HuniePop

I rather liked HuniePop, and I'd like to see more dating sims like it. I'd like to call out HuniePop for knowing exactly what matters for polish and focusing their effort there. The art is fantastic; the music is solid background music. The excellent voice over really does add substantially to the experience (something I would not have suspected before playing), and the gameplay is solid – that last part being essential.

That gameplay is broken into a few parts. The "conversations" hold up alright as a sort of quiz game, and they help set the pacing for the game as a whole as well as let you get to know the characters you’re pursuing. The match three game works well as a stand in for an actual date (making a literal game of it), and I liked the direction HunniePop took with that game. Instead of swapping just two adjacent gems, you take one gem and move it as far as you want down a row or column as long as it makes a match somewhere - so if you just move it one space you swap the gems, but if you move it further they all slide down. There’s also commentary on how you’re doing, which helps keep the dating-vibe going. Once you've established rapport over several dates, the nice lady will come back to your place for some alone time. The sex mini-game was a nice change of pace, and I liked that it wasn't possible to fail once you got to that point. The dating game is slow paced and deliberative, while the sex game is faster, which I think reflects the higher level of passion well. The commentary is also notably less eloquent, as is appropriately inappropriate for the circumstances.

One of the things I liked was that the H-art didn't feel completely out of place. Its placement felt more like a natural culmination of the relationship than gratuitous titillation - it is a dating game, and I was glad the climax scenes managed to feel more like sexy date time than plain porn. (Seriously, if you just want to see dirty pictures, there are other places where you can get to them faster).

Were there things I didn't like? Sure. For one, there's not much to do with the girls after you sleep with them the first time (except doing it again), although at least you can go back and do it again while you buy the presents they want. I was also a little disappointed that you're basically pigeon-holed into being a player who is trying to sleep with all the women in town. Some of the discussion I read suggested that you can "play the way you want", which wasn't quite the way it turned out for me, so I wanted to clarify that here. I was hoping to romance just a couple of the girls, and would have liked more depth there to support that. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with delivering on the “player” experience, just that it wasn't quite what I expected. There was also a bug or two that annoyed me, but those were minor issues I found mildly annoying and didn't undermine the overall experience.

The one spot that stood out as most grating to me was the foul-mouthed side of the game. I did eventually understand its use for characterization (e.g. The uber-bitch has a mouth on her, while I don’t think the shy yoga instructor ever cursed outside the bedroom), but it was jarring to meet 2-3 characters at the very start of the game who all seemed to spew filth constantly. Maybe I shouldn't have decided the college campus was the place to go to meet girls.

Since my main complaints are that the game didn't have all the content I wanted, I feel more like I'm asking for a sequel than complaining about this game. I only paid $10 to get it from the maker’s website, and I think I got more than enough game for my money. If you like dating sims in general but get bored by constant walls of text, HuniePop might be a good fit for you. There's not much in the way of story, but I liked the characters.