did you add some girls from char-uploader from hf or this one?
if so, the jpg files may be corrupt, make sure you check each and every file by adding them to the right folder.
if i download a new char, i try it out by checking the list of girls in the game. if the list is empty, the file is corrupt, you have to delete the file then.
this happend to me a few time with chars from the hf char-upload-thread: e.g. fetch.jpg files, those never work...
I always turn on ignore mode in AA2, and playing in harem mode is very difficult without it.
But still, in HS even if it's one girl, I'm still a bit irritated when she forces me to H.
I hope illusion adds a ignore mode :)
did you add some girls from char-uploader from hf or this one?
if so, the jpg files may be corrupt, make sure you check each and every file by adding them to the right folder.
if i download a new char, i try it out by checking the list of girls in the game. if the list is empty, the file is corrupt, you have to delete the file then.
this happend to me a few time with chars from the hf char-upload-thread: e.g. fetch.jpg files, those never work...
Out of curiosity, do the colors on the bar next to H-positions mean anything, and if so, what? I get the feeling they do have something to do with certain feelings she can have towards you, but I'm not positive. I know the wiki mentions blue/black being positions she won't like, but don't know much about anything else.
Out of curiosity, do the colors on the bar next to H-positions mean anything, and if so, what? I get the feeling they do have something to do with certain feelings she can have towards you, but I'm not positive. I know the wiki mentions blue/black being positions she won't like, but don't know much about anything else.
Yellow bars = Love
Red bars = Horny
Blue bars = Hate
Purple bars = Slave
Black Bars = Mind rape
Every position's bars change depending on the character's traits, and if you use a certain position too much it will be counted in the end as points that affect the character's feelings.
For example if I use the Missionary (60% Yellow, 40% Red) position a lot, in the end both of these feelings (Love, Horny) will be raised significantly.
Yellow bars = Love
Red bars = Horny
Blue bars = Hate
Purple bars = Slave
Black Bars = Mind rape
Every position's bars change depending on the character's traits, and if you use a certain position too much it will be counted in the end as points that affect the character's feelings.
For example if I use the Missionary (60% Yellow, 40% Red) position a lot, in the end both of these feelings (Love, Horny) will be raised significantly.
Well... After playing a few hours with the game, I can say I'm rather happy with what they did. It's far from being a killer-game, but it's also far from being bad. In fact, I could say it's awesomely average.
To me, it feels like it was made from the left-over features from their previous games, that they "finished" and released with Honey Select :
The "event-driven sandbox with plenty of girls in a hotel" theme, with the ability to go find girls in their room and pick them up for a fuck or witness various events, seems like something that comes straight out of SBPR. The fact that those two games use the same chara-maker and share most of the girls personalities further emphasise this similarity.
The "training sim" part, with the girl status changing depending on what you did to her is definitely a feature that should have made it into Play Club. When they announced that title, they claimed it would be a game starring a "secret training club", but instead of having to actually train and break the girls via your actions, all the progression was driven exclusively by the story. In this aspect, Honey Select basically feels like a fixed and extended version of Play Club.
Since this game has taken the slot from another episode of the Play Series in Illusion release schedule, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the team behind HS is the one that usually works on that infamously rapey franchise. They took their previous game, ported it on Unity 5, implemented the character builder from SBPR, stole a few ideas here and there to tie everything together, and voilà : Honey Select was born.
Amongst those stolen ideas, and the new ones, there's a few things that I like. But the issue is that they didn't get rid of some of their bad habits, and also kept a lot of pretty crappy stuff from older games, making the end result some kind of a mixed bag. Here's a bullet point review :
Gameplay :
I'm really happy that they brought back a bit of gameplay in the sex scenes : all the dirty things you do to those girls now have a purpose and an impact on them and your relationship. There even are achievements, as well as a couple costumes and options to unlock. I can't even remember what was the last game from Illusion where you had this kind of feature...
I'm also glad that they included an "exhausted" variation of most of the positions. This is something that you could find in Wake Ari!, back in 2011, and that they never used again until now. It adds a nice touch to the overall pace of the H sessions.
Now, it's still really shallow to say the least. There's a couple good sides to this lack of depth : the gameplay doesn't get in the way of your fapping compared to more demanding games like @Homemate or Love Girls and you don't have to grind for points for hours to unlock all the goodies like you would in a Custom Maid 3D title. But in the end, this blandness seriously limits replayability in the long run : after unlocking the few achievements, the only thing left to do is to watch and fap (except if you like breaking and "healing" back the girls repeatedly).
