Unity - Pure Onyx [v0.124.0] [Eromancer]

I started playing this a month ago, I thought this game looks nice and decent and is in early development, and could've give this a 3-4 star rating. However when I heard this game was in development for +4 years, I can see the frustration, disappointment, hatred surrounding this game.

You play as Onyx fighting against crime gangs, corrupt police officers and some other grotesque things that are trying to rape her and survive in the city of Babylon.

The gameplay is like streets of rage, double dragon, and any arcade beat em up games. However the combat mechanics, and everything surrounding it is very messy:
-Sometimes the hit detection won't connect
-Enemies won't give you a chance to attack back when you are knocked down
-Lack of combo moves
-Hard time attacking the smaller enemies
-Inventory and equipped items are irrelevant (except healing items)
-No struggle animation when grabbed (April 2022 version).
-Lack of progression/skills when picking up items or leveling up.

With all of these things, you can die a lot, or easily exploit the enemy AI by just kicking or running attack moves.

The Hentai scenes contain regular rape, monster sex, some unborn cock vore (Don't look it up, if you dare), insect sex, futaXFemale (Only background) and some lesbian sex (favorite). They are nice and well animated. There is also a gallery to obtain the hentai gallery and they're easily dropped by enemies, which means you don't need to get grappled to see the scenes.

And That's it I told you everything that this game has to offer. There is only 3-ish stages, they all play the same, but also have 10 waves of enemies, "a" Boss fight. No story, your just in the map and start the stage.

+4 years in development for a less than 1 hour game? Is it worth paying $5 (itch.io)? Or Supporting them on Patreon or SubscribeStar?

First time playing this game. I was really impressed with the initial artwork and 15 mins of the game.

I'm amazed that after 15 mins of gameplay that I saw everything this has to offer and it's been in develop for 4+ years. Definitely shameful given the size of the team.

I hope no one decides to back these guys.

Review for the update of the [2022-05-22].

Nothing to say that hasn't already been said both in the rate and in the thread:

+ The only remarkable thing about this game is its animations and its artistic section. Of course, Onyx is a pretty hot girl.

- However, writing all the negative aspects is pointless, so I will just limit myself to mentioning that the developers in question continue to scam their audience, with mediocre updates and little content (content that should have been released months ago, they barely do, among other examples).

I strongly recommend that:
· Do not pay for this game.
· See for yourself the scam, there are many evidences about this.
· Try it, but nothing more.

The game had an interesting start at the beginning of the release. Retro from the 90s. Olds will remember what female characters were in those days. The atmosphere of the game in the style of the 80-90s.
As you can see from the bad reviews here. The developer makes too little content per month. Animations 1-2. Enemies 1-2 pieces. But it's not scary. It's a scary combat mechanic. He's terrible. But also the optimization of the game. 25 fps on my good laptop. GTA 5 I have and then 70 fps on average. As in other games of this kind, you have to lose to see all the scenes. There are no goals and no quests. Just go and fight with opponents. Everything

So, why 1 star?

1. The fighting is absolutely terrible. As this is 90% of the game, it is worth noting, the following major issues:
-> The floor is made up of like 1000 tiny one pixel lines. You have to be precisely on the same line as an enemy, for your attacks to connect. So if they are above or below a line from you, your punches and kicks will miss, despite being in range. However, they are not bound to the same restriction. So they can hit you, but you can't hit them.

-> You cannot sprint in the level, but your enemies can. Dodging is completely pointless, as enemies can interrupt your attacks or dodge, mid-animation, and hit you or grapple you.

-> There is only one way to hit the maggots, a special stomp attack with a very tiny hitbox.

-> Even with god mode active, you can be stunlocked, knocked to the ground, and grabbed to be fucked. And you still suffer all the normal consequences, such as exhaustion if you are fucked.

-> Even with one punch mode active, if you aren't on the same line as the enemy, you cannot hit them.

-> When you are surrounded by enemies, you'll constantly be interrupted, knocked around and you have no Area of Effect attacks.

-> You cannot strip her naked. You can remove her items, but it doesn't affect her appearance. In fact, changing items doesn't affect her appearance either, so its hard to tell when you have the best equipment active or not.

-> Trying to perform mod-attacks is basically impossible, especially when surrounded. It is also a very awkward keypress too.

