Ren'Py - Superheroes Suck [v1.976 Public] [Solace]

v1.951 Public

So, do Superheroes Suck (with story)? I say not really. It is nice story, not really dark, with quite a few humorous moments. I like it. And the game itself is quite long, so I enjoyed it very much.

But perhaps Superheroes Suck (with visuals)? Maybe a tiny bit. Well I've seen better graphics. But the characters are actully quite nice, and the worst parts would be some locations. It could be better, but it also could be much worse. I say good enough.

Also do Superheroes Suck (dick)? Yes, they do. They suck it a lot. Beginning was kind of slow (obviously), but the overall quantity of H-content is good. And as game progress you have more and more options for repetitions of sex scenes, which is also nice.

So does (the sandbox of) Superheroes Suck? No it doesn't. It is simple enough, you can always see where do you need to go for next events and as I was saying there is plenty occasions to engage with sexual acts and not just story events. Also the guide in upper right corner shows only story related events, the (repeatable) sex events are often not mentioned, so at first I was suprised when I saw some new event to trigger that weren't mentioned in the hints (you'll always know because outlines of circles which symbolizes girls change color whenever there is new event).

But wait, maybe Superheroes Suck (with animations)? Sadly, yes. This is probaby worst part. And I'm talking about sex animations. They are very rigid and movements of all body parts is one directional, so they look bad, unnarutral. And the animated parts are often very short but looped. So you can see how bad those robotic movements look like even more, as it's constantly repeated. It seriously can look like machines programmed to imitate sexual poses on the most basic level, than actual humans having sex. I mean I see some improvement as the game progress, but as for now it is still not good enough. Hence I am subtracting a star here.

And perhaps should also (MILF) Superheroes Suck? From the game so far I doubt it will happen, but if possible I'd love some action like that. Because as for now MC only has his teammates, which are all in similar age, with only one slightly older, but there were some older characters intoduced. I hope MC can get some content with them too. So far closest thing we got was when Chrys made MC walk on her mom in underwear. So yeah, it's unlikely that something significant will happen. I can only hope for it. Anyway it's good game, solid 4/5.

Excellent work. Very nice game with a lot of potential. Well written and good paced.
That said, after a while playing it starts to feel a little empty. The dev really needs to introduce a few more characters. The game could use two or three more milfy teachers (its an academy after all). And two or three female students (hopefully curvier) . In the future, the dev can even expand to an administrative staff and few supervillains. Anyway, thats just my opinion. Good job and good luck dev.
PS: The animations are annoyingly slow.

I like the story it is interesting and seems to be well thought out. I really like the characters they are well drawn and anatomically correct (breast size) and each has a completely different personality.

The reason I took off a star is for the endless clicking through the days of the week. I understand this is necessary early in the game to allow people to build up their stats. I'm at the current end of the game and find it ridiculous to click through four days of nothing to get to next story arc.

I will continue to play this game though it would be nice to update the heroes chart so I would know that a hero is done until the next update.

Sincerely Meow

I've reviewed at least a couple of other sandbox games and I'm pretty sure I've made it clear that I don't like them. They're generally excessively grindy and it's all just a lot of extra busywork, a bunch of extra clicking to see the same sort of content your average visual novel will give you hassle free.

But I guess every rule has its exceptions and so far this is one of them.

Now do I think this game would be better if they did away with the sandbox elements entirely?... Yeah. I still don't think they really add anything. But at the time of writing there aren't that many locations and there aren't that many stats to take care of. It's manageable. Maybe this will change in future updates, I don't know, but for now I don't feel like there's an obnoxious amount of hoops to jump through to progress.

Aside from all that the writing is satisfactorily decent, not too dry, not overly obnoxious and not riddled with an unbearable amount of errors. The renders are fine enough. So all told? So far, so good.

I actually found this sometime in 2020/21, but despite a strong start in the plot and a hero who's plight hits a bit close to home, the sandbox, confusing variables and bland lewd scenes quickly bored me. Fast forward to 2024, when sometimes you just need good superhero story, I felt like giving it another try.