I wish they could have added a few other unobtrusive gameplay elements, like an ahegao mode, and made it so some of the perks are only available through gameplay instead of having to toggle a switch (like making her squirt only if she cums in a position she loves, or having to make her come from light foreplay to get rid of her "exhausted state").
I also wish they could understand how girls work to make the game a little bit more realistic : a lot of ladies don't have "one-shot" orgasms like men (no refractory period) and thus can chain-cum for as long as their excitement doesn't drop below the plateau level. It would make the game much funnier if you could make the girl come over and over without the animation forcibly ending (which would make some real nice ahegao mode, by the way). The goal would then be to make her climax the maximum amount of times before you cum (and thus we can get rid of that shitty "click-to-cum" mechanics).
The other issue I have with HS gameplay is that almost all the positions are unlocked from the start. I'm rather extreme as a guy, but when I meet a girl for the first time, I use my tongue and fingers first : I don't go ball-deep in her stinky hole 10 seconds tops after she said "hajimemashite-yoroshiku-nice-to-meet-you". That's not gentlemanly.
To make it worse, the "colour code" of the positions doesn't make any sense : why would a girl that loves anal hate me for screwing her ass ? And why don't those colours change when our relationship evolves ? And why two positions that are almost the same trigger two radically different outcomes ? It feels so random.
They could have made it so all the positions start as "blue" or "purple" ones, and progressively turn to "yellow" and "red" after you take the time to properly kiss her and have some preliminary action. Bang the girl like a dork straight from the start if you want to make her hate you or turn her into your slave, and take the time to make love to her if you actually want her to love you and be all kinky... with the risk of making her run away if you're too pushy, or to break her in the process.
Models and Customisation :
There's not much to say about the female models : they're pretty great.
As far as I'm concerned, there only is a single thing that need to be fixed : the neck. They should not separate the head from the torso in the middle of it, but much higher, to prevent that ugly "break" that you face when the sizes for the upper-body and the head are too distant. It makes it look like the girl have some kind of Adam's apple double-chin thingy on the front of their neck.
The feet also needs some more love. The toe feels really weird to me : they're way too far apart, and aren't "plump" enough. Adding a little bit more details in this area would be nice. They could also rework the hands a bit by the way : they're not ugly, but not that well-made either.
Concerning customisation, it would have been great if they didn't simply copy-and-paste the options from SBPR, but actually improve them : it's a bit sad that there's nothing new in this game.
I, for example, would kill for a proper leg-to-torso ratio slider. Being able to make long-legged bimbos as well as lengthening the torso of loli characters would be a blast. After being able to change the character size, I believe this is the next big improvement that needs to be done.
I would also like to have a little more control over various things, like being able to independently scale bones in the front and back of characters (especially around the torso), so that I can tweak the bending of my girls and give their back spine a little bit more curvature. Add feet and hand size on top of that and it would be perfect.
More options in hairstyles would be great, too. There's not enough hair models in this game, and a lot of them are not really attractive. I also miss the ability that we had in some previous games to lengthen the strands or to mirror/flip them horizontally.
And the same goes for clothing. There's not enough lingerie for an adult game. Gimme more stockings and garter-belts. And I want some real garter, not a decal with no depth stuck on the girl mesh. And shoes with some actual heels, goddamnit. It's also a shame that most of the outfit are just recolours of the same models : all of those duplicates should be remade into single, recolourable and retexturable items.
Animations and Physics :
The animations are plentiful, and they're rather nice. A lot of the positions are actually curve-driven blendings of multiple animations, giving a bit of variation to them so that they don't feel too repetitive when they loop.
And as usual, the issue is in the transitions between those positions : they just "jump" to the next set of animations without blending them properly. Which is a bit of a shame because while they were developing this game, another team at Illusion was working on Secrossphere and did those transitions (almost) right. I wish they had a little bit more communication between teams, and that they were a little bit more "agile", so that any progression made by a team can proliferate to all the games currently in development.
Another usual issue is clipping. And there's a lot of it, here. Some of the animations feel like the guy is not properly in sync, or that his movements are not properly "calibrated" to the girl custom model, resulting in his hand digging in her legs when he should be holding them, or him fondling the inside of her breasts. Don't they habitually use IK to solve that kind of issue ? I feel like there's much more clipping than usual in this game.
