Hentai Stars

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Hentai Games Collection, along with Hentai Golf, Hentai Girls, and Hentai World.)

Hentai Stars is a Puzzle Game released on Nintendo Switch in 2023. And as the title indicates, yes, this is also an “ecchi” game featuring art of attractive anime-style girls, with said girls wearing increasingly revealing outfits and depicted in cheesecake poses, including some topless artwork. Anyway, beyond the titillation, the gameplay here is a basic tile-sliding puzzle game. Yup, that’s it.

Oh, and if this review seems like it’s almost completely copy-pasted from my review of Hentai World and Hentai Girls, that’s because this is the exact same game, just with different artwork.

Okay, as I’ve said before, I’m not a big fan of ecchi games, but I’m not necessarily opposed to them either, as long as they’re a decent game and as long as the sexy stuff works for the game. When it comes to Hentai Girls, I suppose the sexy stuff does work well for the game… but only because that’s pretty much all there is to this game.

To be fair, the anime-style artworks this game presents are nice, and the girls depicted do look attractive and well-designed. This artwork is backed by relaxed rhythmic music that seems like it’s out of a porn video. Unfortunately, this low bar for presentation is quickly undone by the fact that anyone reading this review can easily find countless images of similar or better quality in a quick web search, and since there’s no animation, no character, and no real niche this game fills.

This is made worse by just how limited this game is – including all of the free DLC (parceled out so publisher RedDeer.Games can release a gazillion different versions of the game with different combinations of DLC on the eShop), it features only 15 unique artworks, as well as 4 variations of each of those works (varying states of undress for the girl depicted in said artwork). In fact, at least one image (the one used in this review, as it happens) is repeated in one of the DLCs, just with cat ears and a tail added. Players looking to actually play this game and not pause a lot to… er… “admire” the artwork… will find this game can be completed within 10 minutes, easily.

Of course, that gets me to the actual gameplay, if you can even call it that. There are children’s games with more complex gameplay – again, this is just a tile-sliding Puzzle game. There’s no nuance, no skill involved, not even a timer. In fact, each puzzle begins by showing you how its tiles are mixed up, making it easy to go through that path in reverse. Often, the puzzle doesn’t even mix up all the pieces, making things even easier.

Even this stupidly simple gameplay is something Hentai Stars gets wrong too, forcing players to use the analog stick when the directional pad would make more sense.

Even for a bare-bones ecchi game, Hentai Stars is pretty terrible. Not only does this game use one of the simplest puzzle types as the basis of its gameplay, but it proceeds to mess up even that simple task. And of course that’s ignoring that this game’s main selling point, the sexy girl art, is something made completely obsolete by the wealth of such images to be found on the internet. What’s more, there is so very little content here, one can’t help but wonder why this wasn’t just released as DLC for Hentai World or Hentai Girls, both games that are virtually identical and could use the extra content. In any case, for so many reasons, you absolutely should not get this game.

tl;dr – Hentai Stars is nominally a Puzzle Game, and as the title makes clear this is also an ecchi game with artwork of scantily-clad and topless girls in compromising poses. Unfortunately, the tile-sliding gameplay is more brain-dead than a children’s game, with terrible controls and some poor game design choices, and while the artwork is nice, it’s nothing interesting enough to sit through this boring gameplay just so you can ogle it. Besides, with only six unique images, there’s not much to ogle in the first place. Trust me, if you want porn, just look for porn. Don’t give this horribly shameless cash grab your money.

Grade: F

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