After catching up till the current version, I can confidently say that the plot didn't disappoint me. Witty humor, exciting moments, dialogue that pulled at your heartstrings, heroines with contrasting and complex personalities, each with their filled out backstories. There are plenty to love about this game.

Still, I would have argued that it's pointless to make a game sandbox if all you do with it is move from place to place, or choose who's story you feel like advancing first. But as of now, there are more and more sandbox events, which actually makes it worthwhile and feel like a proper sandbox game.

One of my early gripes was that the lewd scenes aren't really done well. There wasn't the "kink" factor, and progression with the females aren't really logical(as logical as lewd games go I guess). The scenes tends to go straight into the main dish, even when some of them are clearly virgins. But again, as the story progresses, you can clearly see an improvement on the quality of the scenes.

Another would be the the length of each story quest, which is excruciatingly short in my opinion, which of course, is probably to aid in game creation and updates. But it's really become a running theme that when it the story is getting somewhere or exciting, you can expect it to cut out.

Still, a full 5* from me. A definite recommendation for anyone looking for a good superhero story. Looking forward to more great updates!

Surprisingly well done characters and esp. Story. Don't get me wrong, +18 Japanese VN like Cho Dengeki Striker, Majikoi and such are also pretty strong, but they often tend to focus on the story-department anyway and the +18 Content is an Reward/Addition to make it more Mature.

However in my honest opinion and personal, esp. if it comes down the (western) ren'py and other stuff, while you surely can squeeze out some entertainment and enjoyment out them, i'd argue the Story itself aren't the best... and you rather go into them for the steamy sexscenes.

This one however is one of the rare gems, where i got first into for the sexscenes but stayed for the plot/story because it's surprisingly well done with an 5* Hit potential.
The 'only' lackluster which i find so far, and that's quite some games like this often have - if it comes down to the mainplot (not sexplots) they don't take the time to flesh it out. Like alot of the twists and situations, struggles and such happens a bit to fast and kills the pacing.
I mean this does still a pretty decent/good job in this regard but it still miss some of it's potential.

The Sexscenes and Characters are also great so far, the only thing which i geniunly hope that in the end an certain maincharacter is dateable/bangable <- cautious spoiler for name.

The Sandbox and Gameplay, plus decisionmaking is a bit on the weaker side, but IMHO, i still find it okay. I've had worse and i also like that this game is a bit more straightforward and simple in that regard. It can be sometimes offputting if you have this overdone Sandbox where you sgruggle through the first few hours and stuff. And i find the game still profits from the sandbox because it still gives more of an sense that you as acharacter live there with a daily routine and not drag you through a super linear concept.
But it is despite that quite rough around the edges - esp. with the hints sometimes but also the UI and such.

Story 2/5
Its is pretty good and well written, its supposed to be about MC finding out he has superpowers and joins a college with 5 females, sounded like it had some potential but it just fails in to many areas which only ruins the game, atleast for me personaly, also story just goes to shit late in game and starts to make 0 sense.

As for relationship build-up some say its great and maybe it is for one or two LIs but if you look at Harper the first girl forced on you, you just study with her a few times then she sucks and fucks MC, not what i would call a relationship build-up in any way, same for the second girl which you barely had interaction with more then a few times, she also trows her self at MC so yeah forget about what people say about building a relationship there isent any and no options for them either, other then lets her or let her...great choices right?....

Its a sandbox game but not really a sandbox game, meaning you have the boring task of moving around from room to room but since its all 100% kinetic and your forced to follow a kinetic line to progress which removes any kind of freedom a sandox normaly have, which results in making this sandbox being pointless.

You also dont have any real choices and LIs are forced on you, so you never get the choice to say no to anything, also the weird point system to gain points with the girls means absolutly nothing, i had -2 affection with Harper and picked the worst choices every time with her and yet she still sucked and fucked MC????
There is also fake choices where your given 2 options and both result in pretty much the same thing.

