Unity - Vessel Tactics [v0.1] [MeshiSOFTWORKS]

v0.04 Beta

This is a bit of a strange game to rate. It has a lot of really nice CG, but no real scenes. The "gameplay" is easily 1 star worthy, as this entire thing is just a glorified tech demo. What makes it average, though, is its usage outside of that. It's styled as a Gacha game that lets you do gacha without swiping, so you can just fuck around a bit. No stress no mess. You can also see all the girls right away, and if you select them on your home screen, you get get the game's scene-adjacent content in which you can get digested.

It's pretty nice to play with for 30 minutes, and then that's about it. Progress is horrendously slow, basically nothing has been improved upon since I started following it, and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere yet. The gameplay needs a complete overhaul to be worth even existing at all, and in its current state, it's flat out insufferable. Clunky controls that seem to have been made by someone who's never played a PC or mobile game, boring nothingness is the only result when you take the time to learn said controls, and no real reason to actually "play" the "game".

Given the niche, quality CG, and technical amount of existing characters/art, it's still an average quality early access game for this site. It's definitely poor overall, but when compared to other games on here that get flying colors, it's hard to give this less than 3 stars. It most certainly doesn't deserve 5, though.

Fighting is mostly bare at the moment, considering not every mechanic is implemented yet. Softlocks are not rare, warrenting a full restart. However, the art's too great and the bits of personality is shown recently well.
Have great hopes for more fantastic art of various Vessels and fleshing out gameplay.

I need to be very, very clear. This game was not meant for me. I do not like vore. I do not understand vore. I don't get what is arousing about vore. It is one of the strangest, most enigmatic fetishes to me, so far outside of my own understanding that I can't even begin to rationalize it. I'm not disgusted by it, but it does nothing for me.

So when I give this game 5 stars, I need you to understand exactly how much that means. That being said, this is also one of my "speculative 5-stars". The game is very early in development, with only 2 playable levels and a sandbox. But the base it already has built for itself is remarkably solid. It has so much potential going forward. The two levels we do have have astonishingly solid design and an engaging level of difficulty.

Its a mobile-esque gatcha-styled tactics game, but I think this actually has the potential to work well. The gacha-style mechanics make a degree of sense, you literally "feeding" your fodder units into your good ones. The character design I think is very well done, and though its absolutely not my thing, I appreciate how the characters react to the vore, both in their dialogue and standing pictures. And I think the idea of having your characters level up not by defeating opponents (though lowering their HP makes them progressively easier to vore), but by eating and then spending the time to digest them, is novel in a fascinating way. The enemy team can do this too, creating a remarkably dynamic battle flow. The tactics genre is really hard to iterate on in meaningful ways, and for what its worth, I think that's really cool.

Maybe my standards have gotten too low sifting through the mountains of trash and shovelware, that all it takes is a little genuine effort to have my rapt attention, but still. I'm going to be keeping an eye on this one, it has the potential to be a really interesting game on its own merits, and probably amazing to people actually into vore. You know, if it actually gets finished.

[Review for V0.03a]