Hot Dawn Uprising

Review for Hot Dawn Uprising [v0.008] I just tried the game again. My main complaint from the first release is fixed. Conversations can now be sped up drastically. Players can press space bar to skip to the next line of dialogue. However, the game still isn't fun to play. Choices in conversations don't seem to have any real impact and there are many choices where there's only one selection available. The world design (both interior and exterior) is wholly unappealing. The most fun thing in this game is seeing a car tumble through the air in the distance every now and then. I tried exploring the world, but I found no rewards for doing so. Then I just stuck to the quests, but I still never got very far because the game has crashed or hung every time I've tried to play for more than a few minutes. Unfortunately, v0.008 really isn't even demo quality, yet. I'll try again after a few more updates. Review for Hot Dawn Uprising [v0.005 Demo] Right out of the gate, the game is nearly unplayable for one incredibly trivial reason: Conversations. All conversations are insanely tedious because they are very slow and they can't be skipped or paused. Every line of dialogue apparently has a 5-second timeout before it automatically moves to the next dialogue. It doesn't matter if the dialogue is just one word, or even no words at all. There are a lot of conversations. I just don't have patience for the artificially slowed progress and after hitting a bunch of weird bugs at the university, I finally gave up playing. I have a ton of feedback I could give, but it's so negative that I really don't feel comfortable providing it for what is being called a demo. I really like the 3D first-person gaming experience and I really wish there were more good adult games in that category. However, I worked in the PC gaming industry 25 years ago and I know first-hand that it's a shit-ton of work. This game has a LONG way to go to make it enjoyable, and that's before adding actual story content or lewd content. The original Hot Dawn had game-breaking bugs and it was apparently abandoned to make this game, which is easily 100 times more complex. Unfortunately, I don't have high hopes for the viability of this game. If this is truly a 1-man development team, it'll take at least another year just to fix everything that would make basic gameplay enjoyable, and that's without adding any actual content.

played demo, and for 1 man dev, its good work, big map, sex with random generated npcs, maybe good story, good main girls models(non random), yeah alot bugs, but has potential. I just want to pay tribute to the developer and leave a good review. I hope he doesn't abandon such a good work and finds the public's attention.

Kinda alright, needs serious polish. So, I've played through the current Steam version to completion and here are my thoughts. First off, the game is playable —at least on my rig. I want to stress that my tolerance might be higher than average, so "playable for me" doesn't mean it will be a smooth experience for everyone. Performance & Optimization: I'm running a 4090, so I didn't hit major framerate walls, but the optimization seems questionable. Tweaking graphics settings doesn't feel like it impacts visuals much. The main issue is the sheer number of NPCs scattered unevenly across the map—they really tank the FPS. They also get in the way physically, especially on staircases like the one at the school. Gameplay & Features: The game has a fast-travel system, but the placement of the points feels inconvenient and unintuitive. There are two scripted NPCs (near the school and the house) that constantly spawn. They serve no real purpose and just end up being annoying. I love the idea of the in-game computer, but interacting with it is buggy. I'd recommend sticking to the phone (the 'C' key) instead. The dating/relationship system with NSFW scenes is there, but I didn't engage much. The NPCs kinda looked samey and didn't really grab my interest. Story & Writing: The main plot is actually decent and kept me engaged. I like that dialogue choices have flags (e.g., "Stepmom will remember this"), though the long-term consequences weren't very clear to me. As a non-native speaker, the dialogue itself felt a bit repetitive and dry at times. On the NSFW front, it seems to be a slow burn, which I appreciate—nothing too in-your-face early on. Character Design: A surprising highlight! The characters are distinct, attractive, and have varied body types (hats off to Roxy!). My only wish is for higher quality textures. Bugs... The Big Problem. This is the game's Achilles' heel. My biggest advice: try to complete it in as few sessions as possible. The save system is broken . Loading a save often teleports me to a random location. Sometimes, starting a new game will show quests as already completed. Other frustrating bugs: Turning the computer off makes it unusable (interacting with it soft-locks your character). Some quests have unclear time triggers—like meeting Scarlett at the police station "at night," when the station is actually closed. You end up wasting time skipping time to figure it out. Opinion: This is an ambitious and interesting game at its core, but optimization is priority. The potential is there. I'd love to see more teleport points, better time-skipping mechanics, more polished character models, and either a reduction in NPC count or a improvement to their movement and visual variety. Keep an eye on it if you're patient, but wait for updates if you're bug-averse.

To be frank, this game is an absolute mess. I'm playing on a 4070 Ti (not exactly a high end GPU) but does this game CHUG. Even turning down the graphical settings didn't really help. There's lots of stuttering, pop in (the cars are a series of triangles before the entire exterior model phases into existence after about 10 seconds), asset clipping (lots of nipples and bare assess being seen through clothing), shoddy animations and stock assets (why the hell do I shoot two gallons of semen out of my dick, through my partner and the wall on the other side of the room? Why are there 937 identical trees everywhere? Why is there a bench in the middle of someone's driveway?). If you follow the plot line as the quest menu suggests, you're going to be spending a ton of time running back and forth between your house (the only place you can advance time) and wherever it tells you to go. The game some times gives you objective markers, some times doesn't. For example, one quest has you go to the beach to meet someone. If you look at the map, there is an area labeled BEACH in the middle of the woods but there's also a white, sandy beach front right by your house. Guess which one is the correct place: the middle of the woods. Really, the entire gameplay loop is just running back and forth between points, reading dialogue and making choices that progress the plot or stall you until you go back and make the correct choice. Other than whole sale lifting the Fallout lock-picking mini game, that's the entire extent of the game play. I don't know why this needed to be an Unreal Project instead of something in a less robust engine. If you played the Renpy version of the game, most of the characters return with updated models which while the original version isn't anything special, they had a certain charm to them. There's some interesting design choices made for the updated models and subsequent animations. For example, Scarlett never wears shoes including on bare pavement and in the middle of class, everyone sleeps in their day clothes at night, no character has unique animations so they regularly walk funny and clip through their own body/clothes, etc. As for sexual content, it's sparse. I was only able to get lewd photos from Scarlett and massage Isabella at the pool in her house. You can meet and talk to randomly generated women (who will routinely force you into dialogue, I noticed this most often near the university and the corner near your house) and if you have high enough stats and pick the correct dialogue choices, you can get their number. Once you have their number, you can set up a date where you do more random dialogue choosing and if they like your answers, you can fuck them. The scenes with the random women are fine but nothing special. I'm here for the handcrafted characters (like Scarlett, Jessica or Lilith) and...there's just nothing there right now. Could the developer turn this around? Doubtful. It seems like it's a one person crew with no development history besides a single Renpy game. It feels like they bit off more than they can chew and I don't expect them to be to salvage what is a project that's clearly grown out of the scope of what their skills are capable of. They should have either finished the Renpy version or stuck to a much smaller Unreal Engine project.