In the world of PC gaming, Steam is inundated with absolute trash that only fits the definition of “game” by the slimmest of margins, and relies entirely on nudity and/or sex to make a quick dollar. It looks like Nintendo has opened the floodgates for this too, and Hentai Uni is exhibit A. Hentai Uni shouldn’t exist, though, and while Nintendo should be applauded for allowing sex-themed games on the console, they should probably also look at Steam and implement some kind of quality control before it’s too late.
I enjoy games that have fan service, nudity, sex themes or outright sex in them. I’ve enjoyed plenty of this on the Nintendo Switch already, from Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, to Crawlco Block Knockers and Waifu Uncovered. I even enjoyed Hentai Vs. Evil, trashy Z-grade nonsense that it is.
But all of those games had something to them beyond the fan service and nudity. That “more” may have been secondary, but there was something there. They were clearly games, and acted as shooters, puzzlers, or whatever else. They also had production values and some effort put into their presentation. Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, for example, remains the best-looking game on Nintendo Switch. You may have only bought these games for a bit of pervy fun, but the point here is that they were, also, fun and had effort put into making them.
Hentai Uni has no gameplay to it. At all. It suggests that you can play the game with “one hand” (so you can wank with the other! How funny and clever the marketing is!), but I’m struggling to see where you play it at all. It is nominally a puzzle game where you move a grid of squares around to form a picture, but it’s not a sliding puzzle game. No, making a sliding puzzle game would have been too much like work for this developer. Instead, all you do is select one square in the grid to swap it with another. Any square in the “puzzle” can be swapped with any other square, and once you have all the pieces in place that’s it. You win. Hentai Uni has the complexity of a jigsaw puzzle that has, at most, 16 pieces, and personally, I don’t count 16-piece jigsaw puzzles as anything.
But the fan service is good, right? Like, that’s the real reason you’re playing here. To see pretty girls in various states of undress. It’s a pity they’re not pretty, then. All you’re going to be looking at is very cheaply-drawn static anime girls. When you complete a “puzzle,” the screen will fade out and then fade back in with the girl a little more undressed, but in the exact same pose. There’s no animation, and you don’t even learn these characters’ names. They’re just there. Cheaply drawn, increasingly naked characters. Even if you don’t find it weird and creepy, you’re not going to find it sexy, either. That free hand that the game is so proud about giving you will only ever be used to drink more beer in a desperate effort to make something out of the time you’re spending in it.
The characters also don’t even end up completely naked, so even within the stupefyingly limited context of this being a game, it doesn’t even reward you for “playing well”. Nintendo still has limits. With these piles of trash on PC you at least end up getting some proper hentai right at the end of the “strip show,” but with Hentai Uni, the undressing stops at the girl being topless. Exposed boobs on Switch are still impressively progressive for Nintendo, but it just goes to show how utterly pointless this whole exercise is that the one thing the game’s resting on – stripping a girl down – it can’t even bring to the conclusion that it needs to. The panties stay firmly on.
That’s all there is to Hentai Uni. Again, I don’t have a problem with games that feature nudity and titillation. If a developer were to make a strip poker game then I would be all over that (assuming the poker played well enough). Bring on all the Gal*Guns and Dead or Alives that developers can produce. But for the love of Hatsune Miku, Nintendo, don’t let the eStore be flooded with this nonsense.
(That’s zero stars, just in case this review wasn’t clear enough. Not five stars)
Yeah and with steam you at least have a lenient refund policy to protect you from being being screwed over.
Yes, this is true. I have issues with Steam’s refund policy in other ways, but this kind of game is exactly what the refund policy is for.