Java - CosmoBreeder [v0.3.9] [harmarist]

Review of V0.3.9

Cosmobreeder Yiffai is a NES-Styled metroidvania about a totally not Fox McCloud character called Yiffai (or yiffany if you decide to play as his sister) Going off to save Cosmobreeder's top agents from certain doom.
The game takes from metroidvanias such as hollow knight and Metroid (obviously). In fact it's so inspired by these games, The game is 8Bit (besides cutscenes), Has A CRT TV Filter (which you can disable If you want) And all the NES/SNES Features Such as 3 Save slots, A manual name input slot (where you have to pick letter by letter), Cheat codes (which you unlock by dying or failing) and pixel art (seriously it's fucking good).
Now, The porn content isn't nearly as non-con-ey as other 2d platformers, but it's still there for those with an Irk for it. You willingly fuck bosses, are always naked (Yiffany wears a jacket though i guess, but Yiffai is just dick swingingly naked with a scarf) and only recently has a "debrief" been added, which are post defeat scenes which are 99% of the time also willingly.
Some other neat things are there's a shop where you can get info and health items from, but strangely enough it takes an element from metal gear. It has an indepth codec screen, with manual channel switching and several different characters on the other end.

Genuinely really fun and gorgeous. Plus every sex scene, cutscene, Dialogue and sprite changes to reflect the character Yiffany is a lot more experienced and talks about her past missions, where as yiffai is brand new and gets more handholding.
I believe all of the enemies are Male, as there's no female on female but there is F/M and M/M I thought that was worth noting.
There's no combat sex (something I really like in these types of games) But this one is so well made I genuinely don't have a problem with it.

8/10, Can't wait till it goes 1.0

Version 0.3.0b

A metroidvania with a very cute artstyle and a simple premice easy to grasp. The blend between old-school pixel art and cartoonish handdrawn art is really well executed, and the story, while unoriginal, is a nice callback to the old metroid and megaman games (although it is strange pregnancy is not much shown here given the context of the X-scenes). The entire game is built as a love letter adressed towards those games, with all their gameplay mechanics, but also their weaknesses.

While the art, story and core gameplay are worthy of those 3 stars, the rest of the game is not. As I said, the game is heavily inspired from old-school metroid and megaman games, and strangely the devs have decided to also implemented the questionable design decisions of that time that have been left in the dust by their creators, and for good reason. The controls are simple but intentionally janky, with the default attack having stupidly short range and long wind-up animation before actually hitting the enemies, the wall-jump (necessary to progress through the level) doesn't work 95% of the time, and the string of inputs you have to do each time you receive a call on your radio to progress the storyline is excessive and annoying.

The pacing is really badly handled. At the start of the game you are bombared with radio calls to indicate you what to do and where to go, and while it is nice the devs tried to implement a tutorial level, going into the radio sub-menu and calling each member individually is tedious and a process repeated at each new room of the first level that completely breaks the pacing of the game. Later on it gets better, as the game lets you explore and figure out more stuff by yourself, but at the beginning it is overdone.

The level design is confusing. First off, although some tiles marked on the map are tagged to indicate you the most important ones, none of them are color-coded to indicate you in what region of the map you are or what type of room you are in. Unless you remember which way you come from, it is very easy to get lost and to forget which room has the important roadblock you have to come back to once you get the next upgrade. You either remember what tile is important, or you don't and you have to re-explore every key room, with a lowered healthbar, limited items, and enemies that respawn every time you load a room.

Speaking of the difficulty, I must admit that while the game isn't as terrible as other people might say (I've played way worse designed and more difficult porn games than this one, I've developed a ton of patience for that kind of game), I do have to admit many aspects of the game were badly thought out and were very obviously thrown into the game because "the old games did it so we have to do it too otherwise this isn't a faithful inspiration". All the enemies are much faster and more mobile than you, and their attacks are not telgraphed at all except for the bosses; it is very easy to receive a cheap shot even when you just want to travel the room and avoid as many obstacles as possible. Due to the controls being quite janky, it is extremely hard to avoid any kind of attack, even when you know their patterns and go out of your way to dodge as many as you can.

But the thing that prevents me from enjoying this game as much as I could, is that the game is deliberately unfair. It is not a complex game, or even a very difficult one if it wasn't for that unfair factor, and I know the most hardcore fans will call bullshit on my point, but there are way too many instances where even if you play perfectly, you will run into an enemy that is perfectly timed to hit you right as you try to do the very specific thing the level tells you to do at that moment. You want to climb up a ladder ? Bam, hit by a drone that just started its pattern. You want to kill that wyvern before it hits you ? If you're not fast enough, it will hit you before just right before your final hit, and you can't dodge its attack, because of course you can't. You want to traverse this series of platforms suspended over lava ? Too bad, there are fireballs flying in waves around you that are way too fast to dodge. You do gain an enormous healthbar are you progress through the game, but there are many cheap shots like that designed to chip away at your health as often as possible, which makes backtracking more often than not, not only a waste of time but also resources, as items are scarce and sometimes hard to find, as many of them are hidden in the level and you have to guess where they're hidden.

All in all, I really, really want to recommend this game, but I feel this game's entire point is to waste my time. The gameplay isn't engaging enough to make me go through tons of identical rooms and endless waves of enemies with poorly telegraphed attacks and confusing level layout. It really doesn't help that this game overuses the color yellow in every level, which not only makes your character hard to track, it's also a pain to look at after a few minutes. This game can become something great, if the devs decide to sit down for a moment and let go of the bad game design decisions the rest of the industry has abandoned decades ago for a very good reason.

