Review for
Wizard's Adventures 0.1.31:
I've waited a couple of updates to try again. The first post in the discussion says, "Old saves don't work." I still get tracebacks and can't complete quests because of it. Looking at the discussion thread, it's not clear if the bugs are fixed or not because players are still complaining about them. There's no way I'm going back and starting a new game if that's what's necessary to avoid the bugs and, based on the discussion, it wouldn't help because new bugs have been introduced that affect restarting from the beginning. [Edit: looks like v1.32 and newer have some built-in savegames where the player can start at the beginning of v1.31 or any newer update. However, between the slow progress and the constant influx of bugs, it's just not worth bothering.] I'm just going to wait until this game gets a [Completed] tag, assuming that ever happens.
Previous review for 0.1.28
Artwork: 4.5/5 - It's not the stereotypical anime artwork found in most adult games, and it also has more depth and complexity than a lot of 2d artwork. However, there are in inconsistencies, such as scenes in the kitchen at breakfast where Gwen's clothing completely changes multiple times between frames.
Story: 3/5 - More of the typical stereotypes and cliches of adult incest games, but it's at least set in a relatively unique time and place.
Writing: 3.0/5 - It's not riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes in every single line of dialogue, but it's not good. The translation quality definitly varies throughout the game and sometimes it's bad. The writing has some humor and some parody, but in general, it mostly gets lost in translation.
Gameplay: 2.5/5. A bit too grindy. There are 4 times slots in a day and there are too many things that only happen at one time slot and it forces grind. The story and hints sometimes talk about times that aren't obvious, such as "noon". The story and hints also frequently say to "talk" to another character in the game (without specifying a time slot), and that character will refuse to talk to the MC except during a specific time slot. There are also cases where some story lines seem to get put on hold until other storylines progress, but the story and hints don't say anything about it. Earning money and the price of items players need to purchase in the game seems contrived to force... grind. There's a built-in cheat to get money which seems to be a good indicator that others felt the same way.
Content: 3/5 - There's a decent amount of content available. However, this game is about 3.5 years old. At this point, the entire game should be 70-80% complete, but my guess is that it's in the 40-50% range, at best.
Bugs: 1/5 - Every single update is riddled with bugs and what's worse is that new bugs frequently get introduced in older content, too.
- I've encountered tracebacks in every release. Sometimes, I clicked "ignore" and it seemed to affect the game as if I had made a bad choice, so I'm not sure if I was able to play the game as it was meant to be played. There were some gameplay bugs, too.
- Quests shown in the hints can't be completed because nothing happens when following the hints (e.g. quest related to Aunt in the basement). Not sure if it's a hint system bug, unknown dependency bug, or a quest-specific bug.
- There were two "scenes" that played in the MC's bedroom where I clicked through the dialogue of a conversation and, instead of a scene, there was an empty room. The characters sprites, animations, etc. that should've been there were missing.
- Updates have broking old saves multiple times. If it happens again, I won't bother playing until the game gets a [Completed] tag, it's just been too buggy to attempt to replay it.