Pretty much every location you go to contains consequences for failure so bad that you might as well restart the game or at least just reload a save. There's no enjoyment to be had from failure due to the intense consequence of ever failing in even the smallest way. Just be careful not to press F5 when you meant to press F9, like I did, because you can in fact quicksave when you are already DEAD!
The main issue is that the main attraction is obviously the lewd content, but they did not make the lewd content interactive in any significant way (most of it is just ten second loops, some of it gives you a button to bring things to completion), you don't even really have control over what angles to view despite it being 3D generated, so actually playing the game is in no way better than just watching a video of the scenes. The rest of the game just doesn't stand on its own. There's an average shoot'em'up which compares badly to any competently designed survivor game, a mediocre tactics game, and a lot of dialogue which you have to wait several seconds before you can skip to the next dialogue. There are zero choices in dialogue, outside of the story you can choose to talk about things with characters or not but it doesn't change anything, and no story branching, which makes it rather limited as a visual novel. They should have focused on making the main attraction interactive in a way that only a game can be, instead of just making them non-interactive carrots on a stick to reward trudging through the uninspired gameplay.
- No UI scaling. Looks really crunchy at default resolution but the interface is tiny at 4K. - Little to no autosaving. When the game crashes (which it does fairly often) you will be reset back to your last manual save. It doesn't save when you change between generations, not even sure if it saves when you evolve to the next stage. - Quite grindy and mindless gameplay, clumsy controls
I played the heck out of this game back in the day, it was my favorite 4X for a long time, but this version doesn't do it justice on modern systems. I'm hearing of a lot of technical glitches with newer hardware and operating systems, and personally for me (running it in Windows 10 with an Intel 7700K CPU) the lovely movies that play when you complete a secret project or a number of other things always start hitching and break after a couple seconds.
It's quite an interesting thing to see but a lot of the game is designed to waste your time in punishing ways. For instance there's a jukebox that opens up a kind of gauntlet you pay to get into, introduced midway through the game. Go in there and you have to clear four areas under a time limit. Each area has its own obscure game mechanics that mostly haven't been encountered previous and aren't explained. Take to long on the first couple of islands and you simply won't have time to complete the other two, it will be impossible, but the game will let you flail at it regardless then boot you out when the time is up with zero reward. This is just one example but this poorly considered game design permeates through the whole experience.
They locked frame generation behind having a 4000 series GTX card, and they locked DLSS Ray Reconstruction behind frame generation, so if you have a 3080 Ti that you paid 1,200$ for last year like me, well you're just screwed, the game will run bad and look bad. Come back when you want to spend another 1,400$ on your PC, loser!
