Well, well, well. That certainly didn't turn out they way I hoped. Played through the first chapter so far and that's where I'll stop for now.
I guess in everything we knew these guy were good, top even, they still are good. The visuals are great no matter at which part of the game you look character, ships, effects, animation. The voice acting is great. The sex scenes that I've seen are well made but unfortunately quite disconnected.
And that is were it stops. Everything else feels lackluster, uninspired and/or amateurish.
The story reads like children's cartoon level villainy with some juvenile "sex, drugs and rock and roll" sprinkled on top of it. I chuckled at some of the humor but it fell flat about the same amount of the time. Humor is subjective though so there certainly people that will like it.
Game design wise there really isn't much there. The ship combat is the better part. The mechanics and controls feel good but it's just mostly the same. Defeating waves of ships again and again. There's different factions which have different ship and fighting styles. But since you aren't informed ahead of time (what are scanners again) you can't even tailor the one choice you have, you gunner, to the battle. The story/boss battles differ a bit have some additional mechanics but the number of those compared to the regular battles on the system maps is extremely slight.
The tactical side is even worse of. You can't even compare it to full fledged tactics game in the vein of Xcom. The closest would be Into the breach but it's a few leagues below. No goals besides kill X amount of enemy waves. No information in regards to what spawns of where. No environment interaction beside some blocked squares. Few abilites and passives. Boils down to just a damage race and trying to eliminate units before they get a turn.
Globally there's really nothing to do. Commanders and and Xenos level up but there's nothing to choose, nothing to manage. Don't know if there are plans to add anything but the only thing were I can currently see this mattering at all is enemy stats going up faster then your stats so you have to start grinding. In book that's a bad thing.
Global ship travel looks pretty but that's about it. There no resource management no opportunity cost. It just takes a bunch of time flying between planets. Right click to scan, left click to select. A bit of flavor text one bit of generic "event", ship or tactical combat.
Everything that is there feels polished. It's just that there is so few of it. Was there no game design vision beyond this? Then why try to make a game? Did they have a vision but not the skills to realize it? Usually that tends to lead to a buggy mess. I don't know what happened but I know I have a hard time seeing how they can improve things with additional chapters in this regard.
My opinion is that if you put gameplay beyond visual novel choices and puzzles in a porn game. Gameplay that is disconnected from the porn. Then that gameplay needs to be fun and be able to stand on it's own feet. I don't want to grind a bunch of stats/gifts to unlock porn scenes that don't even have any narrative connection. Especially not when the gameplay is repetitive and (eventually) boring.
I guess I'll give it another chance later down the line but from the looks of it I might just end up watching a cut of the scenes on pornhup.
Art and animations are good tho, but I can find better ones on rule34. (noname, gerotica anyone?)
