VN - Ren'Py - Abandoned - Captain Lance [0.75.4-PRE-RELEASE-2] [TearStar]

  1. 2.00 star(s)

    Dryparn

    The game starts out pretty good but gets worse the longer it gets. The idea is good but the execution is pretty lacking.
    The story is incoherent at best and straight out incomprehensible at its worst. Seems like the developer tries to put as much as possible into the story and build a vast universe but here i would rather see quality than quantity.
    The characters never changes face expressions in the renders and renders are also reused all the time.
    In the end it's a game that would have benefited a lot from being cut down a great deal. Less is more.
  2. 1.00 star(s)

    Coaxmetal

    This game is a complete mess. Either you don't want to understand the story/dialogue because it's too dumb, or you CAN'T understand it because it's so mangled. Couldn't continue beyond chapter I.

    Things just happen. You just jump from place to place and terrible low-res people talk to you about things you don't care about or can't understand.

    I don't even know if it has any sex in it – because of the graphics I don't even care to see them.

    One more futa/trans protag game down the drain.
  3. 2.00 star(s)

    KrystofDayne

    Review on v0.60

    Oh man, this game is a hot mess. I sort of feel bad for giving it only two stars because the whole science fantasy genre is normally right up my alley and I have a real weakness for futa content but that's admittedly all super subjective and it couldn't even make up for the game's flaws in my opinion.

    I guess my biggest complaint is the huge, sprawling story that's laid out with exposition scene after exposition scene but with no clear narrative thread. The history lore doesn't seem to really make sense (like the difference between these "nations" and "factions", what was that all about? It gets treated like an official change in policy but seems to have been just a natural change over time and the author can't seem to decide on which it was) and it's just all very confusing and overblown before any sort of lewd scenes come up.

    It doesn't help that the writing and dialogue is pretty awful, that makes it even harder and more tiresome to follow.
    There aren't tons of typos per se but much of the dialogue still reads like it was just put through Google Translate (which maybe it was, I don't know). There really needs to be a good native-speaking proofreader behind this.

    The game also can't seem to decide on whether it wants to be a visual novel or a sandbox game or both. For a long time it's pure visual novel with dialogue and dialogue and only infrequent player input, then it turns into somewhat more of a sandbox with all of its own typical problems like not really giving the player a direction on what to do and the sandbox Ren'Py UI being sort of janky and confusing.
    At the beginning you also chose like a player type (similar to typical fantasy archetypes like medic, rogue, etc.) but that doesn't come into play like much later (I assume, I actually couldn't bring myself to play the game the whole way through but if that does come into play at some point, it comes in waaaay too late), same as your apparent character stats.
    It's just all a mess and the game doesn't seem to know what it wants to be.

    The renders are okay, thanks to DAZ (though also only if you DL'ed the gigantic 4.5 GB uncompressed archive), but not really top-level and sort of badly implemented without a whole lot of care with weird issues like apparently varying height of characters (like one other reviewer noted before). Much of the characters, especially the male ones, also look just way too similar. And what was with that weird other race of people that simply look like Japanese anime characters in contrast to the general Western-style 3d look of the game? That was weird and off-putting af.
    There are also generally too few renders for the tons of dialogue that we're presented with, making the whole process feel even more like reading just a giant lore encyclopaedia.

    After spending about two hours reading through confusing lore and backstory and having had no lewd scenes whatsoever, I started skipping ahead just to see when some of the good stuff would come up, and I didn't even find something. The most I got was the two sisters sleeping naked next to each other. And shortly after that, the game changed to the aforementioned sandbox style and after trying around a bit in that, I gave up.
    I know some people would accuse me of just not playing the game like it's intended, if I just wanted porn then I shouldn't play an erotic VN. But the thing is, there has to be something that grips me, that makes me want to explore more than the lewd stuff, and there definitely exist VNs that accomplish that for me. But this wasn't it.

    All in all, pretty disappointing.
  4. 2.00 star(s)

    WuzzyFuzzy

    I normally don't rip into a game this early in its life cycle as the story line hasn't matured and character development is still in the formative stages.

