Others - Hilichurl's Ambition [v1.0.1] [Theofrad]

I'll be damned, this is an actual erotic GAME. With GAMEPLAY. And not your usual "increment the counter of inner thigh massages given to step-landlady" grinding garbage that serves to disguise the kinetic novel and pad the length, no. There's a clear goal and a loss condition and the ero is tightly integrated with the mechanics as a means to success. This is a miracle in its own right. I am deeply sorry but this will probably make me noticeably biased and lenient on the dev, doubly so since this is apparently a non-profit work of passion.

The gameplay loop is basically conquering nodes on the map using your hilichurls and some basic hex-based combat so that you can capture the girls who dare oppose you and breed them with your units to produce more (and better) units. Rinse and repeat. There are also three additional resources which serve as limiters on your capabilities and force you to expand. There's decent unit variety already at this early stage of development and a few abilities for both you and the enemy to use. You also have to pace your expansion against a threat meter so that you don't provoke too strong a response and get roflstomped. It's a solid base and it's all decently fun.

So, the elephant in the room - the jank. It's not just rough around the edges, it's goddamn sandpaper. The mechanics can be a bit hard to divine at times and the only tutorial is a somewhat chaotic readme from the dev. Much worse though is that the game is not exactly clear with how it provides information to the player - often things just happen and you're not exactly sure why. The formula for actual effective stats of units when equipped with minions is arcane, doubly so as the efficiency depends on enemy abilities as well. The abilities themselves have very terse descriptions - "build a new shield". But does the shield have a duration? Does it boost defence? Does it provide temporary hp? How much? All this stuff has to be learned by trial and error. One turn a red warning will pop up over your base stating that a powerful enemy is coming. Next turn, Lumine teleports in, murders half your army, refuses to elaborate and leaves. Did you somehow provoke her? Is it a scripted event? Who knows. You'll learn that on a replay, maybe. Raiding Mondsadt once will let you capture Katherine, which will unlock establishing colonies. You can only find the new building by accident or via finding a note on it in the readme, as the game itself does not announce the change in any way whatsoever. Tooltips, short forewarning events and more detailed ledgers and reports would have gone a long way. UI is a pain at times too. My biggest gripe is the annoying movement of units and usage of abilities. It could use less clicking on small icons (and between them) and more hotkeys. The trash fights are also irritating since you HAVE to play them out - the built-in autoresolve is utterly worthless and will slaughter your hilichurls on what should have been an easy stomp. The game could use a lot of QoL overall. Balance too can be iffy, but that's a given considering it's the first version.

As for writing, there's none to speak of. The only thing you'll ever hear from the girls is "...". Presumably, these are placeholders. I don't think the game should have a lot of text that would kill the pacing, but three lines of dialogue wouldn't hurt to give the girls some character during their scenes.

CG is actually decent. It's AI, yes, and it's that boring generic anime checkpoint you've seen a trillion times already. But then again, Genshin's art isn't exactly the peak of uniqueness, so it fits surprisingly well. Some of the CGs are upscaled, there are no egregious AI artifacts and mutated limbs and the dev even made a lot of simple two-frame animations. It's all pretty nice and serves its role. There's also a lot of content for a Day 1 release version. If I may suggest one thing, for CG variations I'd inpaint only the eyes, brows and the mouth, not the full head - seeing the hairstyle and lighting shift ever so slightly can be a bit jarring.

All in all, I'm impressed by the title and will be eagerly awaiting future updates. Great work, Theofrad!

The game has a lot of potential but it desperately needs a tutorial or at least an overview how to play it. The game concept and the art really good though.

Can't wait to see it when its more polished!

Ok, here's the thing:

The game itself is good, but has a large room for improvements.

First of all, the mining/gathering part: needs, first things first, a better tutorial/instructions of how it works exactly.
Second, the unit improvements: i'm still trying to understand how it works exactly, what kind of benefits i can unlock, and if the supposed upgrades are applied for the already existing units as well.
Third: a bit more of english localization could be ok, in order to, at least, compensate for the lacking of tutorials.
Fourth: the battle/progression system. It's an endless war of attrition, where you can't get an upper hand unless you have litterally a moltitude of units, and the supply routes are easily blocked every time.
Could be great, for the next updates, to have the chance to establish advanced outposts, in order to make a bit easy to reinforce the advanced units, and keep pushing the advance of your units. Would be great to see a sort of strategy chart, in order to know which objectives could at least weak the region you're attacking, in order to have a fast or at least not so much depleting progression from your side.

In general, the game is a solid 7, but with really lot of room for improvements.

I just want to let the creator know that this is such a cool game. Even though it is a "parody"of goblin burrow, but it has something new that goblin burrow games never have, such as the turn-based system and the ability to make the girls fight for you.

I would say its a bad game like a lot of replies are saying but it defiantly needs some work. The largest issue is that it feels needlessly punishing with how enemy units move IMO. If you control every rout a camp to move to and then go to the next day you can still lose that camp because the attacker can just teleport into your base. This is especially egregious with the powerful enemy that will occasionally attack your main base. I feel like an easy solution would be to make it so enemy units have the same movement restrictions as you. It feels bad when my army of 4 gets attacked by an Elite Enemy so I have to retreat because anything past control of the town just outside of Mondstadt is difficult.

