I'm going to be real here. Animation wise, truly grand. Story wise though... there really isn't anything that is gripping me. Really a run of the mill 'Get back on your feet while doing illegal shit' type story. Plot so far is bland and uncompelling. Girls so far have been alright I guess, not really eye catching.
Would say this a fringe 3/5 game. To say it's a 5 star is laughable, simply on animations alone. There is promise here but it needs more weight, more grip, more bite to pull players in and truly matter.
Unfortunately I had the same impression. When I first saw the animations and detail in some of the scenes I was really impressed. I wondered why I had never heard of this title. But playing further, meeting the female characters (and love interests) I understood why.
The female character designs are really odd, in a not attractive way. The updated Celeste character is better. She looks like she's mid 30s in age in Chapter 1, while he bio claims she's mid 20s. Yuna is more creepy than attractive. I can't really pin down any one thing about her that I don't like...it's more that there is nothing about her that I do like. I'm still not sure about the names of the others because they are just so bland and unremarkable.
The MC's hair gets me also. I keep wondering what is living on top of his head. If this was a retro-80s game I would sort of understand it. Every time I see it, I can't help but stare at it and wonder if it's going to crawl and move around.
The sex scenes are really un-sexy. I'm not sure if it's the lack of build up to them, how they quickly progress or what. They seem bolted on and not very organic to the story.
The sad thing is I really want to like this game. I love the racing theme. I like how the racing sequence is handled. The environments and nice little details like the plants moving in some of the shots are really impressive. But the script definitely needs some attention. Trying to do several tropes at the same time is a bit overkill (family death, riches to rags, sketchy gangster/corruption drama, father disowning, etc.). I'm not sure what the solution is for the female character designs. The main issue for me is they still look far older than the script claims them to be. Second one is the bland, undesirability of them, which makes the whole Adult part of AVN really not work.
This title currently is a lot like the car the MC is trying to restore. There's a lot of promise, but a lot of TLC is needed also.