The story, the characters, the dark and beautiful atmosphere of the game, makes you to want to go even deeper in the game as a player and enjoy every moment of it. At this point, I sit down playing this for hours and thinking about how life is fading away before my eyes and this is the only thing that keeps me sane in times like this. Never thought i'd say it, but I did. The Models are done very well, the animations are fantastic, and every scene has it's own magic. This game makes things personal and ends up a good memory, and that is all I can ask from a game.
Came for the porn hey hey hey, but stayed for the story lol. This interactive VN really encapsulates seedy Cyberpunk world of nefarious corporations and it's jaded mercenaries. Probably the best looking, sounding, written experience of this type. Really high quality character models and surprisingly good animations (and you get to see it all it a variety of ways and positions lol). It is a chapter one of a continuing story in development. Yeah I'd buy chapter two in a heartbeat lol.
Going off on a tangent I really like the sound track to this game. I play it outside of the game via VLC player.
Pros:
* Excellent visuals / graphics - the level of character detail, particularly in romance scenes is very vivid - down to seeing the goose bumps on a woman's rear end in perfect detail. I was very impressed.
* The animation detail throughout the game is absolutely exceptional.
* Excellent story - This developer's other game was "Depraved Awakening" which I thought was pretty mediocre at best, so my expectations weren't real high going into this one, but I tell you what, this was an absolutely awesome game. At this point, Book One contains the first 7 chapters. I'm really looking forward to Book 2. Character development is fantastic.
* Romance quality is excellent as well as it goes hand in hand with the character development - exponentially better than Depraved Awakening.
* Top notch sex scenes - you can tell the developer really worked on this aspect of their games, and they significantly improved things. By a lot.
* The women are absolutely gorgeous. Honestly I didn't have this expectation going into the game, but I think the women in this game are even more attractive than the girls in "Being A DIK". You can tell the Dev went above and beyond with this game.
* Music - they did a really nice job with the music in the game fitting the scenes.
* Protagonist is a masculine guy doing a pretty cool job - it's nice to see in this political climate devs develop games that people like me want to play.
Cons:
* Honestly, there aren't any really to speak of. If I were to make a suggestion, it would be to maybe try to find a way to implement some mini games the way "Being A DIK" has with its combat system, etc. so that there is some more interaction from the player, but this is just a suggestion, the game is fantastic as it is.
Game Length: As noted earlier, this game at present contains the first 7 Chapters of the game (Book One) - this took me just a little over 10 hours to complete.
Overall Rating: 9.8 / 10 - Strongly recommended at full price.
Side Note for Developer (if they happen to read this) (and light spoilers coming here, so folks who haven't played the game, no need to keep reading from this point forward) - do me a favor and add in some deeper romance options with Chandra. :) The sex scenes with her are fantastic, I love her personality, but I think it'd be neat to have an option to have the MC try to get more personal with her, like kissing her or something just to see how she reacts rather than just keep it as casual sex - the potential of seeing her character evolve into gradually wanting a relationship and to show MC that she is more mature than he thinks would be a nice trope to explore.
PhillyGames have outdone themselves. This may be just Book One of City of Dreamers but there is a lot of content here and it is fantastic. The art and backgrounds are gorgeous and ooze sci-fi class. The plot is very well done with not a single wasted character. Everyone was interesting and worth getting to know. There were loads of nice references to movies as well as a nice cameo of a character from Depraved Awakening. The game contains a glossary detailing back story and terms. There is also a great stats page listing where you stand with certain characters. It isn’t complete though as it doesn’t list all characters and it doesn’t list depravity points. The animations are some of the best I have seen in a visual novel and the production value is top notch. Even things like the opening credits are better than most visual novels out there. The music was good but there are points where there are no sound at all due to there being no voice acting.
I played City of Broken Dreamers on Linux. It never crashed on me. I did notice one spelling error in chapter 3 where it said “mayhap” where I think it should have been “maybe”. There is also an issue of the skip option not working. The button to skip the dialogue to the next choice is there but greyed out. You can manually save whenever you want and there are 63 save slots. Alt-Tab doesn’t work.
Game Version Played: 1.04
Game Engine: Ren’Py 7.2.2.491
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 4789 MB
CPU Usage: 8-64 %
RAM Usage: 2.7-4.0 GB
Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the first book of City of Dreamers and can’t wait for Book 2. There are tons of choices to be made; a great world to get lost in, great art; lots of lewd scenes for those that want them; great humour; the game has it all. I finished my first play through in 5 hours 12 minutes. I paid $11.49 CAD for it but would have found it worth it even at $45 CAD. If you enjoy visual novels you should try this out. You can find the first few chapters for free on **** and the full version of Book One on Steam. PhillyGames has come a long way. Depraved Awakening, their last game; was a good game in it’s own right but City of Dreamers is them finding another gear and taking things up a notch.
My Score: 9.5/10
My System:
Intel I5-4590 | 16GB DDR3-1333 | Intel HD 4600 1536MB | Mesa 20.0.8 | Mushkin SSD 120GB | Trisquel 9.0 | Mate 1.20.0 | Kernel 5.4.77-gnu
one of the best vn ever. plot, visual, characters, atmosphere and scenes a really good. only disadvantage is that game is a little slow, but overall game is great.
SummaryCity of Broken Dreamers is a mature adults only cyberpunk visual novel. In the game you will find a choice based visually erotic and exciting adventure.