For virgin fans you might as well forget this one, the one virgin scene is pure shit, no deflowering, no blood, no pain, no nothing, MC just fucks her like a totaly normal sex scene and barely even puts hes dick in but apprently more then enough for the girl to cum, so theres absolutly nothing fun or good about it.

Girls 2/5
I dident really find any of them hot and the diversity in builds arent great.

Animations 3/5
They are decent but pretty short.

Music 3/5
Average standard background stuff.

Choices 0/5
Nothing you do matters, and every thing is forced and kinetic.

Sandbox 1/5
I dont mind sandbox games but there has to be a reason for it to be there other then just grinding stats and moving around.

I truely fail to see how this game got such a high rating with nothing but fake choices, fake relationship system where no choices matters, forced LIs, no kinetic tag, pointless sandbox with 0 freedom, i could go on but i just dont get it.

Good:
- excellent(really!) plot, story
- no bugs
- characters with well-thought-out backgrounds (no 2D cliché chars)

Bad:
- some characters arcs get too long in text towards late game
- no quest system and the simple, per-char progress tracker is sometimes insufficient

lovely light game. you cant really do many choises and feels like alot of redundant actions. but the story picks up more into the game and made me more interrested and not bored. when gotten like 50% into i gat kinda bored. only ever saw the acadamy and inside. but then suddenly artemisis and teacher and lovestruck happends and old man and story of like emo girl and gatta break off rileys mariage picks up.

diffintly a nice game. just gatta be paisent in the start of the game.
a game you play for the story. the sex was okay but nothing that would build my personal lust of. nothing to do with anyone being ugly or dry text. quite the other way around. but the renders-animations last aslong as a virgin boys first sex. xD .

looking forward to the devs future updates. il stay watching and lurking for more.

I really don't have much to say except it is so damn generic. Decent but uninspiring story on rails (no, being able to 'explore' a single digit number of rooms with nothing to do except advance the story is not a sandbox), decent but uninspiring renders, a 'totally original' stuperhero academy but you're the only guy story...

+Story is genuinely really interesting.
-The game has very few and not meaningful choices. Making it effectively an almost kinetic sandbox.
-Grindy
-Navigation is a multi step-chore
-In game walkthrough is missing a bunch of scenes.
-Girls are mostly unattractive

I really like the story but I just can't fap to this.
I am literally playing this porn game for the plot.

What could have been.

The story is pretty neat, and there's good character development, you really grow onto the characters
However, there's so much grinding. Having to click your way around each day to every part of the 'house' (plus so little information at first), having to grow your stats and so on. It probablywould have worked better as a VN, with some tiny parts for options.

The renders ain't remarkably bad, but that goes the other way around as well. The sex scenes were particularly disappointing for me.

I just played this (v.1.577) through for the first time.

Strengths:

- literate text and and engaging narrative
- good character development, meaning characters you actually care about
- decent models - some tend a bit towards "DAZ standard", while the better ones are both individual and attractive
- and most important of all, a good story, in which you actually want to know what happens next.

That brings me to the one weakness.

- Like others here, I believe that the strong story means that it would have been better as a VN. The current design creates various issues. One is the standard sandbox problem where a character might be going through some serious crisis, but hey, it's Thursday morning so she will be in the library and you can go and have sex with her. Another is that some of the quests you have to complete with individual characters are trivial and incongruous in comparison to the overarching story line at the time. I won't give examples here because I don't want to add spoilers, but I'm sure others who have played will know what I mean.

And at one point things seemed to be going very slowly and the story did not seem to be progressing. It was before I realised that the in-game guide would eventually tell me that I had reached the end of current content for a character, but I was starting to wonder whether I had reached the end of the update. After that, admittedly, things did pick up and got interesting again, even exciting, but before that I did actually stop playing the game a couple of times because it didn't seem to be going anywhere.

