be avoided with the cheats. Not really a fan of games where you have slaves you need to seduce (I tend to think a game should be either a slavery game or a seduction game) but this game has enough content for me to be willing to put up with that. Lots of stuff to do.

Based on ver 0.5.19c. Strive currently has the skeleton of a solid slave manager/brothel type game. It is of the "buy slave, train slave, sell for profit" genre similar to Jack o Nine Tails (but without the creepy cannibalism fixation). The UI and basic mechanics are workmanlike and in very playable condition. However, the "household management" functions are slightly limited and a little tiresome to actually manage.

Strive is text-based, and so non-unique slaves are largely ciphers of names, descriptions, and statistics--and there are lots of sex-related and not-sex-related numbers to juggle with no consistent or integrated way to see them all. Slaves have health, energy, stress, obedience, and a short list of more static physical and mental stats. You will have to swap screens to manage them all, and the presentations are very different between, say, the slave detail screen in the brothel, the "capture-a-slave-after-combat" interface, and the "equip-a-slave" screen. It's understandable, I guess, that some of the stats are hidden behind the "mind-reading spell" mechanic. That's a legitimate design choice. But it doesn't have to mean that managing those stats needs to be tedious--mind-reading is well integrated into the buy-a-slave screen, for instance, but shoddily done in its after-combat incarnation. The UI is otherwise functional, and you do get a slave spreadsheet that summarizes some of the important statistics for your whole contingent.

To make the game a little more visual, custom portraits and body images are supported--but you have to provide the images yourself. The Strive community is small but despite this there are a few image packs and even some mods floating around.

The quest content of the game appears to be either totally or nearly complete--unusual for this genre when still in development. The main quest appears to be playable from one end to the other, but it doesn't have a lot of depth in my opinion, and the first half feels like tutorial content. There are several side-quests that are mostly for obtaining NPCs as sorta-unique slaves. The "sandbox" mode is playable, but you do lose unique quest content by not playing the "story" mode.

***It also does appear that sandbox mode prevents you from discovering one merchant who sells critical alchemy items. You have to find them as exploration rewards, and that slows progression down to an enormous degree. This is a critical oversight.***

As for porn, though, the porny parts are almost completely isolated from the rest of the game. First, you have a handful of one-off events: text-and-image scenes with specific town NPCs and NPC slaves, some of which are only available in story mode. Like most games in this genre, you slaves can do night jobs, some of which are pornographic. Disappointingly, though, sexy night jobs (whore, exotic whore, etc.) are not described in the kind of detail that other slave management games provide. This is a porn failure for this game and takes away from the "brothel management" part of the game: when you assign a slave to whore herself, you're just doing it so that you get 50 more gold or whatever that evening, and not for any text porn you might have been hoping to read. You can rape defeated enemies in combat, but again this isn't fleshed out in the way one would expect in this genre.

The real bulk of the sex in the game is the "sex interaction" mode, where 100% of the text-based sex takes place. You pick a willing slave or three or ten, maybe add an assistant and some livestock (seriously), and then there are a wide variety of individual actions in the "interaction" screen that each produce one or two lines of fairly generic (but not badly written) text. A good imagination is recommended. However, I must commend the game on allowing you to have an orgy with, for instance, seven slaves and a dog and three horses, even if there isn't a whole lot for everyone to be doing at once. There is a credible attempt at allowing simultaneous interactions.

Even with a brothel management engine, combat engine, map exploration, a dozen or so races, unique enchantments, and the other RPG features that are already in the game's framework, the game still cries out for more content. The amount of work that the devs have done so for does show, but it feels as if there was much more intended to be included. I understand, though, that the game's main quest is complete, and that does not bode well for the prospects of further content. It would be a shame not to add more unique NPCs, more quests, and better-fleshed-out sex interactions. With the understanding that the game is still in active development, my final message is this: the skeleton is here, and it's nice to work with and look at, but we all know how much nicer it would be with meat on its bones.