    But in this case I'm going to make an exception due to the quality of the graphics being created. In short, they are subpar and not ready for prime time.

    First, the graphic are being created in png and jpg formats which means, at the very least, 30% - 40% larger files sizes compared to webp.

    Second, the creator(s) are using low resolution and high compression in an effort to keep the file sizes reduced, but that results in grainy, pixelated images that are flat and lack detail.

    Thirdly, the scale and perspective of images keep changing. In one frame a character may appear to be the same height as her companions. In the following frame one may appear to be significantly smaller in scale and/or height. In one frame the actors appear to be in scale with furniture and their surrounding, in the following frame the scale of the actors may be significantly smaller.

    Fourthly, we have a set of characters that are human-like in appearance. One race might have a small difference (such as ear shape), but the styles between the races are congruent. Then we are introduced to the Weld and now we have something akin to a cell-shaded cartoon anime character in the mix. Why the jarring difference?

    There's a promising story here (if a bit more focused), but the visual arts are not up to par with the current top-level games. Either the talent is lacking or there needs to be more attention to detail and quality/pride in the finished product.
  5. 5.00 star(s)

    fearsa

    Female protagonist - oh yeah, and I can have an optional dick? :love:. And whats that, I get to do the nasty with my own twin sister - oh my god; and, holy crap, is that my older sister making out with my mom - fuck. And I have a daughter... with my twin sister... :love::love::love:and theres elves? and a plot? and i get to be a hardass bitch? :ROFLMAO:. i am in love

    plus the renders look fly as fuck imo, and theres some super nice scenes of you chatting the shit in le space politics while your twin sister wraps her delicious arms around you. Plus did I mention there was a plot, something about revenge and space and owning your loser dad XD

    Thank you TearStar... one of a kind game at the moment, I hope you continue :)
  6. 5.00 star(s)

    Lillen B.

    An excellent start to a VN that has great potential. It devotes itself to a subgenre that is (imo) criminally underrepresented: Futa/GirlxGirl incest. The writing is pretty decent, considering the writer is (presumably) not a native English speaker. It does suffer from a narrative that is unfolding very quickly/hectically and could benefit, I think, from taking its time to flesh out the lore and characters of the world more between bouts of main plot. The visual quality of the posing and backgrounds is solid, considering this is (again, presumably) a one man/woman show, with plenty of room to grow as the author gains practice.

    Overall: I'm loving it and is genuinely one of the games I'm most looking forward to seeing updates from. With time and a little spit & polish this could be one of the greats in the incest/futa scene!
  7. 5.00 star(s)

    rocsharr

    I did enjoy this, and looking forward to seen more of this. Though honestly I don't rightly know what to write in a review besides the fact it is the style I like when I seek these type of games out. perspective of the player instead of 3rd person narration that tends to be common for these.
  8. 3.00 star(s)

    Every1sGrudge

    [Rev @v0.1]
    Potential, but needs polish.

    Art's good, character models are appealing.
    Characterization is flat, but this version is a preview and there isn't a ton of time to get to fleshing them out.
    Writing voice needs a lot of work. Dialog and pacing are stilted and narrative has the all-over-the-place feeling of a writer trying to get a ton of ideas across all at once.

    Not a lot of porn in this version but nothing squicked me.

    TLDR: Watchin it, positioned to pull the score up with a little work.
  9. 5.00 star(s)

    Wellthisisinteresting

    Great and different story with good renders and unique setting, it seems to be a very thought out universe with many different things going on, maybe a bit too much at times, because all the information can feel a bit hard to understand and its a lot of it in the beginning... but still great compered to most games that lack any story or setting/universe.

    It has some great sexy things if you like futa on female and incest stuff, which I like both, some choices too which is always a huge plus.

    This game has great potential and I hope it will continue! 9,5/10 from me for now!

    Updated December 2019: This game has become even better and is one of the one of a kind games, very unique and sexy hot scenes, with amazing characters, and its easier to understand the story now when the intro is made a bit clearer.