Dimensions VIP

I'm recommending this game, but just barely. I *really* want to give it a stronger recommendation and maybe that will happen one day. Read on for details. This is a so-called "idle" game meaning that after doing a few things, you then have to wait, sometimes for a significantly long time, before you can do anything else. So typical game play is to do what you can then let it sit in the background while you do other things unrelated to game play. There are several "classes" of such things. For one common class, the wait is on the order of 2-15 minutes. There are other waits on the order of 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, as well as one class where the wait increases exponentially. Currently it's about 4 days but I fully expect the next round to take at least 8 days. The game also implements the very typical "dual currency" system common to these games where one currency ("money") is easily obtainable while the other ("gems") grows very slowly. It's possible to spend real world money to obtain gems which can be used in various ways to speed up progress but this is definitely not a "pay-to-win" game. It's possible to make reasonable progress without every paying a single cent. (Though for games with a similar philosophy that I really enjoy, I've made in-game purchases just to show my appreciation to the developers.) The story, actions, and art are definitely sex soaked. I'm highly confident that you won't find any of the most extreme kinks such as bestiality and coprophilia but you'll certainly encounter all the standard ones! The story line is interesting with fun unexpected twists and turns. The way one progresses the main story line is not clearly laid out. Hints are available but a certain amount of exploration and experimentation is necessary. Normally, I appreciate that approach though this game makes it quite painful. Part of it is inherent in the nature of "idle" games with their long intervals between when you're able to do an action but this game also hides quite a bit of your current state. For example, I've played for quite some time and still have no idea how close a girl is to being upgraded. Every time it happens, it's a complete surprise and I usually have no idea what it was I last did to get the girl to that state. There are two extremely significant issues that weigh heavily against this game: massive lag and numerous bugs. The massive lag is inherent in the design decision to conduct actual game play on the server coupled with slow server response. This means that you'll frequently stare at the word "LOADING" for sometimes as long as 30 seconds. It also means that often if you take two actions in a row, the second will be canceled after the server acknowledges the first action. It also means that frequently the screen will show that you can do something when, in fact, you can't. This can be very confusing and results in a long learning curve. The designers justify their decision to make game play server based in order to more easily support multiple client platforms so it's unlikely this fundamental decision will ever change. However I've played other server-based games which weren't nearly as painful because the server response was orders of magnitude faster so it's not a technology issue. For some odd reason, it's also necessary to login to the server every time you fire up the game. No other server-based games I've played required a login so, again, this is not a technology issue. There are numerous bugs, most of which appear to be cache coherency issues (server & client disagree on the state of the game and neither server nor client realizes that there's a disagreement). Most of these bugs are just annoying and don't really affect game play. As a simple example, there are 'action' buttons available for each girl. Clicking a button performs the labeled action and temporarily dims the button as feedback to show that it was clicked. On the order of 5% of the time, the button stays dimmed until the next time you click it to perform the action. The problem is that there are a lot of these bugs. Combine this with both the way the game hides state and doesn't provide a clear path to progress the story line and it's not uncommon to become frustrated wondering whether the lack of progress is due to yet another bug. Bottom line, dramatically reducing the server lag, eliminating the need to login, and attacking some of the worst bugs would cause me to change my recommendation from lukewarm to enthusiastic.