Almost gave up on this game for a lack of information at the start, which makes it obnoxiously tedious. But I gave it another chance with an online guide for getting started, and from there I've had a lot of fun.

There's plenty of content: a variety of unique character questlines, a substantial main quest with several surprises, a fun combat system, a lot of meaningful choices and actions, a decent amount of customization built into the game and a good number of basic game options, as well as a cheat menu.

Some drawbacks:
The tutorial is inadequate, simply because it's too easy to make a huge mistake early on without getting any real direction. I highly recommend finding some info online about getting started.

I expect a game like this to include grinding, but it could be toned down in a couple of places. There are several areas where a simple option to repeat an action without having to manually click would be great.

There are other minor annoyances like being unable to use the down arrow to scroll a text box. More keyboard shortcuts would be awesome.

Overall, for what this game is, it's probably the best I've played. I'd recommend anyone interested to give it a try.

A unique style text-based roleplaying game, with excellent story-lines and several customization options to make the game play your own. Looking forward to following this game and seeing future updates.

This easily became one of my favorite NSFW games. This game is extremely text-heavy, with almost no images. As a reader, this didn't bother me, but it might dissuade others from enjoying this game. The game feels extremely free and caters to pretty much all of my fetishes, and allows me to get guilty pleasure from more extreme things without feeling a punch in the gut from them. This game is probably in my top 3 most enjoyed.

This game is still in development it is already fun and interesting. I just would like some male recruit-able characters with portraits and full body portraits. I love the game style. I hope they continue with this because I enjoy the game very much.

This game is a mixed bag. You train harem of girls from different races, there is a lot of choices, game is really polished. RPG/exploration aspect is really good, writing is decent. On the other hand game system is really simple. You have only single factor model (obedience, then loyalty) which compared to other trainer games gives only one way to train your slave. Compare this to free cities where you have two factors (afair fear and acceptance) and you can submit girl maxing either or Jack-o-nine-tails with multiple additional stats and a lot of training actions to choose from. There is no time pressure and abusing your slaves decreases core stats (which in turn decrease slave value) so being nice is the optimal way. If this was just RPG game I'd give 5/5, for slave management it is too shallow, for waifu/harem simulator there is not enough interactions.

For me, this game has a whole lot to like about it. The art, questing, slave/harem management and inventory system all combine to make it one of my favorites. It's a refreshing change from the typical VN clicker in that you have many options to choose from regarding your style of play.
Being able to import your own portraits is a welcome feature that sets it above the rest, and the dev should be commended for this. Difficulty/grind is moderate if you play the way the dev intended, but by editing a few files this can be toned down significantly. The UI is a tad clunky, but that is just picking a nit, as you get used to it after awhile. All in all, great game in the genre, highly recomended if this is your cup of tea.

I tried playing this game several times. Every time I quit it because nothing happens. I don't have enough money to buy stuff or slaves, when i make some money i have to spend them on misc stuff or random events. So I cannot afford anything required to exit the damn mansion. So basicly - fuck your sister and make ugly your ugly harem happy by spending money and food. Where is the fun in that?

This game has pretty complex system to run with zero guidelines to start off with. The learning curve is more than several hours, reading outside of the game. And that's if you're stubborn.
Erotic content - played more than 5-6 hours, did not see a nipple. It's basicaly the same as if I'm playing a pure HTML browser TEXT game.

GUI - too complex on menus - you need a lot of tim to figure out and remember which action is done from where.
All menus and icons and text are so small at 1920x1080 and increasing font size makes them go out of their boxes.
Almost zero graphics, except for the backgrounds, no way to find out if the enemy you're going to fight is tougher than you.

The plus side - variety. With so many options for spells, genders, alchemy, magic spells, ecenomics, items, weapons, places to visit etc, this game can be a huge thing. Unfortunately, all the variety requires also a HUGE amount of content, both text and graphics and simple enough system to control it. Otherwise it's just as boring as Excel.