Even worse is the clipping from "physical assets". The clothes are especially bad, and I now tend to avoid using dress simply because I know my girls legs are going to poke through the fabric. Pretty awful. To top it off, most of those dress seems like they were made for girls with gigantic buttocks, and thus magically "float" a few centimetres away from the skin of their butt. Before going down and clipping on themselves (no self-collision enabled) and through the girl. Awful, again, especially since it simply ruins some of the dress that are otherwise magnificent (like the oiran one or the mini-skirt miko outfit).
When it comes to hair, they solved the clipping by... rigging and animating them instead of making them physics-enabled. So behold : ponytails floating horizontally are now a thing. But they still went with physics for side-hairs (consistency much)... so they properly respond to gravity, but not to collision, and thus clip through the girls cheeks.
Now, at long last, they started implementing some particle-based fluids. This allow them to bring back cool things like the mythical "spit or swallow" dilemma and the classic nakadashi leakage, as well as a nice dose of rainy bukkake action.
And those particles actually collides with the body, contrary to the clothes. Except that the collision volumes don't account for the customisation made to the model : cum drops magically levitate over the clothes of slim girls, while it sink though the skin of plump ones... It's their first time doing it, so it's excusable, but I hope they'll improve.
Lighting and Materials :
Sadly, the guys at Illusion don't understand how lighting works. Thanks God they're using Unity : it still looks good even with all the poor design choice they made.
They have no clue how to use lights to set a scene and a mood. They use an ambient light that is way too bright where they should use multiple point lights. They use an ominous directional light source that don't properly cast shadows and shouldn't have his place in most indoor scenes. It simply smashes and flattens everything.
And to add insult to injury, they don't even maintain proper control of the composition. If you want to let your player tweak the light, you build proper tools like a night/day slider that keeps the direction and colour temperature of your main directional light in coherent and realistic ranges, as well as switches to toggle indoor point lights... But you DO NOT let your user take full control of parameters that are going to be wrong in 99% of the cases.
And you certainly DO NOT attach the main light to the camera like they did : it is NOT a fucking flashlight. This is trick that can be used in the Studio, since posers virtually makes you into a porn producer, but it doesn't have its place in the main game.
From a technical point-of-view, it's even worse : they're mixing static pre-baked lighting with low-resolution lightmaps with high-quality dynamic lights, they have some static meshes that don't cast shadows properly, characters that don't receive the pre-baked lighing from the environment... In an engine that support global illumination out-of-the-box and can handle a couple dozen dynamic lights without any hiccups (in deferred rendering mode with boosted pixel light count), it's a real shame.
And it doesn't stop here : materials and shaders are far from being top-notch, too. They improved a lot, but are still subpar, even by indie standards. And once again, most of the improvements are mostly due to the updates made to Unity (4.x > 5 .x).
So we have materials that use the metallic value of the PBR shader to simulate shininess, resulting in really weird "gold skin" effects sometimes, that is especially bad on characters. Some textures show ugly compression artefacts, some lack resolution, some are way too stretched due to poorly-made UVs.
And of course, the infamous disco genitals are back with a vengeance : glittering like hell, spinning like mad. The mosaics they use are atrocious compared to what you can find in other titles (except those from KISS), and I really feel sorry for all the poor souls who will be playing the censored version of the game... and even worse for the brave modders who will have to fix that crap.
Finally, they use a lot of post-treatments shaders on top of all of this to hide the discrepancies, resulting in a blurry, bloomy mess in brightly illuminated set-ups. But if you turn them off, the scene suddenly feels flat and lifeless. So, in order to have a game that looks good, you have to tweak every setting... or to use third-party tools like your GPU control panel and ReShade.
User Interface and Experience :
Illusion games have never been known for their light and usable UI, and HS doesn't change the status quo : it's bad and cluttered.
It's especially bad during H-sessions : there are too many UI elements cluttering the screen space and hiding parts of the scene. You can toggle some of them to make them disappear, but they didn't give us an option to hide everything with a key press like you could in Play Club.
Too bad they didn't have a look at what their co-workers were doing in the meantime with Secrossphere and copied the sleek, unobtrusive UI they were designing. It was really well-made, with those widgets that gracefully disappear when I don't need them, only to slide back in when I mouse over the corners of my screen.
The controls are also pretty crappy in the sex scenes, especially when we enjoyed some new funny mechanics in the previously mentioned game. It was one of the only nice features in Secrossphere : you could control the scene with a single hand, either using your keyboard or using your mouse, while keeping the other one in a warm place. I really wish we'll see this kind of improvement again in the future and it's really sad it didn't make it into Honey Select.