As a whole its good but just needs a lot of balancing adjustments and/or better explanations of mechanics because restarting because your bricked out of Alice attacking your main base is very annoying.

Really like where this one is at already - some quality of life/translation items are needed, but the core loop of capturing/defending/training is a fun one. Lots of animations in the dungeon; really enjoy the different sprites. Looking forward to what comes of this one!

Ok turns out it was a bug. You're not meant to fight her for more than one turn before she flees. Besides that bug I would actually say the game is very decent. You can capture girls, breed them, tame them and you slowly conquer the world of Genshin impact. Up until monster Klee rekted me it was very fun actually. The AI art doesn't bother me at all but that is personal taste in my opinion.

Like the game's title, it's clear that there was a lot of ambition behind this game's creation. And in this baseline state, I'm willing to say the framework for something good is there. The downside being that's all the best thing I can say about this.

The game itself takes after "4X" style grand strategy games. The kind where the player micromanages the resources of their nation/faction whilst keeping an eye on the borders with their less-than-amicable neighbors. In this case, the player takes the role of hilichurls (basically GI not!goblins) on a mission to rape and pillage all of the world.

On the upside, this game has all the basic workings of such a 4X game. Each turn gives you 5 AP by which you can perform various actions. Create units at base, move units to attack or defend locations. Scour conquered areas for resources. Capture women in battle to get prisoners. Set prisoners to work generating resources. Theoretically, this should lead to an infinite loop of attacking, capturing, producing/upgrading, and attacking again until the game is won or lost. Keyword theoretically.

In practice, the game in its current iteration is far too clunky to be considered more than a beta build. Why is the post-turn resource report untranslated? Where do I get "strange" units to torture special prisoners to reduce their defiance? These things and more create stumbling blocks and forced pauses in player action that the game as a whole feels slow, and not in the good way that normally comes of 4X games. I don't feel like a conqueror of nations nipping away at my rivals as I assemble the critical mass needed to drown them in a tide of flesh. I feel like I'm playing a board game in a language I can barely read, with the enemies every so often pulling random BS outta their ass that is never explained anywhere.

Whether these are limitations of the Godot game engine this is rendered in or simply the inexperience of the developer, I do not know, but am willing to cut some slack. I'd rate the game a 3.5/5 if the system allowed individual reviews to be fractional, because I like the idea and the framework IS there, but not fully fleshed out or refined yet.

tl;dr,
The Good

• The framework of a 4X about strategically conquering areas and capturing prisoners for unit production.
• Decently titillating images for AI-gen

The Bad

• Untranslated post-turn screens. Hope you know how to read Chinese or always have a device with camera-based Google translate on hand.
• Absolutely no in-game explanations or tutorials, with all guidance relegated to a random-ass readme text file that doesn't quite explain everything.
• Incredibly unfinished, with many things blatantly unusable and/or listed in the readme as slated for future builds
• A lot of the game is just poorly-explained, like how some of the enemy bios don't even have a proper names and descriptions for their skills and abilities. So have fun running into enemies who will do random BS like make themselves invincible without telling you.

The Debatable

• AI-gen images. Some may like it, some may hate it.
• Voices are various screams and such that according to a dev thread on this site are ripped straight outta the source material. May or may not be your thing.

Really like the game. Finally another Great Genshin parody. It does need some work.
- Ai art might be lazy but the gameplay make up for it and the art is good atleast for being Ai generated
Need to fix the spawn rate of the Ai attacks it´s annoying getting attacked from 3 fronts every start of turn
To many random events that force you to back track to territory I´ve already taken. also weird capital attacks every 10 turns or something

Him excited for more updates and to see more ladies getting added in the future

(v.1.0.0)
This game has an excellent premise and what seems like a respectable amount of content, but the UI is the stuff of nightmares. A lot of trial and error is needed just to figure out where all the important interactions are done and what is going on every time an interaction takes place. What does this icon mean? What does this number mean? What does this button do? Why can I press this button but not that button? What is this or that I see on my screen? Does it matter? Where is the button I am supposed to press to perform x action? What does this word mean? Nothing is intuitive, it all needs to be deciphered through trial and error. And the end of turn ledger which contains some meaningful gameplay information is still entirely in Japanese, which is never thrilling to see when you set a game to English.

Cool idea, good potenial, horrible execution (so far).

Gameplay is obtuse, there is pretty much no explainations or guidance (a readme doesn't count and doesn't do it well anyway) and you get punished for capturing girls (through the "abyss energy").

An incredibly rough game with equally incredible potential.

There are no shortage of rough spots, such as a complete lack of in-game tutorial, with the game's already rather esoteric design relegated to a plain-text file, to the presence of the ever-polarizing AI art, to a UI that has an incredibly hard time communicating what anything does to the player.

But the game itself still manages to set out a very solid foundation. Part Goblin Burrow, part Portals of Pheron. Getting over the significant learning curve shows that there is the making of a good game here, and if its actually developed on with proper systems, it could be really good.

The lewd stuff, as it stands, is decent. There are the threads of greatness there, and breaking in the characters has a lot of potential, but the whole system is, like the rest of it, rather obtuse to engage with.

For a first release, for as incredibly jank as it is, there is still a full, if confusing, game experience to be had. I've wanted a game like this for years, and if it can actually manage to capitalize on its incredible foundation, we'll have a real winner on our hands. I'll be watching it with great interest.