I'm quite picky, and yet, like quite a few other reviewers, I feel compelled to give the game a five star rating despite it's flaws.
First of all, there's a really decent amount of content. The author also manages to tread the line between storytelling and TOO MUCH STORYTELLING many other games fail to tread, it's rare to face an avalanche of text tempting you to just skip over. Maybe not perfectly, but sufficiently. A game like this should use storytelling to increase the appeal of the meaty scenes, and that's what UoP does most of the time.
Yes, the stoy is mostly same old cliche university stuff, but complaining about that is a bit like complaing about lasers or the force in a new Star Wars movie. It's what you have to expect - if you don't like that sort of stuff, maybe you shouldn't be playing a game with university right in the title.
However, closely related to that is my biggest criticism of the game.
If you've played some open world adult games, you are probably aware that they often run into the issue of having several plotlines you can engage in simultaneously, and these plots have themes that should influence each other, but they don't, because the sepearte plotlines don't have variables that take the other plot an it's developments in consideration. Sometimes, this can greatly diminish a players suspension of disbelief, if he cares about that sort of thing.
And UoP manages to have this problem (no pun intended) despite not being an open world game.
You are courting a number of girls at the same time, tell each of them you love them, even have inner monologues praising their virtues, but neither can either of these girls become aware of that fact, nor do the inner monologues ever touch the subject. It's as if you were playing multiple games at the same time, or maybe multiple playthroughs at the same time.
Or like the MC has split personality, I guess.
I know, some people have issues with having to replay a game to see different plot developments, but I think exclusivity only enriches a game.
And, by contrast, the non-exclusivity of content takes away from UoP.
I don't mind playing a dick (this time, pun intended) cheating his way through the world in a game, it's just a game, after all.
But in this game, the MC appearently sees himself as mr nice guy, yet juggles love interests like a circus artist juggles balls.
Like I said, the games most glaring weakness in my book.
On to the visuals. They're excellent, for the most part. I feel lighting could sometimes be improved, also some of the girls have a weird looking skin shader, imo. Also, it's been mentioned in quite a few other reviews, they look kinda samey. There's some variety, but not a lot. Personally, I'm partly appeased since this base pattern is at the very least relatively realistic, not mrs huge ass and tits as you sometimes see in other titles.
The renders are top notch, no grains or any of that stuff, and the game does a good job constantly keeping the visuals in sort of a flow, switching perspectives and stuff.
Then there's the animations - I'm not that much of an animations fan, because they inevitabely have to be short. looping snippets that end up looking artificial, but I feel in this game, the animations are as good as they can get. There's attention to detail and skillful selection of that snippets boundaries. I'd say it's the best animations in any game I've seen on this site.
Sound ... unfortunately, there hardly is any. It doesn't take away from the game massively, but is noticeable. The music is generally okay, no complaints there.
Maybe finally the interface, it's a renpy game, so ... yeah. The additions here are the smartphone and the "diary". I feel the smartphone is superficial, I guess you can have some impact on the story by deciding who to message and who not to message sometimes, and there's a very small amount of decisions you can make iirc, but by and large, I think it only disturbs the flow of the game and prevents skip mode from working.
The diary ... you don't really need it afaik, so ... yeah, it's there.
In conclusion, it's a slightly flawed game, but with enough strong points to offset any of it's flaws. Definately worth trying unless you dislike university settings in my book. Great artistic direction, with attention to detail and code-wise well realized (I could repeatedly send some of the instant messages, I had one image missing error and the smartphone and diary can get into conflict in the UI, that's all the bugs I noticed).
The one caveat is the storylines disregarding each other, but you can work around that by refusing all other girls, at least for most of them there is a way to do that. Excellent effort, I hope the game continues to a worthy conclusion and the author moves on to create more games in the future.
Also very interesting, that the story have many pathes you can walk. Maybe there will also come a walkthrough or hints. On my first start i idn't knpw how to get the Int points.