2. The sex stuff, although very well animated, has no looping controls. You can zoom in a bit though. There is a go forward with a scene, but you cannot loop the current scene or go back a scene and it automatically advances to the next scene after a few seconds. This is also present in the gallery. In fact I found the gallery quite limited in its features, which you also cannot make her nude in the gallery. Unlocking gallery scenes is very random, and you get them by defeating enemies... except the same scene can drop multiple times, so getting the last few scenes is next to impossible.

The other issue with the sex animations is that there are only two cum layers, there is an annoying fade to black at the end of sex, and the transitions between scenes are jarring and jerky.

3. To get stuff, you need to defeat enemies. This is really hard to do, even with god mode and one punch mode active. The stuff dropped by enemies may be better than your own stuff but more often is the same or worse. So it is hard to progress on gear alone. There are no quality tiers or ways to craft gear or ways to improve gear either. There is a salesman, but their prices are extremely high and you get so little money and couldn't figure out if you can even sell your items.

4. There is no mouse controls in the menus. You have to use keyboard to navigate around.

5. I exited the game, and restarted it. It did not keep my progress and had to restart from scratch.

Until these issues get addressed, I'd avoid this one like the plague.

Do not be fooled by the pretty aesthetics of this game. This is for the awareness of new users that are potentially going to pledge or be hooked by this game.

The game is barely being updated.
Not much progress on the game content itself.

Gameplay. It has nothing unique to offer.
- No unique mechanics
- Only 1 combo string for punch and kick for each
- Not even item uses outside of medkits
- No grab attacks from the player.

H Scene. While the animations are nice it has turn into a bad direction making it consensual and a low amount of animations
+ Good animation
- Bad variety per grouped positions
- Illogical consensual in a beat em up setting?
- No voice over in the span of 4 years of development.
- No gameover
- Bad 'struggle' transition
- Only a handful of animation in the span of 4 years of development.

For context.
This game is getting a rate of .2 new enemies per month and around .3 new animations per month. and that pace is extremely slow for a project that is earning a lot and has claimed that it has a lot of people involved. The developer keeps getting distracted with side projects and side updates that doesn't involve gameplay or H animations, which we only care about. They got distracted with an H animation series instead of focusing on the game itself.

Sure the game has good animations, but at what cost? I am fully aware of the struggles of animating and programming but this is just a blatant milking scheme. For how many years this game is being developed it doesn't even have any Voice Over yet, nor game overs.

The recent change of making it consensual even destroys the logic of the game and further puts the game in a wrong direction.

Tested latest version. April 2022 version.

April 22 Patch:

Great Animations, Models, music and overall atmosphere for what's there and love the cyberpunk theme but the actual gameplay is kind of rough.

PC keyboard controls feel clunky during combat and to make things worse if an anyone is literally an inch above or below you all your attacks slide right off them which makes the already clunky fighting feel even worse.

Not being able to use items without going into the menu stops the flow of gameplay and just feels bad, the AI at times just feels like its lost, enemies will try to go around you to flank but most of the time will just get stuck above you where neither of you can hit each other, and getting animation locked because you got released from a grab into 4 enemies swinging at you just feels bad not gonna lie.

Great concept everything but the actual gameplay is great, sex animations 10/10.

The art and animations are truly next level. The gameplay on the other hand leaves something to be desired. 5/5 because I believe if they can maintain the animation quality and wrap a good game around it this game will be something else!

Absolutely abysmal updates while raking in tons of cash, constantly generates hype around a project, drags it out and takes a ton of money, then puts it on hold and starts a new project, rinse repeat.

Game itself is a 3 star quality game; graphics and animations are nice, but there's no real progression, items don't affect appearance, and you experience all the content in about 30 minutes with insane amounts of repetition.

The 1 star overall rating is to penalize the scummy behavior of the authors (lower overall score hopefully will lead to fewer people supporting them on patreon), which is purportedly a 12 person team, but push out content slower than solo devs. The updates they do post on patreon mainly say "oh we're working on this", or "oh we're redoing parts of the engine because", likely just to satisfy patreon's requirement for updates to keep farming subscriptions. I don't know what went wrong, but I was following their previous game, Malise of the Machine, and thought they were a talented studio with lots of potential. Maybe they focused too much on graphics overhauls and the engine, which hasthe drawback that the more fancy you make it, the more effort there is to make content for it. Content updates dried up pretty quickly and they abandoned the game with the verdict that it was a tool learning experience.

