Recent reviews by Emerald Unicorn

7/10

As someone who pre-ordered the special edition back on the 360 and still has that copy, and who got every achievement, I can say that this is a fun game. But unlike what seems to be the popular opinion New Vegas was my least favorite one between it's prequel and sequel. 3 > 4 > NV is my ranking (haven't tried 76). At this point it's been long enough since I actually played 3 and NV that I can't recall the minute differences in mechanics that may have led to that preference... but what I definitely remember is that the setting of NV just didn't match my own vibe. Too much desert and I'm not at all interested in the casino/Vegas theme. Once I was inside some other location I had fun, but the overworld exploration felt like a bit of a chore.

All that said... I don't think it was worth what I paid for the special edition pre-order, but for the price it goes for these days on Steam it's definitely worth picking up if you like these Bethesda style games (I know Obsidian made this one... might be part of why I don't like it as much as the ones made by Bethesda? They also made KOTOR II and I preferred the first KOTOR).

I'd give this a true neutral rating if I could. I can see where some would enjoy it, and I did at first, but I quickly realized how ridiculously perfect you have to play. Some people might enjoy the time it takes to figure it out, but people like myself want some freedom in how we go about raising this girl and not get railroaded into specific choices.

It reminds me of the movie Edge of Tomorrow, but with about 1000x more ways to die. And it also reminds me of the bit by the comedian Brian Regan on the "I Before E Rule", specifically the last bit about always being wrong.
"“I" before "E" except after "C" and when sounding like "A" as in neighbor and weigh, and on weekends and holidays and all throughout May, and YOU'LL ALWAYS BE WRONG NO MATTER WHAT YOU SAY!!!!”

I want a game where winning feels achievable. But this game feels more like it's about just not losing as quickly, because you WILL lose.

I paid under $8 for this. For that price I'll rate this a solid 8/10.
It's the perfect game for keeping me occupied just to pass the time. It's engaging, and gets me thinking about my builds.
But currently I feel like it's a little shallow in the upgrades dept. I wish you could stack up on the base mods, needing to take the rank 1 again even if you just want to stack up on a rank 2, and needing to max it at rank 3 before rank 1 would be an option again.
Basically, it seems deeper at a glance than it actually is. And it's still really fun for that. Just not as much freedom of choice as I'd like.

Solid 8/10. I know I have over 100 hours in (as a solo player on a private world) but I'm not sure how satisfied I would've been paying full price for this... If you already know this game is your kind of game, and/or you have friends to go in with you, full price can be worth it. If you're hesitant then a sale is definitely worth it (I kept coming back to the store page for weeks before a sale happened lol). If you're looking for input on the PvP server aspect I can't help you out there. I had no interest as it just doesn't offer what I was looking for, which was a casual-ish progression, and it seems that the PvP stuff you can be raided while offline (I think?) and lose your castle and stash of stuff, just setting you back for being offline. Even if it's only when you're online, I didn't want to have to worry about being set back in that way.

If you're considering buying this game, be aware that this game can be a grind. It is by default. There is a lot of resource gathering and crafting involved to get/maintain gear and status effects. This can be mitigated on your own server by adjusting settings (possible to change later, but a bit of a hassle). it seems there's a slider for just about any setting you could want to change. Playing on my own server the only things I adjusted was the blood drain rate and refining/crafting time (I think I set mine to 5x speed and some of the bigger items still took 2-3 minutes). But I kept all combat related stuff the same, and resources required and quantity/speed gathering the same.

All that said, the sense of progression in this game is very good. Lots of things to distract you with, like getting 100% blood quality prisoners/servants. Then upgrading their gear as well. The way you unlock powers by defeating bosses is very rewarding. Building/upgrading your castle.

At first I was nervous about how simple the combat was, but upgrading weapons a few tiers unlocks 2 special moves for each type of weapon. And the spells seemed rather basic. But by the end you can get/grind for weapons that specially modify your first weapon ability and has bonus stats that can totally get you rethinking your whole build. At first I just used whatever spells I thought were most powerful. Then I started getting ones that paired well together within an element even though I wouldn't have used either one individually. Then you start getting gems that can modify spells more and create even more unique interactions with a build type.

I was also worried about how out of dozens of spells you could only have 2 on your bar at a time. But it really adds a nice depth to the game by having you ponder which combos you want to work with. By the end I had two different combinations of spells for just exploring/farming, and then each boss near the end required me to explore different combos due to their unique challenges. Some require more AoE for adds that they spawn, some require more mobility, some you just need to be able to tank the damage, sometimes you need something that will spawn friendly skeletons to distract them. So much variety required for only having two active primary spells (and then an ultimate).

Be prepared to die. This is basically an ARPG souls-like game at times. It was common for me to die at least once learning a boss. Sometimes as many as 4 or 5 times. The final boss took me, no lie, at least 20 attempts. I can't remember the last time I actually let out a very loud cheer when I finally accomplished something.

Which brings me to the current downside of being a solo-PvE player. As soon as I beat the boss it hit, hard, that I had nothing really left to do in the game. It just kinda ended for me. Yeah, you can keep playing and grinding for better weapon stat rolls, and spell gem rolls, and finding high blood quality NPCs to make prisoners/servants... but seeing as I was already strong enough to beat the game I can't see much point in that. It was super fun doing that grind when I needed it in order to beat the next boss...

So now I guess I just wait for updates. Maybe I'll see if I can get a friend to get the game so we can start together.

I enjoyed the 20 hours I got out of this game. But I don't think it's worth the current price of $25. I got it half off and for that I'm satisfied. Perhaps in the future with more updates and once it's out of Early Access it'd be worth the full price.