I've said more about the single weakness than the many strengths, but this is a game that on balance I enjoyed playing, and I will look forward to the next update. As a VN it would be a definite 5 stars in my opinion. My congratulations to the dev.

This game is a five star game, plain and simple. It's a slow burn, and I cans ee some people having issues with how much sandbox grind there is that might not be needed, and I tend to agree, I think if things played out in an order instead of forcing us to manage a schedule it would improve, but besides my lack of love for sandbox games, this story is great, the characters are great, and I enjoy them all, the sex scenes can be a little over the top but it's fine because it's set in a superhero-themed world. I know I have listed my flaws here but I absolutely LOVE that they don't show the MC at all, it allows you to put yourself in their shoes rather than view the story as someone else.

The amount of content in this game is amazing as well, which should be the case after 3 years, but even still I've seen games that are this far into development have half as much content. Way to go, I haven't even caught up yet and I know I will continue to enjoy it.

Version 0.1551

The Game has good graphics and the animations are well done.
The dialog is written very well and the story is interessting.
The Questlines are easy to follow with the help of the questlog and I am looking forward to seeing more of it.

First of all, respect to the devs, it's through their hard work that we are able to enjoy this content for free, so we should always remember that.

As for my review, I played through this once all to version 1.45 and lost my saves. After that I had to replay it and realized how much of a chore it was to get through the game, because so much of the time playing was wasted. No, I don't mean on content, I mean literally wasted by clicking everywhere to find the next progress point. Even if you follow the built-in guide, It may say something like "You need to see what the class will be about this week", but the actual progress point may be clicking on the gym on Monday morning.

So much time wasted in that way. The other thing wasting my time is the fact that usually you can only do 1 thing in a day. Its like afternoon and evening just... dont exist. After a certain part of the game everything pretty much happens in the morning and then you have to click time skip 3 times and then on your bed to start the next day. It's tedius, time-wasting, and un-necessary.

I honestly believe this game would be 1000% better if you switched from sandbox to VN. Then we wouldnt waste any of our time and we would get to enjoy the great story they wrote.

This has quickly become one of my favorite games on F95. The plot is exceptionally well done and well written. I dont feel like I'm reading a children's grammar book. The art is on point. Plenty of scenes to keep you interested. Hope it stays around a while!

Wow. Didn't expect the game to be so good

I always say transitions are one of the most important components of a VN & this is one of the very few games where I'd wait for line transitions (especially given how impatient I am)

The sound effects, visual effects during transitions, the face & eye movements, etc are done so well. They fit well with the pov style, especially the facial expressions.

The expressions & looks are so well done in the game, it's a perfect fit to go with the pov style to focus more on those aspects.

Only fly in the meal would be the face reveal during the smoking scene(right before harper falls from the sky)
It's not enough to ruin the game over a few scenes, but it does destroy the perfection of the face-hidden immersion.
It's like a small portion of an otherwise perfect cake being salty instead of sweet. you still enjoy the cake, but experiencing the salty bit reminds you it's not perfect.

(Nothing against games that establish MC's face. It's just that after that scene, the game continues in a hardcore pov/immersive style so it feels very bad in that aspect.
It's like 1 pink ball among 20 yellow balls. Nothing wrong with a pink ball, but it feels like it ruins the yellow theme/motif of the arrangement)

Another thing that's kinda inefficient is the sandbox.
Again, I'm not complaining about the sandbox style. Many may say it's just a small area of sandbox in the game. But that's the point. The game doesn't really have enough routes/girls/quests variations to showcase a sandbox.
Coupled with how many soft-blocks there were (complete chrys quest before you can complete riley quest) - it might've been easier for the dev to lay out the events in a predetermined sequence like a novel.

The storylines & characterisation was pretty good tho.
Add it to the fact that the dev seems to have a good grasp of how to flow scenes in a VN(see below), it forms a great narrative to immerse oneself in. (again, pov immersion works very well with this)
(many just focus on writing a story, or creating good renders. instead you need to break it down into lines with sound & visual effects - kinda like turning a plot story into a proper film script.
Having a good story & picture is only half the battle, you have to present it well as a scene)

Overall, a great ride. Looking forward to the story further.

