would be 10/10 if they let me impregnate the giant muscle ladies

one ticket to hell.

This game is a almost like a sort of Rimworld-lite that's a strange marriage between your typical Japanese visual novel/JRPG type game but with normal RPG and base building mechanics. It's also very hentai in a very typical Japanese way, where sexual themes are invariably associated with what's called "guro" in Japan, or things like violent non-consensual sex, sadism, dismemberment, cannibalism and a lot of other really, really dark stuff. And that's where the Rimworld-lite comes in. Whereas the base game Rimworld does not really include themes like that, the intrepid modding community was quick to add those "features", making Rimworld a game which can fulfill the darkest fantasies of the player, for better or worse.

But though the simulation in Rimworld is incredibly deep and complex, the graphics are very rudimentary. The graphics in this game are fairly basic as well, using a fixed-camera top down view in Unity where the ground itself is actually 3D but everything else is 2D sprites. Basic character animations are extremely simple and limited, with a bit more effort put into sexual animations. And the level of simulation appears to be a work in progress, and is very simple. But it still has more visual detail that Rimworld and is therefore slightly more visually pleasing.

Note there is an option in settings to turn off "guro", and as I'm not a fan of that genre, I haven't tried seeing what happens when the option is on. But turning it off definitely does not turn off all the guro-related functionality. Players can still dismember NPCs, there are still crafting tables for using body parts to make things, and similar. So fair warning to people who would be traumatized by that type of thing. Stay far away from this game.

In the game's defense I will say it can be whatever you want to see it as: something to fulfill your dark fantasies, or a neutral examination of the goodness and badness in the world. I suppose that it serves as a mirror to what's already inside you, if you want to assign more meaning to it than is probably there.

The good aspects of the game are the quirky, nonsensical, somewhat simplistic and childish story, which is backed up by a reasonably good progression with cut scenes spread throughout the game to move things along. The graphics are cute. And it's hard to explain why, but the story just seems to capture your attention. This game has that "fun" aspect about it that isn't due to any one feature or whatever, but that's more than the sum of its parts. Another advantage is that there's a cheat console that lets you experiment with game functionality and skip the typical resource gathering grind if you want to. But even the grind is very minimal, and the game is already much easier than most western games I've played.

Finally, the game is under active development and updates are released regularly. But given my understanding of Japanese game design, I would say it's probably about 80% to 90% finished and there won't be any fundamental changes moving forward, but rather lots of cosmetic changes, maybe a few more cutscenes, some animations, and some tweaking.

The bad aspects of the game are many. They're not enough to earn a negative review, but they're there.

1. First and foremost is that this is obviously a male-centric game. The inclusion of both male and female main characters that you can switch between seems to be aiming for a more gender neutral approach, but in practice, the female cannot really do anything sexual, and certainly cannot do anything non-consensual. All that functionality is limited to only the male by design, and of course the gameplay is exclusively CIS gender. That's disappointing.

2. As an early access game by a developer who does not speak English, from a non-English culture with very different ideas about how things should work and what's obvious and not, a lot about the game is not obvious at all and you really have to search the limited English language information online (most of it is here on Steam) to figure out what to do. I happen to speak Japanese, so luckily I can understand the Japanese information provided on Discord (where the best info is), but most players won't have that option. In the developer's defense, they're trying really hard to overcome the language barrier by providing machine translations on Discord of the Japanese info into English and Chinese, but sometimes the translations are unintelligable.

3. Again, as an early access game, there doesn't seem to be an ending yet. There are plenty of things to do for the first 50 to 100 hours or so, a surprising amount of depth for early access (so it's definitely worth the price), but then it suddenly stops and the only thing left to do is improve your base. As you can see from screenshots posted to Discord, there's a lot you can do with base building in purely visual terms, and you can import your own PNG sprites to make your base look unlike anything included in the base game. But it doesn't actually do anything. It's just pretty to look at.

4. The controls are so rudimentary that they're actually quite inaccurate and it's very easy to make mistakes, some of them irrevocable. There's a mechanic to subdue NPCs and capture them, using certain weapons, and then other weapons kill them. There's also a wear-and-tear mechanic where your weapons break mid-use. One thing to watch out for is that if your subdue weapon breaks while attacking an NPC, you're liable to kill them accidentally because the minute your weapon breaks, you start giving them kill damage rather than subdue damage. It's also very easy to place objects in your base incorrectly, and sometimes impossible to place, say, wall parts connected to each other despite that there's nothing in the way. The game just refuses to see the empty space where you want to place the next part.

Those are just a few of the negatives off the top of my head. There are others.

What this game needs moving forward:

1. First and foremost, given that the developer has enabled the Steam Workshop for the game (from within the game), I would like to see more modding beyond just importing static sprites. As this is a Japanese game, I seriously doubt that will happen, as it is not something available in most Japanese games, and Japanese players don't normally expect or want that functionality, but I hope I get surprised. Opening up the ability for modders to add characters, cutscenes, items, and animations, would solidify the game's position as "Rimworld-lite" and expand its popularity by an order of magnitude. The developer could leave it up to the modders to add non-CIS gender sexual content, for example.

2. More predictable controls and ironing out of the small annoyances like accidentally killing an NPC you're trying to subdue when your weapon breaks.

3. The game has a rudimentary function to customize the eyes, nose, and skin color of captured NPCs. But not hair. That needs to be added. The developer should simply replace their current simple customization function with the full character customization function available from the main menu, and make it applicable to all customizable NPCs.

4. Balancing. I suppose that given the title Mad Island, that a lot of mechanics in the game, such as pregnancy and farming, are not meant to be realistic. Currently, those things happen almost instantaneously. Plants grow overnight and run to seed in two days. Pregnant NPCs are ready to give birth in hours. That's a little extreme. The game includes lots of special items to accelerate certain things, so I would recommend they vastly slow down those instant changes and then add items to speed them back up again.

So TL;DR: in it's current state, the game is enjoyable and worth the price, unless the themes covered are just not for you.