The thing is, I WANT to play more but I feel like I've quickly come up to a barrier point. There's a limited "tech" path that limits just how much you can get done in a day with the current tech, and I feel like I just finally got started with the ranching aspect. Honestly, I got most of my time played from the early grind with having to go out and hunt wild animals to sell their meat to start buying ranch equipment and animals.

But now that I've got my ranch up and running with pigs and cows they can quickly breed out of control if you don't stay on top of culling nearly every day. Even with game time set to the slowest passing of time it still takes me the better part of the day to kill and fully process one pig because the current best equipment you can buy only processes one piece of meat at a time and a single fully grown pig gives 26 pieces. I'd like to see more automation and better storage optimization. You have to lug around a cooler with you that can only hold 12 pieces of meat. Some kind of automatic collector of meat if you kill an animal in a certain structure that adds the meat to the farm inventory, and then being able to queue up many pieces for a machine to process and streamline the steps (grinder, to sausage stuffer, to dry aging or boiling). Just so you don't have to spend as much time micromanaging each individual piece of meat.

Similar with cow milk (haven't tried goat milk yet) where you can milk each cow 2x per day and they give 7L of milk, but the biggest container is 42L, So if you have 3 cows you'll fill a container each day, and ideally I'd want to expand to having more cows.

Bottom line, the barrier to production happens quickly once you finally start ranching. So I think I'm done playing until after more updates happen, hopefully adding more automation and streamlining of processes. Maybe also a way to snap/lock logs and planks into the bed of a truck or trailer so you don't have to spend as much time manually placing them down and aligning them to move back to the storage area when you're out clearing trees.

But in the end, if you want a decent 15 hours of gameplay solo, maybe more with co-op being able to divvy up workloads, and you can find this at 50% off, I'd say it's currently a 7/10. Giving it a thumbs up because I'm optimistic about the future of the game and the dev seems properly invested in improving things from the interactions I've seen with them.

I've been surprised at just how good the "main story" is and how well integrated it is with the sex side of things. A magical setting helps for sure. Demons aren't typically a thing I'm into for this kind of stuff but this story makes it interesting. Pretty good trans rep that allows the MC to be both a top and a bottom. My only critiques, really, are a lack of dialogue options to feel like you have more say in things, but there are some choices to be had. But I think that's so that the main story can be told better than having to divert attention to writing a bunch of alternate paths. Another critique is the animation. It's simple. The art is extremely well done, but the scenes aren't a fluid animation as a trade off, so I don't really count that against it. The last critique is the lack of audio. After a few minutes I tend to forget about it, but outside of the main menu and the MC snapping photos there's zero sound, not even basic music or anything. But everything else is so well done that I don't even care.

I'd call this one of the best AVNs I've tried, though I'm still new to the genre. But I've tried College Kings 1 & 2, College Bound, Fetish Locator, and Come Home. I think the College Kings were the next best, but those are too tame in content. College Bound didn't fit my personal interests with the female characters all having ridiculously large breasts and the MC talking bad about small breasts (I prefer smaller, personally). Fetish Locator was good but so short that I was able to refund it within the return window after beating it. Come Home was decent, also with decent trans rep, but was a little too empty with a lot of skipping/passing time just to get to the next event with a character.

But I just keep finding more stuff to do. I'm rarely having to pass time just to have scenes with the characters as there's almost always something to be doing with one of them. And seeing as this is free you really don't lose anything other than a bit of time if you decide it's not for you.

If you like unrealistically large breasts and lots of MILFs then you might like this game. But that's not for me. Most of the women in the game are sporting HH and bigger while your GF is the only real petite character, and the main character constantly thinks about her "small boobs" as a downside. I prefer A-C cup, ideally, though as long as things look natural then bigger is perfectly fine. But most of the women in the game just look very unnatural and catered to a specific preference for obscenely large breasts.

And aside from that my save got bugged where a random scene from a park would just keep popping up inexplicably during other scenes that crushed any remaining sense of immersion.

Yikes...

About all I can say that's positive about this game is the lighting/models. Those were actually really nice. Everything else just threw me off immediately. Opening cutscene filled with poor/choppy animations. Thought I could overlook that. But then I got into the game and the camera moved so freaking slow. Thought I might have to bump the sensitivity up, and with how slow it felt I thought I might have to raise it all the way. After finding my way to the (poorly laid out) UI for the settings I see that the sensitivity was already at max... lmao. Noped right outta there.

So bad it's good.

When I first picked up this game on the 360 I was full of hype and excitement. "The successor to TES IV: Oblivion". Well, that was very wrong... I was so disappointed that I returned my 360 copy within a few days. Really, the only problem I had was the voice acting/story. It's a complete joke. (Oh, and swimming was terrible because you move at like 1/10 your land speed. Faster to run around a lake than swim across.)

Then, years later, a friend gifted the game to me on Steam as a joke since I had often brought up the sheer stupidity of this game in conversations frequently. One day I decided just to try it again to be reminded of just how bad it was. And going in this time knowing that the story/dialogue was a joke I realized that the gameplay was actually kind of fun. I enjoyed the process of exploring the map and leveling up my stats and getting new gear/spells and becoming more wealthy. The bits where you have to talk to NPCs became something to look forward to just to make me laugh. So in the end I realized that I liked this game, and I find myself coming back to it every now and then when I just want to play something simple, yet not too simple. (Oh, and swimming still just plain sucks even with this mindset.)

Finally just finished getting every achievement for the game after about 200 hours. And I had a blast for every single hour. For a game that can technically be completed with a speedrun in less than an hour it really offers up a TON of gameplay with plenty of variety. A lot of the npc voice acting is mediocre but the actually story is pretty fun. Graphics, well... it's no modern day AAA graphics quality game, but it's still beautiful to wander around and see the views.