I'm honestly surprised they still earn 10k+ on patreon given how consistent their lack of content updates have been. Are people that starved for 3D graphics porn with almost no content? What about just playing Skyrim with mods?

Best beat-em up H game I've seen. The animations are simply unreal. Not sure how this has 3.5 stars there's really nothing like this out there even remotely. Plays pretty smooth to for an unfished game. Lots of complex sex scenes and punching to nejoy.

This is a review for the November 2021 update.

UNDERBOOB IS BEST BOOB 'M JUST SAYIN'

Gameplay - still at a "proof of concept" level. There's still only the Test Mission level and UI is clumsy, particularly when it comes to using items mid-battle. Pleeeeease devs, just implement item shortcuts, we don't hafta live with pausing the game, going to the item menu, and choosing what healing item we want whenever we wanna heal.
But I digress.
Boxing with punks and sometimes insects functions alright, you can tell Onyx to punch the fuck outta someone, or kick their balls. You can do one or two combos, but that's it. It lacks variety in both enemies and actions you can do, and the bosses are just jabbing fodder. At the very least, the feedback of each action feels pretty good, they have a good punchy sound effect, and the animations for 'em are well-made. Speaking of which–

Animations - I'll skip over the "normal" animations cuz though they are good, really, that's not what you're really interested in looking at. Yeah that's right, it's the s e x. Yeah well, you betcha they're good. Like, really good. They even have appropriate facial expressions, so you don't have to worry about the girl looking dead af as they're being plowed!
Don't really get why we can only unlock an animation via dropped items though. Why can't we just unlock the respective animations whenever the character gets assaulted? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sound - This is also really young. The necessary sounds are all here, but background music is repetitive, and there's no voice acting at all. I'm not expecting voice acted dialogues, just the moans, but alas.

Lastly, lemme just talk about the graphics real quick.
Hey, they nailed that 80s cyberpunk aesthetic they're going for so far!
And the UI may be clumsy, but at least the menu looks stylish as fuck.

Honestly, what really saves this package-in-progress is the really good animations. Yeah they're that good. So then you might say, this is just another glorified gallery, right?
To an extent, I suppose. If you don't care for the immature beat-em-up gameplay, it totally is just a gallery. But personally, I had fun with punching jacked up dudes and sexy female cops. I feel that with enough updates, slight improvements in the gameplay design and a bit more to the customization, this could become a competent beat-em-up for its calibre.

Still, I can say that people are definitely justified in feeling like this game is another one that would be stuck in development limbo. It seems that the devs started working on this in 2018, now 3 years later, closing in on 4, there's still only a meager amount of work done. The animations I praised, particularly the H-scenes, they're still really few. I understand that animating these things take time, and I highly doubt Eromancer has a robust team in them, so I'm still more than willing to give the lack of variety a pass.

Is this worth the 5 bucks you'd spend on their Patreon? Just for the animations alone, yeah! In the first place, animations this good are worth tons more in other places. Eromancer is just giving us a game along with 'em.

So this is the first time I've played this and I think a lot of the other criticisms are pretty legitimate (though maybe over lambasted in the star rating) but I'm giving this gave 5 stars solely for the excellent quality of scenes. If this game were just a porn collection of clips/animations. It'd still be excellent so I think it at least deserves 4 stars on that alone.

Animations 9/10 - overall excellent, some frames cut to the next pretty suddenly

Designs 10/10 - hot/attractive while having distinct looks. I'd maybe like to see Onyx with maybe her nipples and a septum piercing, or maybe a alternative skin possibly with piercings? A dangling belly button piercing could be hot too if it's not a bunch of dev time for a relatively small thing. Love her design though.

