So the save system in Homelander is this weird checkpoint thing that feels like when you're cooking something and the recipe just says "salt to taste" but you've never made this dish before and the pan is already smoking. You get these autosaves right before big choices but sometimes the choice you wanted to make three screens ago is already locked in because you clicked through some dialogue too fast while trying to find the skip button that's hidden in a menu I still can't find consistently. I spent like twenty minutes trying to figure out if I could go back and not be a dick to this one character who turns out to be way more important than the game initially lets on.

The whole orphaned protagonist meets mysterious woman thing is whatever, you've seen it, but then the sci-fi elements start bleeding through the fantasy setting in ways that actually got my attention. There's this scene where you're in what looks like a medieval tavern but someone pulls out a device that's clearly tech, not magic, and nobody acknowledges the dissonance. That moment stuck with me more than any of the sex scenes honestly. The CG art during the lewd bits is fine, standard hentai stuff, but the faces sometimes look like they're reacting to a completely different thing than what's happening. Like one character's expression during a supposedly intense moment made me laugh out loud, which I don't think was the goal.

The Homeland stuff builds slow, maybe too slow if you're just here to crank one out. You meet people from different walks of life like the description says but some of them feel like they wandered in from a different game entirely. There's this one side character who runs a shop and she has more personality than half the romance options, but you can't do anything with her. That's the kind of thing that drives me nuts in these games. Why make her interesting if I can't at least try to fail at seducing her. The replayability angle is there if you care about seeing how the bonds actually change the endgame defense of the Homeland, but getting there requires sitting through conversations that feel like they're padded with extra lines just because someone was paid by the word.