Speaking about it, the user experience is mind-bogglingly bad overall : way too much clicks and confirmation pop-ups to perform anything. A good experience would be to double-click to load something, but Illusion prefers you to click to select, click the load button, and then click the confirmation pop-up that appeared (just in case you performed the two formers actions by mistake, hey). It's gratuitously and overly complicated.
The worst offender is the character-maker : the layout is delirious, the usage is tedious. Why no 3D gizmos when editing accessory positions ? Why no keyboard controls to scroll through parameters ? Why not also saving gloss colour and shine intensity when creating custom presets ? It didn't improve one bit over last year.
This is one of the reason I don't even want to fire the Studio : if it's already this bad in the main game, I can't imagine the hassle you have to face to set up a proper scene in their poser. It must rob you of your sanity faster than a story from Shindol.
I wanted to make a quick bullet-list but kept adding stuff and ended up with a wall-of-text... So I put everything behind a spoiler. Read it if you want full details, but take care : I didn't proof-read.
TL;DR :
It's great to have a bit of gameplay in the H-session, but the lack of depth dampens the replayability. The absence of coherence in the "colour code" of the positions and the girls mood and preferences is really sad.
The models are nice, except for that neck that breaks. Having more customisation options, especially when it comes to clothes and hair would be nice though. We want heels, we want lingerie, we want hair strands that can be scaled.
Animations are great, even if they transition badly. But the physics and clipping issues are pretty bad in this title, once again. Kudos for the new fluids implementation, though, even if it's still rough around the edges.
Lighting and materials are subpar, period. Most of the improvements are due to the use of an updated version of Unity.
Terrible UI and UX, especially compared to Secrossphere. Seriously, playing this game feels like fighting against rogue menus that want to rape your eyes and kill your sanity.
So, a really average game, in the end, without any substantial innovations nor improvements over the previous titles, except for little bit of extra gameplay, the new semen physics and the switch to Unity 5 with its updated rendering engine.
Lolz I wouldn't hold my breath on that but I noticed a pattern they release two "real-style" game and one "anime-style" game. I may be wrong but let's see. New update is mostly fixes and/or an upgrade and one or two clothes (depends). Expect weekly patches for now on. Wonder how many they will release this time.
No need to speculate, Illusion did provide an update schedule and you can retrieve it by looking at the 08/26 and the 09/02 updates in the "Pre-Release Update History" I included in the OP. Or you can also check this post.
We know that at least two new costumes will be released in the upcoming weeks : the ones that won in the summer poll. The goth-loli outfit shall be released this Friday and the nun / sister habit will come next week.
We also know that they're working on Vive support, since they talked about it in their blog, so you can expect some updates to the VR patches. Depending on the SDK they're using, it may even supports the Oculus Touch that shall be released shortly (if they don't mess up again).
Other than that, there sure will be some various fixes to the game and studio, but do not expect any new big feature, like improved IK and item attachments in the Studio. The biggest thing you can look for is the addition of a "Free H Mode" in the game, since it was teased in some of the UI assets if I recall correctly. New hair may also be released : those are pretty easy and cheap to produce, especially since they already have them in their asset catalog.
Apart from all that, I don't believe you should expect anything else when it comes to new content. If they planned on adding things like new maps, new animations or new clothes, they would already have announced it.
Now, if there is anything big in their pipeline, like new content, new features or some improvements to the Studio, we won't know before at least mid-October. Simply because they won't ship those cool new things for free : if they have new toys for us, they will sell them as an expansion like they did with Play Club.
By the way, since it seems to be the same team behind those two games, and since Honey Select seems to have pretty good sales (first place on Amazon.co.jp and in Getchu's top 5), there is quite a lot of chances to have a future expansion pack for this title. And I certainly hope so : I like that game, even if I was pretty harsh when reviewing it.
I hope for them to make a more noob friendly Studio, as I'm struggling using the provided one...
Talking about VR, did anyone try it using the Rift or the Vive? If so, how is it? Also, can you use it in the Studio? I like to play the perfect peeping tom and explore the shared scenes I find interesting, so VR support would be awesome I guess ^^.
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Hello, I made a request a month and half ago for reuploading the game: [160226] [Rave'N ] 牝贄狩 淫虐のアーケード街 (thank you for that!)
But during the extraction from the zip folders, extraction fails, stating that it needs ''GAME-879392.part4'', but I only have up to part3, and the re-upload did not include a part 4. Is there a way to fix that?