You know, for what it's worth, this is still one of the better porn games out there. That's a damning with faint praise take considering 99% of the "finished" ones are kind of trash or super short in content but overall this is genuinely pretty okay so far. I genuinely enjoy both of the game modes so far. The voice acting sounds okay enough by porn game standards and visuals' polish rivals that of an Illusion game or the Fallen Doll/Project Lovecraft devs.
My only real gripe so far is that, as much as it overall is fairly enjoyable for what it is so far, the writing did make me go "Who is this even for," at various points. The constant 4th wall breaks and dead meme spouting feels like the game was written by a cynical old man trying to appeal to the young adults of this generation and the commentary + satire the game make it feel like this game is going to become a ticking timebomb of controversies from all sides as development of this project progresses.
While I'm at it, I think "how much game should a porn game actually have" is a catch 22 kind of discussion. I've seen people here complain about Illusion's games, which tend to focus on the porn more than actual gameplay, being "more of the same." I personally feel what we have so far has potential to be pretty good in both departments in spite of the faults people are pointing out here and as far as porn games go that's pretty damn good in my book.
If this was a porn game, the current implementation of gameplay could be considered as "good enough." It's actually pretty fun for a while.
This is not a porn game though. It really isn't. Out of the 5 hours or so of content so far, maybe 10 minutes of that is for the porn if we are being generous. Those 10 minutes consist of glorified gifs that have no context whatsoever. There are no dialogues during or prior to scenes except for the recruitment scenes. And you can bet your ass this is not something that can be fixed within the current framework of the game. They need to overhaul the entire Pandora system and pretty much the entire game to integrate the sex into the story.
It absolutely fails as a porn game because they clearly focused more on the gameplay and "VN" aspects more. Now with this context, if we evaluate the current gameplay modes objectively, it falls way short. The ground fights have no depth. No equipment, no skill trees, no customization of monsters, no crafting, no breeding, no terrain, no cover mechanics, no tactics. The space battles are a little better, but it also has very little depth. The secondary weapon changing based on your shipmate is about the only thing that adds variability to the monotony. The ship upgrades are a joke. There are no other ships. No ship selection with different primary weapons, different maneuverability, tankiness, etc. No ship parts to customize the ships.
These issues are also not something that could be fixed easily by just waiting for more content. The skeletons for both gameplay modes are set already. They would need the humility to see the faults and overhaul the systems.
Finally, that leaves us with the VN side of things. The humour is up to personal taste, so I won't get into it much, but they do a bang up job at destroying any investment into the fate of these characters. The whole narrative is one big joke. Subjective issues aside, the game has no choices whatsoever. This would be easier to fix than the gameplay issues though.