I'm not even in to furry stuff, but, I mean, damn. This game is a thing of beauty.
Its got a bit of jank to it for sure, and even getting it to run properly can be a bit of a pain, but once you get things going, things flow beautifully. This release (v0.3.0) is the first time I actually got it working despite my hassle.

Now, I get some general complaints about the game. Its a classic metroidvania, with all that that entails, such as, but not limited to, things being poorly explained, getting lost, janky hitboxes, stringent resource management, having to save at save points, and a level of real difficulty not generally found in lewd games. If you're like me, and none of that bothers you, this is a legitimately good game that I would highly recommend solely on the merits of its gameplay and aesthetic design alone. Speaking of aesthetics, the game wonderfully emulates a CRT display in the most charming of ways. You can turn it off, but if you ask me, the game looks far better with the classic vibe. The whole thing reminds me a lot of something like Midnight Castle Succubus.

Oh, and I guess I should actually mention the lewd bits. They are... good, I guess? They are certainly good enough to get off to, once you've got everything in the gallery, but they're few and far enough between the real draw, the gameplay, to be a remotely effective wank. Again, not a furry myself, but I can see the appeal of these kinda cutesy furballs.

Even in its current unfinished state, its an easy 5/5 from me. And it can only get better as development goes on.

A decent foundation altogether, but its faithfulness to old-school 8-bit metroidvanias may cause a good deal of headache for someone not experienced with them.

Harmarist is pretty infamous for his art of... let's say "petite" characters, but his style and overall level of quality is undeniable. CosmoBreeder is, in part, a sort of attempt to break outside of that very specific subsection of the furry community and work towards a (comparatively) more general audience. In that respect, it's a bit mixed: while it's filled with very appealing pixel artwork, and what few extants NSFW nuggets being here are well made, the core game itself isn't what I would call "accessible".

This game teeters on the edge of being a 4/5 for me, but mechanically the game is unrepentantly janky and on the difficult side, a very frustrating combo which makes it hard for me to rate it higher. The hitboxes tend to be unintuitive, the attack patterns aren't very clear (though only in a few cases feeling as if the game is being genuinely unfair, like the tiger enemies that show up a bit of the way through), and the keyboard control scheme is frankly abysmal; a controller is strongly recommended for playing this game. As for the bosses, I've only gotten as far as defeating both phases of the kobold boss, and outside of a couple deaths to RNG falling rocks for the second encounter, it was relatively straightforward.

Ultimately, I'm giving this game a very begrudging 3/5; as much as I want to give it a 4, I'm frankly too bad at it to enjoy it fully. If you're better at these games than I am, you might enjoy it a lot more, but if old-school D-pad platformers aren't your regular cup of tea, prepare yourself for a stiff learning curve.

the game so far has been one of my favorite games on this site.
the art is so charming with it's quality pixel art.
the platforming feels great with it's retro metroidvania feel.

only complains is that I was stuck at the title screen for the longest time until I plugged in a controller cause this game for some reason doesn't have space, escape, or enter as the "start" button.

Version 0.2.7b at time of review.

Majority of comments and people complaining about the difficulty but its perfectly inline with most older metroidvania style games.

Speaking personally I grew up on older games so my definition of 'hard' is a lot different than most people, maybe an easier difficulty can be added for people that want less of a challenge.

It's great that you can choose male/female based character for different peoples tastes. Good pixel art, the scenes and interactions are nice too.

You're rewarded for exploration by finding secrets and unlocking upgrades and extra scenes.

The biggest issue being that there is no information within the game itself on how to change controls or even what they're mapped to (menu is opened by pressing . and / keys together). Should be some kind of menu in there before you start. Once you change those settings its perfectly fine.

Also at least early on in the game constantly having to go to communication menu to get extra info or talk to the other characters happens a bit too frequently.

Looking forward to further development on this, some people mentioned that the dev has abandoned other games

I dont like to make reviews of too early games but its already 0.27v so i guess its enough.
I think there has been some good quality efforts and good work behind the game but the gameplay is... horrible:

The first shot goes just at the start, in the main menu, you dont know the key to press to accept or move between options. Instead of using the common "press enter", they used the god damn right shift! i had to read the thread in order to play the game. Then, if that is no enough, you have click in "enter name" and then in the new save name you have created. Cant they make it like others games just clicking "new game" and insert your name? They wanted original i guess.

All of this bullshit just to be able to start a new game. Instead of using intuitive mechanics or at least explaining them, they did this abomination. Im pretty sure there will be a lot of people who will quit the game before even start.

Then the game itself is... just annoy, weird hitboxes, boring combat, your attack is a joke (you literally just throw a ball one step forward you). I dont mind hard games, i even like them but you need to balance them right or it will be the opposite of fun.

The quality of a game is no just about having 1000 pics, a lot of gameplay options or nice story. Its also about good designs, you cant make a save point 10000km away from the boss (Its an example, no the case of this game) and the design of this game is simply and sadly, trash! actually after the first boss, you dont have a way to heal or to save so you may die and repeat all over again! for real?? In most of the games you have healing or a save point, this is something no really hard to understand! And i could go on giving more examples...

I stopped playing after i reached the second boss which is literally a copy-paste from the first one but with some things falling from the sky. Also the art looks good but to get them seems no easy, in fact, im no even sure how, i only got one scene after first boss.

I guess there will be people who can like this game if they have a lot of free time, also the game appeal to some niche public, try it out if you are one of them but that does no mean the game is remotely good. 2 stars because at least i can see they put effort in art and sound.