A pretty decent dating sim good enough to legitimately get someone interested in X-men from scratch. It did it to me.
Likable characters, decent art, lots of little interactions which add life to them, an actual story going on in the background, has it all really.
But see the actual porn is mid as hell. I did say decent art but art during sex is pretty wonky. Some of the positions look legitimately awful and it's all Live2D, no actual multiple frames going on. Some of this works, most of it is pretty bad. The art during BJ and doggy look the worst with some alien looking faces. Also flying hands and tongues look terrible and the artist cannot draw feet. Their skin is probably the worst, too flawless, lacking in detail and brushed looking. It's just uncanny.
The writing is also mediocre, especially regarding the protagonist. For the most part the characters are servicable if a bit flanderized but the MC is unacceptable. You always get 3 choices, 2 are much the same in sounding holier-than-thou and "I'm your therapist now" while the third is always so ridiculously mean that it has no use, this categorization literally never fails. Check every single time you get 3 different choices in this game. There's just no in between and nothing sincere. Rarely does the protagonist ever sound like a real person, it's always some lady doth protest too much BS. The only part of the writing that holds up are tiny interactions sprinkled here and there, if only because it's the easiest thing to get right.
The issue is further exacerbated by character "quirks" which due to their execution have the subtlety of a brick and the character archetypes you choose at the beginning, which are arbitrary, pretentious, pointless and straight up bad. For whatever reason, randomly you get to choose if you feel "pragmatic" "noble" or "bitter" (more like asshole). It's such an odd trio to choose from and feels very unrepresentative of a normal spectrum of feelings someone might have. It's a really weird fixation to have this as a game mechanic and to specifically focus on these three concepts for it and it hurts the player expression a ton due to its constraining focus.
I guess that's a theme with the game's writing, "fixations". The writing has a lot of dead weight going on which were added without much thought put into the "why" of it. Maybe it's because there's too many writers, maybe it's just bad direction, but you certainly feel it. And in a game where the writing is meant to carry the whole experience it really drags it down.
Because they're big blemishes on an otherwise good game it stands out a bit. But still the devs are passionate and the game deserves a try. And I'm genuinely pretty impressed by how big of an organized effort this game is despite its pretty low patreon budget.
Even if this review sounds a bit harsh the game is still pretty good. It just could be a lot better if they didn't commit so hard to dumb design choices and it's a bit frustrating.
Edit: Revamped after a 4th playthrough. More indepth now.
Having checked out the discord server of this game I can see why the writing has that tone. Some of the devs are pretty terminally online and project a lot into the game. One of the writers dead seriously compared the poor, poor X-men to the suffering of the Holocaust, lmao.
And the devs absolutely
insist that this isn't a harem game because that's a big, evil word. You'll notice the tag isn't there either. But it very much is, you can fuck pretty much every girl you see and they'll only be with you.
