Horizon Walker

After playing Horizon Walker for around 3 in-game days and getting near the end of Chapter 1, my honest opinion is that the game is just okay. Would I recommend it? Not really. This is the first adult gacha game I have ever downloaded, and while people may call it a hentai game, it honestly feels more like an adult fanservice game than full hentai. The main appeal is clearly the Vanguards. Most of them are designed as very attractive, sexy, mature women with revealing outfits and heavy fanservice designs. That is pretty much the main selling point. I only spent around $3 on the game because one of the revealing skins for a base character was on sale for around 85% off. One thing I want to point out is that even with Gentleman Mode, the skins are still censored a bit. So if people are going into this expecting full hentai, do not expect that. It is more like adult fanservice pushed close to the edge, but not fully explicit. The combat system is okay. It is a tactical turn based game where every Vanguard has different skills, attacks, perks, and roles. Your main character, the Human God, also has his own skills and perks, but nothing about the combat feels super special to me. Most of the time, I just put the game on auto battle at 4x speed and let it run in the background. The AI is also not very good, but in the early stages the game is easy enough that it still works as a casual background game. The story is nothing really worth mentioning. It mostly feels like background noise. I did not feel very invested in it, and I mostly cared about progressing, unlocking things, and building my team. My biggest problem with the game is the progression and power creep. Once you keep progressing through the campaign, you start noticing very quickly that your units are not doing enough damage and are not surviving well enough. The problem is that the game does not give you enough resources to keep up. You need materials to level characters, upgrade skills, improve weapons, upgrade weapon perks, and build your team properly, but the game barely gives you enough. I got extremely lucky in the gacha and pulled Efreti, an EX rank character, and also got her Vulkanus weapon from the other gacha area. Both of these are around a 1% drop, so I know I got very lucky. Honestly, if I did not have enough coins to claim Efreti when she appeared, I probably would have stopped playing much earlier. Getting both her and her weapon for free is what carried me to the end of Chapter 1. But even with that lucky pull, the power creep got bad enough that I am stuck again. Weapons are also a major issue. You do not really grind better weapons from missions in a normal way. Most better weapons seem tied to the gacha system, and even after getting a good weapon, you still need more materials to level it. Those materials are also limited and not easy to farm. So your characters can be leveled up, but they may still be stuck using weak green weapons, low level skills, and underdeveloped perks. The weapon perk system is another grind wall. You have multiple perk slots and each one needs resources to upgrade. You also need good perk drops, but those are tied to limited daily activities like Fairy Bounty requests, where you only get a few tries per day. If you want to target farm certain materials, you have to use another limited daily activity, and again, you only get a few chances. It feels like everything important is time gated. Skill upgrades are also painful. There does not seem to be a good direct way to farm skill materials. You get a little from campaign missions and dailies, but not enough to keep a full Vanguard squad upgraded. Because of that, most of your characters end up stuck with low level skills unless you focus everything into only a few units. The Human God main character is also disappointing. You cannot create your own character, the game just gives you one, and he feels very weak after the early levels. Past around level 10, he starts feeling almost useless in combat. This becomes really frustrating when the game forces you to use only him in certain missions, because getting full three star rewards can feel almost impossible. For people who are only here for the adult content and intimacy system, I honestly do not think it is worth it either. The intimacy grind takes a long time because you need gifts to raise your favorite Vanguards to higher intimacy levels. You either have to buy gift boxes, find them slowly, or spend a lot of time feeding gifts to one character. The one good thing is that once you get a character, you can directly buy some of their revealing skins, and sometimes they go on sale for very cheap. Another thing I dislike is that campaign characters do not really join you naturally over time. You meet characters in the story, but you do not unlock them from the campaign in a meaningful way. I think the game would be better if each character you met could join as a lower rank unit, like B or C rank, and then you could build them up over time into higher ranks if you liked them. That would make the story and characters feel more connected. Instead, most of the game still feels centered around gacha pulls. Overall, Horizon Walker is not terrible. It has nice character designs, okay tactical combat, and it can be fun as a background game at first. But after a while, it stops feeling like a chill background game where beautiful girls fight monsters for you and starts feeling more like a chore. The progression feels too restrictive, the material grind is too limited, the weapon system feels too tied to gacha, and the game starts showing power creep very quickly. If you like adult fanservice gacha games and do not mind slow progression, you might enjoy it. But for me, after reaching the end of Chapter 1, I do not think I can fully recommend it. Not recommended unless you are already into niche adult gacha games and are okay with heavy resource gating.