Critical Point

Yeah, okay, whateva' ho.

Game Plot: You can get a good feel for the overall quality of the action in "Critical Point" by the dreadful opening sequence in which your character relives his fateful fighter plane/jet/robot crash over enemy territory. The whole scene is described in text while the screen occasionally shakes and shitty sound effects play, all while you are looking at the same image of clear blue skies. The game returns to the present, where you are headed to a moon base run by the "Free Alliance Space Force" to check out some mysterious technical problems that have been happening. Leiji Osumi is a secret agent working as a technician to uncover some nebulous plot and no-doubt have lots and lots of sex.

Things got off to a rocky start for Leiji and me when the first person we met at the space base was a teenage girl who the game made sure to point out was 18. It's never a good sign when the first conversation in the game features someone accidentally saying "incestuous", although this fortunately proved to be a red herring. Purple-haired teenager introduced me to the green-haired commander running the base while Leiji made smarmy mental notes about the swell of her bosom and the curve of her backside. Basically the first part of the game consists of a tour of the base in which you are either introduced to or encounter almost all of the characters in the game. The real joy during this portion is the scenery. Apparently the same people who developed that shitty maze screensaver for Microsoft also developed a moon base for the future space Japanese women. Every single fucking location in the game looks the exact same. Boy is it ever exciting when the action happens and you're usually stuck looking at a blank hallway while Leiji stumbles through describing rainbow unicorns, mushroom clouds, kung-fu fights, and battles between laser-sword wielding robots.

Seconds later this woman will be dead.After meeting the stellar crew of hydrocephalic pie-eyed Barbie dolls the action suddenly took an abrupt turn for the crazy when a red-faced and panting technician in the control room tore off her blouse and wielded a pistol trying to molest poor Leiji. She was restrained by a male crewmember, who in turn found himself on the receiving end of her wild sexual aggression. The blue-haired maven in charge of the room did the only thing logical in such a situation…no, she didn't join in or masturbate like you thought I was going to say. While the evil couple were locked in the heat of illogical passion the stern head engineer shot the technician and her male "rape accomplice" to death with her pistol. Naturally, since your character was investigating strange incidents, he chose to do nothing at all. I don't know about you but if some woman with a head like a watermelon with two glistening chunks of coal stuck in it tried to rape me, raped some other guy instead, and then both were shot to death, I would probably turn on my heel and speed-walk to the nearest overhead beam that would allow me to loop my belt around it and hang myself.

Leiji was made of sterner stuff and set to work unraveling just what was going on at the moon base with the help of a blue-haired female android prone to crying. Today we build robots that assemble automobiles and microchips, but in the future crying will be the most important task for them. It turned out that someone was poisoning the food with a military drug called "Christmas" that made people violently horny. Why the military would create a drug to make their own soldiers insanely horny is not adequately described. Before all this is found out though, people start winding up dead, aside from the two people shot to death in front of my face I mean. First there's the crew of the shuttle that brings you to the moon base, then there's this spotty-faced guy named Kristin who is on the receiving end of a giant metal pole through his dick, and finally there is an anonymous pink-haired woman with an electrical cable the size of a fire house jammed up her ass.

I'm sorry I raped you, here let me do it again to make everything better. You can click the image for a view of the crotchcicles if you so desire.Meanwhile, Leiji finds himself beginning to fall victim to the spirit of Christmas. While discussing the sabotage with a sassy-reporter who turns into a coy victim when her stupid VR-goggles come off, Old Saint Nick pays a visit to Leiji's loins and forces him to brutally rape her. It goes without saying that she is also a virgin, since no Hentai rape sequence would be complete without a description of hymen-tearing that would make Hitler cry. After delivering my "presents" beneath her "tree" I came to my senses and apologized. The game presented me with two options after she retreated to the shower to clean herself of my evil. The first option was to leave, the second option was to comfort her. Being a gentleman who never leaves the scene of a rape without filling out a feedback card I selected the "comfort her" option. In a soul-searching sequence that opened my heart and my mind I learned that the best way to comfort someone after violating them is to barge in on them in the shower and have sex with them again. But it was "nice" sex the second time; see that's the key that most rapists don't understand. The first batch of baby-to-be is evil, but if they just did it a second time everything would be all right, because then the good semen would go in and purge the womb of the bad. I think "the friend of my friend is my enemy" or some other equally pointless aphorism applies here.

The shower sex-sequence was fairly comical for the sheer volume of "mystery Hentai juice" pouring out of the reporter's crotch while you re-molest her. At least the previous scene provides some tiny excuse for the crotchcicles of goo dangling from her recently stormed gates. One other interesting side-note to this whole sad sequence was that the game repeatedly commented on the fact that the reporter girl had no pubic hair, even though she clearly had a bush capable of hiding at least three Viet Cong snipers or a charging rhinoceros. Why they insisted on mentioning it so much despite all visual evidence to the contrary probably ties in with the whole "here's a picture of clouds to look at while we Engrishify Hamlet" concept.

Yikes! Click the image for a view of the ass-hose.After having sex a couple more times and meeting a couple new characters including "the most poorly drawn face in a Hentai game ever" Leiji was close to nabbing the person behind the food-tainting and murders. With the help of the android girl, whose name is not relevant, Leiji discovers that it's the base commander who is behind all the trouble. Apparently her husband was a bad guy and he took her son and was blackmailing blah blah blah, none of it really matters. By the time you get to the final showdown, which features even more of the "empty room while action is described" awesomeness, you're just so glad to escape the maze of identical halls and awkward sex scenes that it's a relief. After admitting to the whole thing the commander excused us from the room and, much to the surprise of no one in the room except maybe my cat, she shot herself.

After some more crying from The Automatic Tear Factory things faded out, resuming on earth where Leiji had taken over a department with the shadowy government agency that sent him to the moon base to watch people get gunned down. For no real reason the teenager and the reporter were now working for him and up to the same old tricks as they were on the space station. The ending was all happy and comical, trying ineffectively to convince me that I had just played through a game that taught me valuable lessons about rape counseling, solving murders, and learning to question my heterosexuality. Thank you Critical Point, we laughed together, we cried together, and with a little help from you a part of me died.

AAAaagh, the eyes, no!Difficulty: With a large number of branching options in the plot, completing the game with a full image gallery would require feats of willpower on par with resisting torture at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. While sliding colon-first down a sharpened pole or having your feet roasted might sound like a good time to a few of you sickos out there, trust me when I say that this game still would not be easy. Through the grace of whatever duke of hell I owe my immortal soul to for playing all these Hentai games I managed to complete the game on my first run through. Thank you Maggot-Lord Syddrugguth for smiling upon me on this day! For you I offer up the blood of one hundred innocents, and in your name shall I continue my unholy work of reviewing these games. IA!

Defining Moment: A tiny part of me wants to say the re-rape sequence, but I think "Critical Point" finally killed that part after all these months of playing rape games. For now I have to call it a tie between all of the fucking endless "describe the action while you look at the most boring image we can come up with" scenes and the part where they erroneously claimed the reporter had no pubic hair. Both of these speak volumes about the level of quality you can expect from most Hentai games. In other words, laziness and total apathy to detail rule the day for most Hentai developers, and "Critical Point" provides a definitive example of these two attributes.

Final Thoughts: I started this review out by hinting that the plot really wasn't all that bad for a Hentai game, and it wasn't. It featured absolutely no school girls (it came real close), no tentacles, and no incest (although it had me going there for a minute). It actually did have a story, one that I would rate about on the same level with most of the Legolas-Gimli slash fan fiction I have read. That may not sound like high praise, but you haven't read some of the Legolas-Aragorn slash out there.