Underneath a lot of missteps, there's actually a decent game.
The background for
Superheroes Suck is actually fairly well done. The setup is hardly inventive (loser MC at a deadend job gets thrown into wild and incredible new situation), but it's actually done with some aplomb. The worldbuilding is not extensive, but there's enough tasty breadcrumbs that the universe feels reasonable and lived in.
We don't have a lot of backstory on Nierhaven, the Heroes Association, or superpowers and how they work, but we have enough little hints here and there that suggest the developer does. And that's really all you're looking for in your worldbuilding. We don't need an Almanac, we need a kind of fog of war that suggests there's a big world out there that we can't [currently] see. In that regard, this game does it quite well. We have the pieces of an interesting society that tries to regulate the existence of random powered people, and the bits we have—while themselves not especially original—are good enough to keep us on the line.
But, as touched on by other reviewers, where the game fails is in its execution. For one, it's the most pointless "sandbox" game, especially considering that a lot of the time slots only have 1 available option. E.g. if it's a Wednesday afternoon you often only have 1 particular choice to advance the time. This is made more frustrating when there's the occasional point in the story where you need to do 4 separate "morning" events, but you can only do one morning event per day, which just ends up breaking the immersion and continuity for no apparent reason, because each scene is clearly designed to immediately follow the previous plot point, and not come a week later.
The sandbox nature of the game gets in the way of both cases. Most of the game doesn't need it, because there's not enough simultaneous events (or branching storylines) to demand it. And when you
do have competing events, they're usually part of the same storyline and realistically should be done on the same day, rather than spaced out over a week.
There's also no real choices here. You need to progress your relationship with all the girls. There's no picking and choosing which ones you want to pursue. Even if you focus exclusively on one, you'll eventually run into some kind of hard block where you have to sufficiently progress on someone else before you can continue. Main Story elements are gated behind your relationship with all of the main characters, and your relationship with them can only go one way.
There's no option to turn down or remain "just friends" with any of the girls (and you interact pretty much exclusively with girls, except for the most suspiciously placed "old man" who
somehow becomes a major plot element later on—who could've seen that coming?), so you are obligated to be the fucktoy of every single major character. No matter how you choose to interact with them, the scenes play out the exact same way.
There are some stats, mainly affection and obedience with the girls, and a few player stats (Fitness, Aptitude, "Confidence", and the literally once-used Icon/Rogue), but as far as I can tell, they're almost completely aesthetic. Your relationship progresses identically with each girl regardless of your stats with them. Fitness and Aptitude have maybe 3 skill checks the entire game? You spend Confidence a handful of times max, but you can gain dozens of points before you spend a single one. As far as I can tell, Icon/Rogue is never checked at all.
In other words, this game has complications just for the sake of having them. There's no reason this game needs to be a Sandbox. It can be done better as a visual novel. There's no reason for this game to have stats. It barely ever references half of them and the relationship with the girls proceeds normally without them. There's barely any need for superpowers either, because for most of the game you don't actually have any. There's no interactive scenes where you, as the reader, feel like you can use powers in an engaging way. Most of the time, things happen to you. Very, very infrequently, the MC uses his powers in what is inevitably another plot-mechanic.
This game features almost no agency, which is especially disappointing because it's supposed to be a Sandbox, and comes with all the sandbox hallmarks like pointless wandering around the same setpieces, stat grinding, repetitive scenes, and waiting for the right triggers. If this game ditched the sandbox, eliminated a lot of the grind, and actually made the stats matter (e.g. an affection and obedience route for each of the girls, like the stats suggest), it would instantly be a much better game.
The girls you interact with are written rather decently and the writing is generally above average for games in this genre. The developer seems to have a decent handle on fluency and storytelling, commits relatively few spelling or grammatical errors, and the quantity of exposition isn't overbearing. Scenes move and characters exhibit development.
However, the supporting characters tend to be a little flat, even if they are written fairly well. And what I mean by that is that they go through believable emotions, they're written as having understandable insecurities, and they react to the external stimuli that the story throws their way. All good things, of course, but their very nature of their characters can be a little one-note. Harper is always that nerdy bookworm that wants to quit the academy. Chrys is always the aggressive sexpot who wants to seem cool. Valentina is always robotic. Riley is always bitching about her [ex-]husband. They seem to have one central shtick and everything revolves around that. Even giving them each a strong secondary trait that is frequently referenced would make them seem like much more fleshed out, because the writing around their central traits clears the bar.
The sex scenes are all okay in isolation (just okay, though, not exceptional). Most of them are animated and of reasonable quality. But both the buildup and aftermath can be done better. Very often they're abrupt; you have the characters alluding to sex, and then the next scene is just an animated panel of them mid-fuck. Then once that's over the girl is either hentai level of mindbroken and exhausted, or they've got their clothes on already and the scene's over.
Where's the buildup, the tension, the romance, the comedown? The sex scenes almost feel tacked on, which speaks to how the individual scenes (events within the sandbox) are actually pretty good, but also how much better they can be if the game executed them properly and put them into a VN sequence.
Despite these flaws, you can see the skeleton of a good game:
- Decent worldbuilding with a lot of room for growth
- Good character elements (albeit incomplete)
- The groundwork for different paths with each girl (affection vs obedience)
- Above Average writing in the main story
And it's enough to keep an eye on. It's just a shame that the game is mired by flawed design decisions, such as poorly executed sandbox (with grind), the absence of player agency, and the mediocre integration of lewd scenes. With a significant rework and polish, this could be the flagbearer for games of the superpowered genre. As it is right now, it's a mediocre and oftentimes frustrating experience with hidden potential.