SFX 8.5/10 - could use some polish/fine tuning but does everything well

Visual Aesthetic 9/10- I really love the comic book-ified 3d look. It has the detail of 3d but the reliable appeal of not falling short of materials looking off (like hard plastic looking vaginas or everything looking rigid)

Fluid 9/10 -probably some of the best I've seen in a game. They look messy (in a good way) without looking gross (in a bad way like wax for example)

Critiques
I do this these sort of die/fail to get content games are inherently flawed in that the reward and punishment is completely backwards. I'd really like to see this game as a more story based game but maybe if the dev just feels like developing an immersive/sexy story isn't their strong suit and can't hire someone who's good at that, then I'm actually fine with the game as is because the gameplay grind is relatively easy and short I got all the animations after like 1 playthrough and 1 boss. Also, there are plenty of games with really stupid or slow or just really bad stories/characters where they're just kinda in the way and honestly, I just end up skipping asap to the scenes anyway so it'd basically the same thing but at least the gameplay is short in this game instead of a potentially bloated and slow story. I do maybe some instructions on "defeat enemies to pick up their scenes or when they grab you let them win to see each scene on its own" might be welcome unless the following change on the in game camera were to be made which would be like a natural "learn as you go" type of thing.

Part of the reason why I'd like to see it be a story based game is because these animations/scene ideas/content are so good, it's such a waste to have them be these visually small animations that are 1/10th the size of the screen. I think at minimum the scenes in the scene galley should either be zoomed in by default so the animation fills the screen or at absolute minimum have the option to zoom in. There is clearly so much excellent work put into the animations of these and it's just such a waste to not have them be "the star of the show" as they really deserve to be. I also even think in the gameplay when you get grabbed, it'd be cool and stylish (in a way that fits the style of the game) to have the camera swoop in/zoom in to kinda "fullscreen" the grab and following animation so you can have the same view as you would in the gallery mode. I think this would make a significant improvement to what's already in the game without having to do much in terms of development (whereas developing a story and character arcs or changing the game genre completely would be an overhaul).

Besides that, something else I think that wouldn't be a complete overhaul but a nice addition would be voices for the female characters (I actually personally would prefer if the male characters stay silent) but this is also something that the game doesn't need and I'd understand if it's kinda hard to find a good voice actor that matches. I definitely think the lack of a zoomed in camera makes a way bigger difference.

If keeping the combat/game genre, I think maybe it'd be nice to have the combat be more sexy like Onyx having some leg wrap/suffocate-her-opponent-with-her-pussy moves (similar to how the cop character uses her legs in some of her combat) or like the larva spit attack being like a cumshot on her and her clothes getting ripped as she takes damage from physical attacks so the gameplay kinda acts as a tease/build up to the gallery mode after which is what I think most/all people are really going to be looking forward to and the main point of this type of game.

Love the scenes that are in it though and hope to see scenes with the larva, more different types of scenes with the chainer character and different creatures.

P.S. I want to say specifically to the people who are giving this really horrible reviews like 1/2 stars but actually agree with the quality of the scenes, I'd say consider the star rating as likelihood a project will get further financial support to be developed. IF a project is in an extended development limbo then sure, review bomb it and bring down the average if you want but if you're not even giving new projects a chance even when you actually see that the scenes are good, the project might not get developed at all. That's how I see it anyway. We're literally asked on this site to review to improve the game. It's not really a review of it as a final product. This isn't meta critic or steam reviews. These are WIP releases. If you're reviewing it as though it were a final product, aren't you just gonna end up reviewing almost everything as 1 or 2 stars? Won't projects with fantastic animations like this then be in the same category of 1 and 2 stars with projects that have awful story/character/animation/visuals/etc.? Like, there's not negative star rating on this site, what do you rate games with horrible visuals and slow/stupid stories and boring characters with no animations, no sound, no music, and horrible fluid effects? The same star rating as this even though it has fantastic animations/scenes? I mean at least give it a mixed "3 star review" if you're going to review it as though it's a finished product (which it's not) if you acknowledge both its good and bad points.

Oct 2021 review

2 stars

Three year project.

End result of production so far.
-9 scenes (removing the female cop one as she is just reskin and same scene regardless.)
-Three stages that are just more of enemy swarms, I don't even know if they end? Maybe they do. I stopped caring at around 40 mark in stage.
-Few enemy variety and some annoying enemies that serve no purpose but to frustrate you. (Big brains with the larva spawn monster.)
-Lack of voice over of female during sex scenes. I guess it is too much to get a voice going for her in span of three years. /shrug.
-Lack of continue, I mean if you exit the game there goes your progress really so far. But then again, this game is lacking any playability so far.

