OK, so I have mixed feelings about this game. On the one hand, it’s a Night City Game, with all the good renders, characters, and story that entails. On the other hand, the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. Overall, I see a lot of potential here, but I think it, unsurprisingly, has a long way to go.
To be clear, I’m mostly going to be criticizing in this review, but I want to quicky cover all the good. The characters are interesting, with developed personalities and interactions. The sex scenes are great, as should be expected, and while there aren’t many yet, those that exist have a decent range of content. The world is pretty, the navigation is… reasonable (though I have complaints), and overall I look forward to playing more of this.
There, now that I’ve covered what I like let’s get down to gripes.
First, and not super important, there’s no real introduction. We get the scene of the player in jail and then get dumped into our room. I assume the actual homecoming will be added later since development is in such early stages, but even just a placeholder screen would have made things a little less jarring.
Second: the navigation. Overall I think this is quite good, it’s similar to many other games. However, with the fact that going to a location where a door is locked pops up a dialogue box (which in general are slow to progress and close) we end up in an annoying trend. I see that a character is present in a room but because I don’t know their schedule (because my memory is terrible and there’s no in-game resource for it) I must click on it to check. This wastes time as I have to wait for the dialogue box to go away to move on. This isn’t incredibly annoying on its own, but the annoyance compounds as it happens again and again. I have two recommendations for this. One: mark locations where characters are present but not available differently, either not putting the silhouette there or changing it in some way since there’s nothing for use to do there, and two: speed up the dialogue box, or add an alternative display method for those messages, maybe one of the corner messages like we get for XP and whatnot?
Finally, my big gripe, the one that really strained my desire to keep playing and would have made me drop it if I hadn’t installed the cheat mod and edited my save: the gameplay. Look, I get at least the general idea of what you’re going for here. I can see how it follows on from SuperPowered’s conversation and stats system. That said, there doesn’t seem to be much actual gameplay here, just a lot of grind. The only time the game actually feels like there’s a challenge or interesting puzzle is when you need to trigger a transformation and must get the right items, variables, and events. Otherwise it’s just performing the same routine over and over with little to no change and basically no fun. So here are a few suggestions of thing that I think could make this more interesting, understanding of course that this is an early stage game and obvious has a lot of refining to go through so many of these issues are likely only due to it’s unpolished state. Still, here’s what I’d like to see:
- More permanent topics and more ways to get them.
- As the game goes on you can mostly get by with permanent topics once you’ve leveled up, but there’s the occasional specific one that causes problems. I’d love to see a way to convert temporary topics to permanent ones, maybe through number of uses? Maybe this way you could eventually have all available topics as permanent ones, provided you put in a lot of work to do so. This would reduce or remove having to randomly grind for a very specific topic in the late game because you need it to activate an action or whatever. Which leads us to…
- Don’t require an item to be in the hotbar/inventory to use it.
- There’s nothing so annoying as getting to an interaction only to see that an option is greyed out because the item required is in the wrong inventory, especially for those interactions that happen rarely since it means going through another week to try again. This is also the case for interactions that require a specific topic to be available. I have the topic unlocked, but because I didn’t know I’d need it for this event it’s not set so I have to go back to my room, change my inventory up, go back to the character, and now the window has passed. This is incredibly annoying and doesn’t really present a challenge since there’s no way we could know we’d need that specific item or topic unless we’d done the interaction before, and even then we’d have to remember it since all but the archetype transitions aren’t recorded anywhere. Please just set it so if we have the item/interaction it just works, regardless of where it’s located. I could maybe see an exception for temporary topics, since we might not want to burn them, but maybe an option in the settings or something to pick the behaviour for them.
- Add a “Pass Time” button.
- Yes, the Sleep and Relax options exist, and I thank you for adding them, but any game like this that is very schedule and location based begs for an ability to wait in the current location until a given time. I understand the scheduler may cause an issue with this, but if possible I’d highly request a button to advance time by one hour, just for sanity and a reduction of the number of times we have to go back to our room to sleep.
- Add more descriptions and details on the Archetypes.
- The archetypes are really cool, one of the best parts of the game, but as others have said they can be confusing. It’s not generally clear what exactly an archetype will be like, and the only source I’ve found have been forum posts here stating which is the “vanilla” or “slutty” option. Ideally I’d love to see a brief description for each when they’re hovered over or something, a way to know what we’re getting into, especially when we have to choose between two. Some way to see the paths each archetype could go to would be great as well, even if it was as simple as saying it’s the vanilla or slutty path. Additionally, I’d love to see an easier way to revert to a previous archetype, we already achieved it, honestly grinding to it again is annoying. On that note, marking which of the available archetypes was the previous in the available section would be helpful as well since it’s not always easy to remember.
- Less grind.
- Look, this is likely because the game is so early in development, but it feels like it takes way too long to make much progress, and the curve doesn’t seem to change as the player levels and develops, it’s always a grind. XP gains (both player and character) are quite small for how much we need to acquire. I think increasing the amount of XP gain would help with this immensely, even just 2X. Additionally, and I realize this may already be planned, passive XP gain would help immensely. This was a great part of SuperPowered, expending resources now to get a steady trickle of change. Maybe this could be more items purchased for ourselves that increases the player’s XP over time and some kind of options to ask the other characters to do things for us that increases their stats, possibly at a constant or large one-time cost to us. Either way this would mean we could be passively gaining in areas that are harder to improve through conversation while focusing on other topics or tasks.
Overall, I really like the idea of this game and I very much look forward to future installments. These are just a few things that irked me as I was playing, but I have every confidence that this will get even better as time goes on.
