Re: [SMAVERICK] (RJ183220) Virus Z
The blatant "inspiration" from PiC has been very clearly noted so I won't belabor the point, but I am kinda pissed they plagiarized the DUMBEST possible aspect of PiC as well - the shitty gallery. No repeating animations, huge gaps between animations - PiC is one of the worst gallery examples in a H-game IMO and this game's copying it puts it almost as low. The implementation is slightly better though (less button presses to get new animations going) so I can't dislike that aspect as much. It's just dumb that the only way to NOT have to sit through several seconds of X enemy walking is to use the blue tentacle bot which cycles through 3 animations pretty well.
The melee is terrible as well, not that PiC had good melee either - it didn't - but this game's hitboxes are janky as fuck. There are some enemies it's extremely strong against (it hard counters the tentacle robots) but otherwise you're generally much better off staying at range and plugging away with the dinky pistol - which starts off much worse than PiC's, but doesn't have the same obnoxiously shitty aiming system, so honestly I actually don't mind it as much.
The linearity of stages is a definite downside compared to Parasite, I didn't /really/ enjoy PiC platforming but it added a sense of verticality to the game and the placement of zombies around obstacles was sometimes interesting by forcing the player to make decisions surrounding it - this game is just "walk forwards and shoot."
The H animations of both games vary in quality, but I actually like the art direction in this game about as well even if it's not quite as unique as PiC's. Multiple attractive female enemies doesn't hurt. it feels like there's a lot more variety in enemies after the first few stages whereas PiC tended to throw wayyyy too many of the basic zombies at you. This game mixes it up pretty well after earlygame so at least you're constantly fighting different stuff.
H animations are great but suffer from drawbacks in both games. Here there's no climax animation so each loop ends off very strangely with the 'freeze' but the actual animations are very fluid, PiC had infinitely better climaxes but each section of the animation was chained together very awkwardly and I felt like a lot of the second/third section animations were straight up worse than the beginning one (ex. female mechanic). Kinda similar story with the ending animations, but in reverse; PiC didn't have cycles at all in those whereas this game has (mediocre) climaxes before looping. Both had some really good ones so not a lto to say there.
Overall I feel like the game got a bit too close to PiC in many ways, which is a real shame because it's actually a pretty solid H-offering on its own that is always just gonna be "that parasite in city ripoff." If anything, I think it could have been a slightly BETTER Parasite in City if they had actually made a few alterations to terrible design choices from the original. As is though, I enjoy both games and will look forwards to the teased next game from this circle, it seems they have improved a lot over time and hopefully keep it up.
