The strategy layer actually works, which surprised me more than the tits. And there are plenty of those, bouncing around on redhead commander types while I'm trying to figure out whether to reinforce the eastern ridge or push for the spice fields. Priorities, right?

Uprise throws you into this dune-blasted sci-fi mess as Adal, some duke's kid who just inherited a planet called Albion and an instant war with Emperor Ramarg. The tutorial dumps a lot of RTS and TBS mechanics on you without much handholding. Lost my first two harvesters to sandworm attacks because I was staring at the advisor character's chest instead of the minimap. No regrets. The erotic content isn't just slapped on, it's woven into the campaign structure, though the triggers feel random sometimes. One minute I'm plotting supply lines, next minute there's a hentai scene with the imperial envoy that I definitely didn't earn through any strategic brilliance.

Music loops are surprisingly not annoying, which is rare for a Patreon early build. The artwork has that slightly inconsistent quality where some character portraits look professional and others feel like they were finished during a lunch break. But the redhead strategist, whatever her name is, she's rendered with the kind of attention that suggests the artist had clear favorites. Can't blame them. The fantasy elements mix weirdly with the sci-fi setting, like someone couldn't decide between Dune and a generic RPG, so they just said fuck it and used both.

Wish the UI didn't fight me every time I try to select multiple units near the edge of the screen. That won't get fixed probably, it's one of those engine quirks that just becomes part of the game's personality. The Patreon page promises imports and cheats and android versions, which sounds great until you realize you're essentially paying for a game that might never leave alpha. But the core loop of managing territory while occasionally unlocking adult content has this grimy appeal that keeps me clicking next turn. Like playing Civilization but with actual civilization-ending threats and also animated boobs. The emperor keeps sending these threatening messages and I keep ignoring them to optimize my mining operations. That's probably not the intended narrative experience but whatever, the spice must flow or however that meme goes.

The sprite for the Space Marine, when he dies, does this little stumble. Left foot catches on nothing, torso tilts maybe 15 degrees, then the whole model just pops into a ragdoll. I spent longer than I should admit watching that tilt. The animator knew something about the body giving up before the physics engine takes over. Or maybe it's a bug. Probably a bug. But in a game where everything else is chrome plated mechs and laser beams that scream "look at me," that tiny stumble is the most honest thing.

The mechs though. Christ. They're supposed to be these towering war machines but the scale is all wrong next to the barracks. One minute you're placing rocket troopers who look like action figures, the next a mech walks past and it's like someone photoshopped a fridge into a dollhouse. The tutorial voice, some gruff commander type, tells you to "think of smart positioning" but doesn't mention your defenders will clip through the reactor building if you put them too close. Saw a whole squad of marines just... merge with the power core. Became one with the electricity. Very spiritual. Not great for defense.

Joined a corporation because the button was blinking. Now I'm in some chat with people speaking what I think is Portuguese and a guy named "Xx_DeathMech69" who keeps sending coordinates to attack. The clan war interface is a mess of timers and red arrows. I sent my battle cruisers, all shiny and promising, to a base that looked weak. They got shredded by rocket troopers hidden behind three layers of walls. The kill feed scrolled my name like a public shaming. The music during all this? Actually kind of a banger. Synth heavy, makes you feel like you're in an 80s training montage even while your army turns to scrap. Graphics are... there's a lot of bloom. So much bloom. Every explosion looks like a small sun being born and dying in half a second. It's excessive. I love it.

this thing is basically a spreadsheet with tits. you got your little brothel and you click to make numbers go up. buy a girl, she's got stats i guess, put her to work, money comes in. the whole loop is just watching bars fill and clicking upgrade. it's like someone took cookie clicker and said what if the cookies were hentai girls with dead eyes.

the art is deliberately shit in a way that wraps back around to being almost charming. like a middle schooler's notebook margins but with more visible labia. every character has that same vacant expression whether they're supposedly moaning or just standing there. the animation, if you can call it that, is two frames on loop. a tween of a png sliding up and down. i laughed out loud the first time i saw the "climax" effect which is just the screen flashing white for half a second. no sound. nothing. just flash. bang. done. back to the management screen.

