Review for
Unreal Lust Theory v0.21
v0.21 still nothing more than a technology demo, there is no story or writing and very minimal gameplay. The only reason to release this would be to get feedback from players, so I'm providing mine, and I'm reviewing it as a technology demo, not a game.
I am 100% in favor of the adult gaming industry moving in the direction that this game is trying to move. I've found and played only a handful of 1st-person 3D adult games, and none of them were good. This game, in its current state, is no exception. It has potential, but so did all similar attempts before. I really hope that this game is being developed to lay a foundation for future adult games and not just an attempt to make money from a remake of Lust Theory in the Unreal 5 engine, because I don't think the remake itself will be successful. However, a remake is a way to make a game without having to completely write a new game from scratch, and that's actually not a bad idea, but they will still have to create good gameplay appropriate to the new engine that the original game didn't have.
Visuals 3/5: It's hard to gauge because of the minimal content, but I'd put the visuals on par with AAA games from 5+ years ago, aside from some of the things I'll point out.
- Textures generally look very good, although the dynamic resolution occasionally took too long to switch to the higher resolution.
- The level of modeling detail is inconsistent. E.g., the kitchen is pretty well done, but most other rooms are more spartan than they should be.
- Nobody would have that many free weights in a home gym that's hardly big enough for two people to use at the same time.
- Reflections from mirrors appear to have an intentional blurred effect. Strangely, the reflections from the glass shower panels in the bathroom are clearer than the mirrors.
- The MC has no reflection in the mirror, which isn't that uncommon. I might be inclined to think it was intentional to not show the MC or to save GPU resource, but... Megan has a reflection in the mirror and the sex scenes show the MC.
- All rooms and hallways are about 40% larger than they should be, so the interior of the house just looks like a bunch of wasted space, and it also makes the rooms look even more sparsely furnished. I suspect the extra space is to prevent the MC and NPCs from getting stuck, but... it looks weird.
- The house has a typical European interior with European electrical switches/outlets and other uniquely European characteristics, but the garage has North American electrical switches/outlets and other uniquely North American characteristics. Looks like it was created by two completely different graphical artists.
Gameplay: 3/5 - There's not much gameplay. Searching for pumpkins and Christmas tree ornaments is lame, but it at least provides a technology foundation for future gameplay.
- The controls are straightforward FPS style.
- The default movement speed is too slow. The default should be to always run. There needs to be a lot more eye candy in a game to keep players from getting bored to death walking around at a slow pace, and that has been a consistent problem with similar games in the past.
- Interaction with objects needs better feedback. There's only a tiny white dot that becomes visible in the center of the screen only when interaction with an object is possible, and that dot is sometimes really difficult to see. Needs a "crosshair" that can be toggled on/off or something.
- Sounds when opening/closing doors aren't synced very well with the door opening/closing.
- The physics for the pink yoga ball is humorous, but overall, kinda poor.
Performance: 2/5 - I played this on a system with the following specs: Core i9-12900K, Arc A770 16G, 64GB RAM, 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, Samsung 4K monitor. I configured it like this: window mode fullscreen, scaling 100%, dynamic resolution on, vsync on, frame rate limit 60, and Ultra on everything else.
- The Update Notes say that the house is fully optimized. I worked in the gaming industry doing hardware-specific optimizations for 3.5 years. This is more like barely optimized. Although the update notes actually say "Fully oprimized house." LOL.
- Frame rates are 20FPS at 3840x2160 and 60FPS at 1920x1080, just standing still. That's not optimized. With this game's current content, it should be getting well over 200FPS at 1080p. However, to the developer's credit, framerate and just general smoothness of looking around and walking around have improved a lot since v0.2.
- As mentioned above, the sounds and movements aren't synced very well.
Sex Scenes: 3/5 - The smooth movements, high resolution models, and the lack of clipping/collision issues are better than anything else I've seen dynamically-rendered in adult games. They're even better than quite a few recent Renpy games that are statically-rendered. Unfortunately, that's not saying much and there there's still a long way to go to make them good.
Lets get this out of the way. The biggest problem with this game specifically is that both the models and animations in the Renpy version of Lust Theory are much better, so the only real benefit of the Unreal version is the unlimited camera angles. Personally, I don't find that to be worth it and it would be much better user experience to replace the dynamically-rendered sex with statically-rendered cutscenes. I guarantee that players don't want to play their adult games on a mid- to high-end gaming system when the gameplay isn't better and that's why I don't think this game can really be a success. However, in the interest of moving the industry forward, it's reasonable to keep them the way they are and continue to improve upon them as the game evolves.