v0.45
I saw that someone described Third Crisis as a game that knew how to be a game. I think that's not completely true, it's more like a game that forgot it was a game halfway through. The intro has a combat system that is quickly forgotten for a walking simulator, and doesn't use the combat system again for hours of gameplay. Unfortunately, when combat returns, it becomes a chore when very few combats directly give rewards, and doing Rat bounties for money requires repetitive back-and-forth walking.
Controls:
WASD/arrow keys for moving is reasonable enough. However, the default walking speed is very slow and you absolutely need to change that to >150% and set automatic sprint because of how much walking there is in this game. There are also multiple hotkeys for dialog and combat that only show up on button press, which seems unintuitive.
Gameplay:
The ideas behind the combat mechanics are alright. You can mow down most enemies once you have multiple characters, after which combat becomes so easy that it's just a time-waster. There are several areas where you fight the same kinds of enemies over and over, at which point I just enabled skip mode because it was too much.
There also didn't seem to be a way to look at enemy defenses, so the distinction to do Lust damage was almost meaningless. Several cheap slotless equips meant easily ignoring Lust damage taken. Lust, collisions, knockback, and other combat mechanics aren't ever really explained which will cause player confusion (using Rocket Dash or Grav Knuckles to make a target hit a wall from 3 tiles away does 20+ damage, but does 0 if they're already at the wall, lining up multiple enemies and Dash/Grav on all of them does collision damage twice).
The autosave feature is very aggressive, I didn't ever feel the need to do manual saves. The amount of detail given in each save menu is sometimes not informative at times, and the way you navigate through saves feels clunky. At the very least, unlocked scenes are remembered even when you savescum, which is good.
The purple text = corruption is a good idea but isn't consistently used, which is a little annoying for pure runs.
The mission tracker is necessary and a good inclusion. Sometimes it doesn't give enough info on where to do certain things, but most core missions are easy enough to understand.
The way you collect lore is a chore at best. Note paper is scattered around the maps, but multiple maps have scattered paper that you can't pick up, which leads to a lot of combing over every part of the map in hopes that you find something. Same goes for parts of the game where you literally have to comb over every part of the map to find the macguffin.
The major issue I have with Third Crisis is that there are a lot of things that are unnecessarily tedious about this game. You have to walk from place to place because there are no teleports. Every night of curfew is a stealth test. Clearing out the Sublevel Touched and then the Sublevel Florans is doing the same combats 30 times. Dancing with Jewel doesn't have a "skip to next night" option, which means walking to the motel and back five times. I'm sure this case specifically is just an oversight, but there are a lot of other places where you have to walk through the same place over and over with an obnoxious zone mechanic.
The mine tunnel area is probably the worst case of malicious walking simulator, the poor lighting is combined with a fog mechanic that just forces you to stand still. After clearing the zone, the lights are cut off and you have to go through the mine tunnel again, but with even more limited vision and you still have to stand still because of monsters in the dark. There are a lot of cases that feel like they don't respect player time and also don't respect development time, because there are many zone mechanics that never get used twice. Being drunk also changes all of your dialog which is ridiculous and probably took way too much time to do.
Starting from the Hub and in several zones afterwards, it's very easy to get lost and walk into and out of the wrong rooms over and over, triggering a scene switch every single time. The main town has a map and so does the mansion, zones in the middle should also have maps. There's a quick navigation from town to the Hub, but no other quicknavs.
Hentai:
The way the gallery is set up is not great, you have to either go to bed, or exit to the start screen. The scene viewer itself is also lacking. There are several scenes that end abruptly because encountering the cutscene naturally has pre-dialog and post-dialog that the scene viewer skips. There are also animations with a long wait time that you can't speed up, because skipping will often end the cutscene entirely. The animations themselves are fine, the reused ones actually look pretty good the first time you see them. The Super Deepthroat ones are just tacky. So far there are 200+ scenes in the viewer, but a lot of those are the same animation with slightly different dialog. Not to mention half the pinups are basically just scenes that weren't added in properly, you can even guess where they were meant to go.
The final thing that really holds Third Crisis back is the amount of incomplete content. Many characters are just placeholder NPCs, some of which haven't been dealt with since 2020. The main story is also stalled halfway, while several mostly samey bad endings are being completed. Like ok fine it's a corruption game, still weird that 3/4 bad endings are basically the same thing. They might as well have just folded waitress/whore/porn into a single long route. These side routes also have a ton of content, so it's not like they were faster to make. If you're just looking for a slut sim -- great, you've found it. Feel free to ignore the combat and the story because the corruption routes don't need any of those even though the canon trigger happens halfway into the story.
In short, I didn't get the hype. This is by no means a 'bad' game, but it's also not exactly a good one. It's just another in a long line of WIPs that had a couple of really good ideas and then wrapped them up in a bunch of not-as-good ideas that are currently eating up years of development time.
