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| Title | Crush Crush: Moist & Uncensored |
| Developer | Sad Panda Studios |
| Publisher | Nutaku |
| Release Date | 10/5/2016 |
| Genre | Adult Time Management/Resource Game |
| Platform | PC In-browser |
| Age Rating | Adults Only |
| Official Website | |
*The review is potentially NSFW, the links and game are Adults Only*
I would not normally be the one you would choose to review an in-browser game. I am not one who would normally enjoy a free-to-play game either. But, circumstances aligned that made me the one to review the new title from Nutaku, Crush Crush: Moist & Uncensored. For my own tastes, there is one major thing that will make almost any game better, and that is the presence of naked women. Not every game needs to have them, but I’m genuinely more likely to enjoy the game if they are there. So even if this game’s genre was not something that would be immediately appealing to me, I definitely wanted to give it a chance, both ethically as a reviewer and also due to the promise of some life and hometown.
With the name of the game being Crush Crush, I kind of expected it to be some kind of puzzle game where I was crushing blocks. That is not the case, this is a time and resource management game. The Crush comes from crushing on a girl (affection wise) and crushing them, usually in some physical way when he/she meets them. There are 2-3 CG scenes that show you how the two characters meet, one where your relationship turns a corner, one for your first kiss, and then two CG pictures for when the relationship turns sexual. None of them are particularly well drawn or are interactive, and there is no voice acting to accompany any of them.
Unfortunately, there is very little character to each of the girls you are romancing, other than their physical design and the listed statistics, you are not going to learn all that much about them. But they are different enough that you will, more than likely, have your own favorites. Mostly they each represent one part of the otaku culture. The first one is Cassie, and she’s a bit of a tsundere who likes athletes. Next is Mio who is a total gamer girl, and on it goes until you reach the full stable of 14 girls. Well, I use the term girls in a broad sense. While there are no otokonoko or traps, there is a VR program and even a female bear. Yes, you read that right, they go to very strange places.
It does not take very long before you can unlock the first three girls, after starting the game. But it does take an exponentially increasing amount of time for all the girls after. To build affection with them, you have to do a combination of chatting with them, touching them, buying them gifts, and taking them out on dates. Eventually, you will also need to have a minimum base stat or job level, but those come a bit later in the game. You need to invest time in working on your hobbies for the statistics and working jobs for money. You can gain time resources by gaining affection with the girls and unlocking achievements, but most of my time resources I had to purchase from the Store by using the pink diamonds. Pink diamonds are earned fairly frequently, but you also can purchase them for money through the Nutaku coin system.
The most fascinating part of this game for me, other than the naked women, was the Prestige system. As you unlock more girls, and raise their relationship up to new levels, and raise skill or job levels, you gain an additional Prestige modifier. That modifier is a multiplication of all earned rewards, but you cannot raise it unless you reset all your progress. The major advantage of doing this is that after the reset, you will progress at a much faster rate. Once you start having some extra pink diamonds, however, you can use 15 of them to add to your Prestige without needing to totally restart from the beginning. To be clear, that is not really a concern for your first few hours of play. But after you have several days into your current run, that becomes a very desirable thing. The Prestige modifier maxes out at x2048, but I finished my review run at just over a modest x100 multiplier. Even at x100, it made a huge difference on the rate I gained affection and particularly money.
Earning money becomes a serious concern the farther in the game that you get. A good example would be when a girl you want to raise affection level with wants 5 cars, and each car costs you 15 billion dollars to buy. Yes, you read that correctly. So, it doesn’t tether itself much in the way of reality, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. Once you get your base abilities high enough you can unlock some jobs that offer some really serious cash. Additionally, you can buy any single gift for 1 pink diamond, no matter what the cost. That seems a little strange when the price for a seashell ($400) and the price tag of one of those cars is the same number of pink diamonds. But I was not going to complain, it certainly made the monetary system a bit easier. So it ended up taking me far longer to raise up my skill levels than anything else. As it currently stands I would need to wait 5 days in order for my skills to raise to their next level, or I could pay a large number of pink diamonds to skip time forward up to 7 days.
There was only one bug that I found, and that was with Quill. It took until I was half way through her relationship until she started gaining affection normally like the other girls. That being said, it was still possible to raise her affection, it was just a bit more annoying because it took a lot more effort. There were no translation errors that I found, but there is honestly just not that much dialogue to translate. All the girls only have around 10 total responses to flirting or touching, and a couple CG scene translations. Other than the enormous amount of time required, unless you spend a lot of real world money, I only really had one major issue with this game, and that was the art design. The girls were fairly cute but not really well drawn. The sex scenes had the potential to be interesting, but they ended up being rather bland. While I appreciate their presence, I would have enjoyed this game a lot less without the carrot on the stick waiting out there, but that reward was decidedly less tasty than it could have been. In fact, only one of the girls (ironically named Nutaku) had an extremely uncensored sex scene, the rest of them were quite tame.
So was this game able to make me appreciate it despite my aversion to free-to-play mechanics? Well, not really. Those hooks are buried into its entire gameplay loop. You need to spend money or you are going to experience the frustration of very long waits for anything that you want to do or see. I grew up during the heyday of the arcades, so I’m used to having to pay small sums to play a game, but this feels a lot different. The major difference is that you can save money with practice and skill in arcades and it provided you a serious sense of accomplishment to do so. Here the only accomplishment is to pay more money to see more of the game quicker.
There is no skill proving ground, there is no real leaderboard carrot, and even though I like the naked girls, I can just look elsewhere on the internet to see some for free. If the girls were better written, if the girls were better drawn, and if you had deeper mechanics that involved some skill, this would be much easier to recommend. But it’s not poorly developed, it’s exactly what they wanted this game to be, by all indications. So if you just want a browser game running in the background that you can occasionally check in on to monitor your progress, then this one may be a good decision. Otherwise, you may want to check out some other Nutaku titles, as they also offer full release games now.
| Review Score | |
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| Overall |   |
Game is Free To Play, Publisher Provided Credits to Make the Review Easier and More Timely