and yet i kept clicking. that's the insidious part. the management layer is barebones but functional. you buy upgrades that make numbers bigger so you can buy more girls who make numbers bigger. there's some xp system that unlocks new positions or whatever but it's all just window dressing for the core loop of number go up. the brothel theme is paper thin. you're not managing anything really, just assigning bodies to slots. the strategy tag is a lie. there's no strategy. you just buy the most expensive thing you can afford and wait. i tabbed out to watch youtube and came back to enough gold to buy three more workers. that's the whole game. it's an idle game wearing a trench coat made of poorly drawn boobs.

the fantasy tag is doing a lot of heavy lifting too. elves with comically large ears that clip through their own hair. some demon girl whose horns look like they were added in ms paint after the fact. it's all very "first time opening a drawing tablet" energy. and somehow that's the appeal. this isn't trying to be good. it's trying to be horny and it fails at that too but in a way that's almost hypnotic. like watching a car crash where all the drivers are naked anime women with anatomy that defies several laws of physics.

You know that thing where you're playing a game and you're like "ah yes, this one mechanic is basically a slot machine for horny outcomes"? That's Powerless. Not in a bad way. Kind of.

This elf princess with absolutely enormous tits is running a kingdom of Tauren while the king is sick. Every day you get 5 moves, which is never enough. Then you travel overnight to another territory. The names are all randomly generated so one playthrough has you governing "Blightwood" and the next it's "Sunmeadow" or whatever the algorithm spits out. That's actually neat.

It's under construction though. Like really under construction. Half the buttons do nothing. You click on something and just... nothing. The map is small. The story stops abruptly. But there's Twitter updates apparently. Following development feels like watching someone build a car while you're already sitting in it trying to drive.

The breeding box is where everything clicks. You rally soldiers through this pleasure system thing that Nyla the oracle teaches you. She's in the castle kitchen crypt for some reason? The first time you meet her she explains how it works, then later she gives you new scenes. So you're basically unlocking fuck animations through a skill tree disguised as military strategy. Your army gets stronger when you... yeah. The barracks pool is unfinished, the wardrobe works for changing appearance but that's about it. I wish there was more. Which sounds stupid because obviously there will be more, that's the whole point of early development, but still.

Building temples and mills increases production so you can recruit soldiers to invade neighboring territories. Standard 4X stuff except the orc domination angle gets replaced with elf princess domination fantasies. Sometimes I'd forget about the kingdom management entirely and just try to find which buttons actually worked. Like a deranged easter egg hunt. The oracle scenes are genuinely hot though. That pleasure tutorial? Not what I expected from a strategy game tutorial.

Helltaker flashbacks, right? That clean white hair, the suits. This isn't that. This is what happens when someone took the "demon girl" folder from their hard drive and smeared it across a strategy map. The art is, uh, let's say deliberately unpolished. Like a rough sketch that somehow got colored in by a different person who was very excited about the shading in one specific area and forgot the rest of the canvas exists. I spent ten minutes just staring at the interface trying to figure out why my influence wasn't spreading, only to realize the button I needed was literally a tiny, badly drawn pentagram that I thought was just decoration. Classic UI design from the depths.

The whole thing is a power trip wrapped in a crusty.exe. You're a new ruler in hell, and instead of fire and brimstone, your main weapon is... scheduling dates. With a slime girl whose texture looks like melted gummy bears. There's a strategy layer where you pick who to ally with, and the "hardcore sex and brutality" tagline isn't lying. I allied with this one demoness who looked like a rejected Disgaea character, and the scene that unlocked was... a lot. It was a multi-stage video loop where she uses her tail in a way that made me genuinely pause my music. The animation was jittery, like a GIF from 2006, but the sheer, unfiltered intensity of it? Honestly, I've seen triple-A titles with less creative anatomy. The sound design is just a mess of wet slaps and a looping royalty-free metal riff that I'm pretty sure I heard in a Newgrounds flash game once.

Top 3 Moments You'll Want to Screenshot. One: The succubus queen's dialogue tree where one option is just "[Remain silent and stare at her chest]". It works. Two: A "strategy" pop-up that accidentally calls your resource "Cum Points" before a patch note says it was changed to "Dominion". They never actually changed it in my game. Three: That one video with the shadow tentacles. Just... that one. My biggest complaint? The video player doesn't have a goddamn volume slider. Why. It's 2024. I had to alt-tab and use the Windows mixer like a peasant. The RPG elements are tissue-thin, just a reason to get to the next sticky scene. It's a mess. A glorious, horny, unoptimized mess that knows exactly what it is. I forgot what I was talking about.