The Gay Tag Review
Gay needle: 100% gay, no risk of seeing anything but cocks and asses here (even the characters are all male except for one cameo)
Orcs are very popular so of course YPressGames jumped on the bandwagon. The story is vaguely convoluted and ultimately not that interesting: an elf king asks you to recover his son that was sent as an envoy to the orcs (at kinda war with the elves) and was kept as a captive. Twist: you're actually the son of the king that the current king usurped and executed, so you have your own agenda. Ah, you're a powerful and manipulative mage with a small dragon familiar. Various intrigues and (maybe) love will get on the way of your goals.
So the bases are decent, but it quickly develops in the usual and frankly expected tracks. In full YPressGames style, you choose your love interest (in a very unsubtle way -literally you have a choice with the four names) very early in the game.
As far as I've seen, all the stories have kind of the same structure: you get the LI's trust, you can develop feeling that make you insecure on whether you actually want to just use them as tools for your objective, there's one main obstacle along the way (usually linked to the elf king's son who's a brat) and then the resolution with different endings per LI (completists would rinse and repeat each storyline with different choices, which are not that many per LI and each story is not too long, so it's not too difficult, until they get all the endings). This monotony is aggravated by the fact that the worldbuilding is pretty flat and not intriguing. The stories generally feel low-stakes.
The art is very good: it's less cartoony than other YPress products that had the issue of making everyone too clean and cutesy so that you wouldn't really take the sometimes hard situations seriously (I remember the one in the space prison). The sex scenes are definitely well drawn, although they possibly lack a bit of spunk (you would imagine orc sex being messier and rougher -and even when it is rougher in the story I don't think the images convey that). They are also not that many and structured very similarly throughout each storyline (one at the beginning, possibly one in the middle, one not involving you but the elf prince and one at the end) and also more or less with the same tone.
There is also a sort of capital sin of putting the by far more exciting scene just at the very beginning, so that everything that follows cannot really compete with that. Still, the characters are rather well defined and there has been some effort in making the LIs not just copies of the brutal orc stereotype.
So in general this is a rather run-the-mill VN with not many interesting points but that will scratch the itch of those that like orc (and especially orc-elf) sex. Worth going through to get the sex scenes but it hasn't left much impression on me.
Gay needle: 100% gay, no risk of seeing anything but cocks and asses here (even the characters are all male except for one cameo)
Orcs are very popular so of course YPressGames jumped on the bandwagon. The story is vaguely convoluted and ultimately not that interesting: an elf king asks you to recover his son that was sent as an envoy to the orcs (at kinda war with the elves) and was kept as a captive. Twist: you're actually the son of the king that the current king usurped and executed, so you have your own agenda. Ah, you're a powerful and manipulative mage with a small dragon familiar. Various intrigues and (maybe) love will get on the way of your goals.
So the bases are decent, but it quickly develops in the usual and frankly expected tracks. In full YPressGames style, you choose your love interest (in a very unsubtle way -literally you have a choice with the four names) very early in the game.
As far as I've seen, all the stories have kind of the same structure: you get the LI's trust, you can develop feeling that make you insecure on whether you actually want to just use them as tools for your objective, there's one main obstacle along the way (usually linked to the elf king's son who's a brat) and then the resolution with different endings per LI (completists would rinse and repeat each storyline with different choices, which are not that many per LI and each story is not too long, so it's not too difficult, until they get all the endings). This monotony is aggravated by the fact that the worldbuilding is pretty flat and not intriguing. The stories generally feel low-stakes.
The art is very good: it's less cartoony than other YPress products that had the issue of making everyone too clean and cutesy so that you wouldn't really take the sometimes hard situations seriously (I remember the one in the space prison). The sex scenes are definitely well drawn, although they possibly lack a bit of spunk (you would imagine orc sex being messier and rougher -and even when it is rougher in the story I don't think the images convey that). They are also not that many and structured very similarly throughout each storyline (one at the beginning, possibly one in the middle, one not involving you but the elf prince and one at the end) and also more or less with the same tone.
There is also a sort of capital sin of putting the by far more exciting scene just at the very beginning, so that everything that follows cannot really compete with that. Still, the characters are rather well defined and there has been some effort in making the LIs not just copies of the brutal orc stereotype.
So in general this is a rather run-the-mill VN with not many interesting points but that will scratch the itch of those that like orc (and especially orc-elf) sex. Worth going through to get the sex scenes but it hasn't left much impression on me.