Gameplay: The game starts strong, with a nice feeling of progression and exploration, but really loses steam as you play through. On your way to the first major objective, you start encountering xenomorphs. The first one is already a tricky fight, dealing heavy damage (depending on your level and stats), attacking quickly and repeatedly, but most importantly dodging your combo attacks and having lots of health. An enemy can be a brick wall with its HP, but it shouldn't also be able to dodge more than half of your attacks as well. These fights really drag on, and when you get a weapon powerup that lets you kill them faster, the game quickly starts throwing stronger xenomorphs at you. Different colors, more HP, more attacks. You start having to exercise real caution because most xenomorphs appear after reaching a trigger in a given room, jumping in from the foreground or background, and with their long tail attacks that reach further than your whip you'll be in trouble if you get surrounded.
The levelling and stat progression is quite strict, with high EXP requirements directly telling you to move on to the next area if you want to level up. Levelling INT is useful initially to gain more MP, but you can focus on STR and CON I feel at around 27-30 INT if you find a lot of the powerups. LCK I suspect is useless. It only affects your chance to crit and deal double damage, but the scaling is very slow (you'd need 200 LCK for 100% crits) and I feel like I would have been better off putting all my LCK points into STR and CON. the defense from CON is minor, with enemies gaining a lot more damage over time than you gain defense, so you primarily just use it for more HP. Getting a lot of HP isn't all great either as the potions restore a flat amount of HP, that ends up feeling quite small by endgame. At least potion drops become really common later on.
You can find a lot of new attack abilities, but their damage doesn't scale with your stats, so they don't stay relevant for long. The last powerup I found almost useless because I was hitting twice as hard by that point. Your MP is better used on the spin attack, since it scales with STR.
Once you defeat the first major boss, you get the shield powerup. It makes you invincible to most basic attacks for a short time. This makes dealing with the xenomorphs a lot easier (but not faster since they can still dodge your attacks when cornered), since you can run into them, pushing them into a corner where you can wail on them, reseting your shield before it runs out. Exploration is almost mandatory as getting upgrades to your mana regen allows you to maintain your shield constantly. I found 6 MP regen boosters total, and I think I got them all. Unfortunately once you get your shield you start needing it almost constantly to deal with late-game enemies that either spam projectiles, use homing projectiles, or lots of long-reaching melee attacks. It pulls out all the stops; throwing large groups of elite xenomorphs at you from both sides. It also adds a lot of enemies that use lightning attacks, which disable your shield or knock you down if you don't have one up. The combat loop basically changed to revolve entirely around shield uptime and beating up HP-sponge enemies. Some of the last enemies you encounter are the worst, attacking you with almost off-screen length lightning attacks that fire in bursts, so unless you avoid them your shield goes down and so do you.
The two of the bosses are also insane difficulty spikes. Mother Brain I defeated by spamming the spin attack along with healing and mana potions (these are easy to farm from the weaker xenomorphs), as it has tons of shield disabling attacks. The final boss I beat by exploiting a glitch: if you have sex attacks enabled, you can avoid attacks by getting grabbed by the tentacle traps, staying invincible then breaking out when the boss is vulnerable. Maybe if I took enough tries I would have beaten the bosses the normal way, but it was pretty exhausting and the patterns were complex, as all the bosses get new attacks as their health goes down. A lot of the beam and projectile attacks could use some telegraph when the boss gains a new attack at low health; you really can't react the first time they throw it out, and some will near kill you from full health.
The Content: As seen with his prior games, GRIMHELM's animation is top notch, this guy's perfected the art of making the female body jiggle. Definitely some of my favorite art and animation in recent hentai games. As you continue through the game the sex animations keep throwing in new poses (or at least variations of poses that were used before) that let you admire Ellen (the main character)'s soft and bouncy body. Unfortunately, new poses is where most of the variety is after roughly the mid-way point of the game when xenomorph-type enemies are introduced.
Most of the sex content beyond that point can be lumped together as "bipedal monster dude picks up girl and rails her" with a bit of robot, tentacle, and floaty monster thrown in here and there. Because so many of the challenging encounters end up involving some variant of a xenomorph (with or without tits, and varying colors), the majority of the sex you'll see is gonna be xenomorphs or monster guys. There are some traps (the tentacle and machine kind, not the human kind) that you can trigger by standing still on them, and some interesting flying monsters, but most of those don't try to initiate grabs on you the way ground enemies do, so you'll only see them if you're defeated, or getting up from a sex attack when you have the non-game over H scenes enabled.
This game's obviously not vanilla, but it's also not very out there either compared to the kind of tentacles and monster content being produced lately. While there's some non-human monsters and some disembodied tentacles, pretty much everything you're getting in this game is just dicks and plain tentacles in holes, maybe some double penetration/spitroasting and some lesbian action here and there. Perhaps it's GRIMHELM's tastes, but I feel like some potential was missed for some of the staples seen with tentacle content, like cum-inflation, all-the-way-through fucking, varying tentacle size/shape, or oviposition (that facehugger hardly counts, since it doesn't even have an egg-laying animation afaik). You'd think that with the size of the enemies, there'd be some stomach bulging, but even that seems to have been left out, and some of the largest enemies don't have sex animations at all. The larger minibosses are a real shame; if the developer just got creative with some tentacles instead of ensuring every alien's dick came out of its groin (two exceptions) then maybe they could have joined the fun without obliterating the girl. Of all the fetishes this caters the most to, I'd say it's teratophilia with the xenomorphs with tits and the monsters occasionally fucking each other rather than the player.
Some last gripes, less important: Some attacks are WAY too loud, particularly the lasers and bombs that the bosses use (Looking at YOU, mother brain.) Ellen's got such a cute face, it's a shame almost all the sex animations hide her eyes with posing, her hair falling down, or tentacles. The final escape sequence after the final boss is really strict on time; if you stand around gawking at the final boss's death animation, you're probably already screwed. The screw attack's vertical movement is weird how it has to charge up, I hate how it forces you to use MP to get the same amount of air-time as a regular double jump since you have to hold the button down.
