Gods Of Hentai

I hope you’re sitting down for this review, because we have a lot of crap to unpack. Gods of Hentai is one of the more interesting porn game titles out there, for all the wrong reasons. There’s history, controversy, and a huge mixed bag of features that you may or may not enjoy. There’s so much to be said about this game, and I’m going to try to be very thorough.

The Steam Dream

It’s every developer’s dream these days to eventually make it to the Steam marketplace. Making a game and getting it published on this platform is one way of making sure that you’ve made it in life. It’s the largest game platform in the world, and they don’t seem to have any concerning competition. It would appear that Steam is the place to be if you want to be taken seriously.

For a porn game, getting listed on Steam is a much bigger challenge, that’s why most of them don’t even bother to try it. I’ve seen non-pornographic video games on Steam that look like someone dropped a turd into a blank Unity3D project and hit export, but when it comes to porn games, suddenly, the standards are a lot higher.

Well, back in the day, Eroge tried really hard to get Gods of Hentai on Steam, presumably hoping that it’s the best place to grow a large following for an online multiplayer game in which people play together, side by side. It wasn’t a bad idea at all. They were greenlit, and the game quickly became very popular. Thousands of people would log in every day to get their fill of online hentai goodness.

And then, the banhammer happened. You remember a few years back when Steam started removing adult video games from their platform if they contained themes of forced sex or any hint of underage fictional characters? Well, this game got killed dead by that wave, even though every character in this game is clearly an adult. I don’t just mean that they say that all characters are adult and then dump cute looking schoolgirls throughout to fuck the system. There are full-grown demon bitches and adult humans, and that’s about it. The game doesn’t have any controversial content within. Still, it didn’t matter. Steam killed it dead.

From the Ashes

It didn’t take Eroge long to realize that the Steam dream was dead. They moved the game to their own website so that people could play directly, and I’m also pretty sure that they made some effort to save their accounts so that they could pick up where they left off. I can’t confirm this, though, so don’t quote me on it. Anyways, the game is still very much alive there, and you can play it for free.

You make an account on the site, create your character, and dive right in. The game will presumably be alive for much longer, since it’s extremely popular and given that it’s absolutely riddled with micro-transactions. Oh, but the microtransactions aren’t clearly marketed within the game. No, they went the clever route of encouraging you to buy Erogecoins, which is what these large free gaming platforms do. They encourage you to buy “gold” with real money, and then you can use that gold within the game. Separating the actual transaction from the game probably makes it easier for you to spend this virtual gold, since it’s not real money. But, the money you paid to get it was real money, but you forgot about that, hopefully.

I have no problem with game developers making money through micro-transactions, to be honest, especially if the base game is free. Plus, since Steam murdered this game on their platform, the micro-transactions on Eroge are the only thing keeping it afloat. I’d rather have those than see the game die.

Too Retro?

Now that we’ve gotten the ugliness out of the way, let’s talk about the actual game and what it has to offer. I’d like to start with the art style, if you don’t mind, since that’s the part that you’ll be jacking off to. But, we’ll warm up first. Let’s cover the gameplay.

The first time you load up this game, you’ll probably feel a bit pranked. It’s entirely isometric, meaning top-down and a bit sideways. Also, all the assets are two-dimensional cutouts with no 3D what-so-ever. This isn’t technically a problem, I mean, 2D MMOs have been popular for an extremely long time. In fact, long after 3D MMOs came out, Eastern companies with titles like Conquer Online managed to dominate the market and gain a huge following.

My problem with this approach is that this game somehow manages to look much worse than Conquer Online, more than a decade later. These assets look half-assed at best. Plus, there’s so little detail that went into them that I’m wondering where the actual budget went.

Open World MMO?

The actual open world in which you can see other people isn’t actually the only part of the game. It’s probably the smallest part of what you’ll be seeing, even though it’s your main mode of getting around. You see, this game does indeed have an open world in which you can see other players, and you can even chat with them. However, once you start any kind of encounter, you are ripped away from your isometric freedom into a 2D side view of combat reminiscent of old school Nintendo games.

This is not a good thing. The side by side combat uses the same assets as before, you know, the low-quality art of you and your party? They smash against the enemies over and over again, in turns, without you inputting anything. It’s basically a crappy slideshow of a fight that could look amazing if they had bothered to animate it.

A Mixed Bag of Random

Aside from the isometric open world and the flat 2D encounters, there are two other realms of existence in this world, for some fucking reason that I do not understand. First, you’ve got the menus which are in themselves kind of a gameplay mechanic, since there’s so much you have to do within them. The actual party preparation with items and equipment is all done within menus. Core gameplay does not belong inside a menu box; it belongs within the game. But there’s so little game within this game; I’m not surprised they had to cram a ton of the gameplay inside the menu screens.

Finally, you’ve got the visual novel portions, which should technically be the best part, but at this point, they just get on my nerves. These play out like short cinematic conversations that you have with certain female characters, usually your party members. You get to choose what you’d like your character to say, but it genuinely doesn’t matter much. You get to the smut regardless.

These are drawn in yet another art style, different from all the other sections of the game, and they’re quite arousing. I found it very easy to jack off to them. My gripe is with all the garbage I had to go through to get to this point. It doesn’t make sense to me to have an MMO with so many chopped-up parts.

Plus, the whole thing is built inside Flash Player of all things, and the top of your HUD is littered with standard freemium bells and whistles that only really serve to encourage you to spend money, rather than time inside the actual game. It’s as if Eroge are straight-up showing you the door away from the gameplay, because it’s the part they’re the least proud of.

The one redeeming factor for this so-called MMO is the same thing that keeps ancient MMOs alive to this day, the community. I don’t know why or how, but this game has a vibrant community of active players that really seem to be enjoying the game.

If you were to try this game and like it, I doubt it would be because of the smut or the quality gameplay. It’s far likelier that you’d enjoy it as something you can do with your friends. It’s not a smut multiplayer game; it’s a multiplayer game that just happens to feature smut as an afterthought.

As for all the painful 2D combat and passive gameplay, well, it’s something you have to get over in order to enjoy Gods of Hentai. After all, it’s a free online porn game. The bar is set really low if you think about it. Maybe I’m wrong. Check it out for yourselves on Eroge and decide.