Edit: Adjusted score to take into consideration the presentation structure of the story overall. Breaking the main, linear storyline into 4 girls & then constant soft-blocking it so you play it in a fixed linear route anyway just adds to the click count & gets annoying.
Did a critical play-through of the whole game overall & havig to check the guide everytime to see where to go becomes annoying.
Sandboxes are supposed to have independent routes & guides are just helping tools, not necessities. But here, since there's only a single route to follow, half the time you cannot progress on your preferred route & you are forced to look at the guide & find you are being forced into a particular girl's route with no choice.

In short, this is like a great book with amazing chapters (the scenes in the events are just near perfection) but the chapters are scattered all over the library in a treasure hunt format with you needing to find the next chapter through the guide everytime. Annoying & detracts you from enjoying the book properly.
Also the sex-scenes are lacking when compared to the non-sex-scenes. Idk why
Anyway, while the game is awesome, it does have some shortcomings. So adjused the review to be more critical instead of fangirling like a crazy fan (which I am)

Review is based on version 1.526 from May 7th 2023.

“Superheroes Suck” would be a four or five star game if it weren’t an adult visual novel. The story and writing kept me engrossed and the twists and dramatic elements did a good job of pulling at my heart strings. The plot deals with difficult emotions like depression and feelings of helplessness that made the game occasionally unpleasant to play, but soldiering through it was worthwhile. Unfortunately, the game’s main failing is a big one: The adult content. Not a single scene “worked” for me, even when going through the Gallery afterwards and stringing them together leaving me satisfied with the story but thoroughly disappointed with the reason I tried the game in the first place.


The story is strong with good pacing that really ropes you in and puts you in the MC’s shoes, for better or worse. I say “for better or worse” because I occasionally felt quite taxed with the (justifiably) negative emotions going through the MCs head as he struggles with allegedly having superhero abilities that he can’t seem to manifest, while being surrounded by competent superheroes who make it look easy. When the MC felt helpless or irrelevant, so did I, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. That said, a game that can pull you in like that can’t be called sub-par.


The game is free-roam with “quests” for each different character that can be done in any order, at least up to a certain point, at which time the game forces you to finish up the content one character before unlocking new content on all of them. This is for the best, so other characters can comment on the current issues with other characters, making the game feel more lived-in. There’s a bit of grind early on where you work on raising your fitness, aptitude, and confidence, but it’s relatively light and gave a sense of accomplishment as the MC gets smarter and stronger (and has more success with the ladies). The confidence system seems to be mostly abandoned by the end of this version, with the initial intent seeming to be spending confidence points to get sex. By this point, my character has built up almost 200 confidence points and it doesn’t seem to have any effect on the gameplay.


That brings us to the worst part of Superheroes Suck: The adult content. The quality is just not there. The animations are often too slow and of relatively low quality, the setup is often too quick and the scenes are often very short with only one or two very short animations. Despite around 10 hours of total gameplay (if not more. I didn’t time it) none of the adult scenes ever “worked” for me, which got to be quite frustrating by the end. Not only is their quality sub-par but so is their frequency, with hours going by without a fresh scene. For several characters, a significant amount of grind was required to unlike a single 30fps animation with limited dialogue. Even the undressing part isn’t there. If I would give the author one piece of advice, it would be to abandon animations until you’re good at it. A few dozen different renders along with good spicy dialogue is far better than animations that are distractingly low quality.

There's also a surprising lack of group content. There's only one instance I can remember where a second character was present during an adult scene, and their participation was limited. Given the length of the game and the current harem-style setup, the absence of any group scenes is noteworthy.


That said, I enjoyed the game and played through to its entirety, and I even look forward to future updates to see where the story will go. Sadly, unless things change, it will remain a pants-on experience.

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.