HTML - Infested Cataclysm [v0.1.5bbb] [Grey Goo Scion]

Will judge harsher in future, 5* for early game though.
The style of game is best described as sandbox-survival with quests that can help lead you to different areas.

Gameplay
I personally question the heavy DnD style mechanics as it is notoriously awkward to do in video game, and as a solo adventure it feels a little messy.
Lots of items and perks for each class and build do add some decent replay value though, even at this early stage.

Art
So I find it to be mixed, I think some of the AI is either edited or just well curated, primarily for main characters or event, like the nurse on the main post.
However a bunch of the later enemies and such have what I will call 'funny AI cocks." I'm hopping these are mostly placeholders and will be fixed later.
I would rather have well curated AI art then Real Porn for both consistency, and using real porn clips is stealing even more so then AI already can be.

Writing
I think the premise is fine, the quests and such work well, no complaints for an early project.
The generic sex writing needs work, like a bunch. People will often use the exact size of a body part "Your 7-inch salami feels so good!" Exact sizes should be saved for narrator/description text, not a sex zombies passionate climaxing.
Repeat lines, "God-damn cocksucker!" should be avoided being said three times in one end battle scene. Once again something that should be pretty easy to fix, it just takes time.

End Notes
I know my post is mostly critics, but I truly think these are things that can be fixed, and often have good examples in the more fleshed out content already in the game.

The dev is active on this site and more so in the Discord, responding to suggestions in a positive manner. I wish them goodluck and hopefully the support they need to see this project to completion.

I enjoyed this game so much that, after deleting the account I'd originally downloaded this under, I had to make a new account just to track it down again. Not many "zombie" games will let you succumb to corruption, and this game does so quite well. Would recommend for the atmosphere and the freedom you have even in this early state (1.4e).

[v0.1.3a]

The good:

There is no question that this game is ambitious: a MC with a whole bunch of stats and abilities, a crafting system, an encounter system, a variety of locations...

The bad:

Unfortunately right now all the effort put into these systems, and the walls of text that are needed to explain them, don't really contribute to the game. There is no way to use most of these, and they just make the limited game dynamics that I can interact with more confusing.

While the writing is competent (for a business brief), it is not very engaging and not well suited to a world setting meant to be dynamic and fast-paced.

The ugly:

Then, there is the technical execution.

The aforementioned walls of text, without any formatting to help readability, that my eyes glaze over while I scroll desperately to reach the army of buttons at the bottom of the page that might allow me to do something interesting, maybe?

The inconsistent image naming that breaks most of the images because a capital or a space have been turned into lowercase or an underscore in the code, as if two different devs had written the code and put the images in the archive without talking to each other.

Oh, and did I mention the walls of text already?

+ Good gameplay: travel through location fight, get exp, items and weapon. Enemies want to fuck you but you fight etc. Just as i love.

- But poor porn content doesnt stimulate to play. Maybe some pics or vids to each sex with each encounter, at least real porn? Only text and a picture of the enemy. I realy hope there will be more visual porn in next updates

Alright, so review number two. I plan to update this as the game expands and grows. So what changed from the last review? Some of my concerns were addressed, fixed, or changed; however, with this came other things that have broken or gotten worse, so let me begin with the positive. Items now stack, so the inventory bugging out has become less of an issue. It hasn't been completely solved for a hoarder like me, but it took a lot more to reach the point where things broke again. Secondly, the map function has allowed traveling around to be a breeze, and getting lost isn't something that is possible anymore. Thirdly, with the new update comes some new content, and from what I have explored, it is nice as a second update with some new enemies and neutral parties/potential future allies alike.


Now onto the negatives or places I think could be improved upon, as well as bugs I found. With the addition of the high school bully, a new enemy has been added for specifically that instance, unless I just never ran into them as a random encounter in my searching. To talk about that enemy and combat in general, I feel like it needs some serious work or rebalancing since it felt like a coin flip on if I were going to beat them with a combat focused build that I had decided to try on this fresh playthrough, and as such, it wasn't exactly enjoyable. This builds upon my thought that the weapons you're able to find and take from enemies don't compare to the weapon you get from your parents room at the start, and then once you beat the raider guarding the next area, nothing compares to that in my experience, so combat becomes very stale and it builds on something I'll bring up next.

Some random encounters still pull from the entire pool of enemies even if you specify that you don't wish for a specific enemy type to appear, when you're at your house and a random infected saunters in it can be anything which is annoying for me since I'm forced to fight something I didn't want to see to begin with, second the crate drop events that appear if you aren't lucky enough to get them to proc in the early morning and infected are at the location instead it can also pull from the full pool of enemies again meaning that you could be jumpscared by something you said you didn't want in your playthrough so going through the code and making sure things are solid there is a next step I would recommend.


Thirdly, for the main plot or missions, you can get a hint by going into the quests tab; however, through me simply missing it or it not currently being implemented, a line of text somewhere or in the quest tab itself that could indicate where things currently end for things would be nice. That way, I'm not hunting for something that isn't currently in the game since I myself play these sorts of games for the story and gameplay first, with the porn aspect being secondary and simply an added bonus for stress relief when needed.

Fourth now we are getting into the more minor gripes I have and things that are more easily seen and fixed starting with, in some combat situations or scenes there are times when I have triggered a bug or something not working as intended such as with certain enemies using the female MC getting eaten out causes an error with the game not being able to pull up that victory from the table be that because it isn't currently made or another issue in the code looking into and building upon that would be good, now currently way that you use schematics was unintuitive at least for me and I didn't know how to use them until I thought to look at the phone so having a tutorial of sorts or having a reason to look at that would be good for other players like me who may struggle there.

Fifthly, while searching for items in places multiple rolls are made and shows you finding multiple things if I am understanding that system correctly with certain perks taken or having a high enough salvage score, whichever the cause if you're suppose to gain everything listed when you do it currently isn't working which ties into needing to get food and if you haven't built your character into doing that surviving if you will becomes very difficult so either removing the need for food increasing the amount of food found or fixing the current possible issue of not getting everything that you should from searching is needed since it heavily takes away your ability to do certain things until you can make even a minor sustainable condition at the start.

And finally for now ideas or other things I would like to see. Since I brought up combat already I will touch on it first here allowing us to continue to level past 3 would be nice even if it might just give us a bump to HP or the ability to increase our stats by one point since combat still feels a little too swingy for me in the sense of unless you've managed to stockpile some medkits from homes to heal between fights if you get unlucky you might need to waste a day at home after a single fight which means that you've wasted a day of food on nothing, where before you easily handled the enemy.

On top of that the AP skills you currently can only get one use unless you take the level up to have the extra point so those skills become a situation where you only use them if you're backed into a corner at least with my own playstyle, if this idea means that we need to make a fresh character between patches I think it'd be fine for now considering the game is still very early on and it would allow for me at least to attempt different builds more easily or as I said take away more of the coin flip chances fights feel like they become.

Anyways, I believe I've more than said enough for a second review and touched on a lot of things already so I will stop for now here, as a whole the new expansion was nice I wish there had been a little more and diving into this in the hopes of giving good constructive feedback this addition left me wanting more and I'd rate this 3.5 stars however since that isn't possible I'll leave it with the rounded up 4 since I still see a lot of promise in this and hope that it lives up to what I could see it becoming.