Putting all negatives aside.
+MC resembles Caulifa
+Moderately decent animations. I mean, at least they should get something right in development span.
+Graphically looks appealing.

Mixed
+/-Interesting level system and item equips. Though in current development phase serves not much any purpose as it stands.
+/-Combat. Could probably use some work. It isn't the best, but it isn't the worse either. Could be better.

So lets conclude, is this worth a download?

Gameplay wise. I will say no. No. No. No. No.

Quick flap? Sure, go ahead, grab a save file and have a wank at it. Otherwise it is just boring if you looking for beat em up in its current state. Check on it again in another three years and maybe it will be something worthwhile.

Great action and grapic but the control is a bit stiff. The sliding after sprinting is totally unnecessary. Quite annoying to line up with the enemy. You have to stay close and the same axis with the enemy, while some of the enemis can hit you across two axes. The small crawlers are too damn annoying, and without an efficient way to clear them, down kick is a way but too slow and inefficient.

The beat em' genre is not terribly common within lewd games, and this one looks great and plays not-so-great (for now).
Pure Onyx is a contender for best looking lewd game. Sure, some visual novels look great, but everything here moves in real time. The animations look great during both gameplay and sex animations. It feels like a professional-level game which is rare for lewd games.
On a technical level it's extremely sound. I didn't run into any problems. And for those of us who prefer fighting with controllers, Pure Onyx already has controller support. As soon as I plugged in my PS4 controller it worked without error.
The gameplay, currently, is what drags the game down. Right now it feels like a tech demo or a proof-of-concept. Fighting can feel stiff or frustrating, as it only has two "combos" where you either mash kick or mash punch. It's hard to move, it's not really satisfying to beat up goons, and it can be annoying to try to fight mobs of enemies. Too much time is spent trying to figure out where *exactly* on the Z-axis an enemy is just so you can punch them, or trying to stomp a larva while kiting other enemies around. I am weighing gameplay the most for this review: even if your game is beautiful and glitch-free, it won't matter if it's not fun to play. People will quit or look up vidoes of the H-scenes on porn sites.
I don't believe in giving games early in development high scores for "potential", so I'm giving Pure Onyx a low score for now as I feel this is an accurate rating for it's current state (the October 18th release). HOWEVER, I do recommend that you give this game a try. The sex animations are a treat. It's easy to collect and experience them all. I'll be keeping an eye on this one; Eromancer has potential to make something great if they can create a genuinely fun and erotic beat 'em up.

Great animations, great artwork, respectable gameplay. It's still early in its development, but this side-scrolling beat-em-up then fuck-the-girl-down shows much promise.

Definitely keeping an eye on this one.

Review update 15 July 2022:
I'm changing my rating from 4 to 1, since the game is really a scam. My last review is almost a year old and nothing really changed. One or two animations were added, no real content update. At this point the developer is just farming his over 3000 patreons and the game isn't really worth playing it.

Review for the September 30 2021 version.

The project is just in its early stage, so I’m writing the review for the current stage in hope that it becomes even better.

Negative first:
The only negative things are currently gameplay and luck of story. Well, there is no story at all and I think it’s actually alright for a beat 'em up game, but it could be a huge plus for the game.

The game currently it lucks on progress. There is not much to do and only few opponents.

Positive points:
I don’t know exactly why, but I find the animations in this game perfect. It suits exactly my taste. The graphics, the quality and the sound effects of sex scenes.

Since the animations have already satisfied me several times and the quality of the engine is already very good, I see a very high potential in this game.

Terrible game and people padding the rating by giving it 5 should be ashamed.
The art style is great and that's all there is to it.
Not much to play although it's been in 'development' for years. Some attacks are unblockable which ruin the game element.
The porn element is even worse as the low amount of scenes are basically small sprite animations and there isn't much to see.
Despite all of that you still need a top notch laptop to run this tech demo as it is poorly optimised and would run like a hot potato on anything but top of the line. Likely a conscious decision for smooth animations but it means it's not for everyone.
I'd have skipped if I had known all of that.

Basically a 10 minute tech-demo, nothing more.
Don't get me wrong the female character models look amazing and the h-scenes are top notch, but that is all and it doesn't look like this is going to change soon