First off, my employers, ChristCenteredGamer, do not, under any circumstances, want to review this game on their site due to its content. I entirely understand that, and thus this is my own personal project, done entirely outside of their aegis, though since I did want to use a similar review format, I made them aware I wanted to do my review in a style like a CCG review, though I again repeat this has NOTHING to do with ChristCenteredGamer, this is entirely my own review, I just borrowed a similar format. this review is again, not supported or sanctioned by my employers, hence it is on my own personal blog. The game was purchased entirely on my own dime and has been sent back for a refund now that I have evaluated the content for the review written below.
Huniepop 2: Double Date is the sequel to the original by Huniepot. Its story is set two years after the first game, Huniecam Studio is non-canon despite them sharing some characters.
The story is that, two years later, You (the protagonist, either male or female) are an accomplished dating master and you are finishing a night of passion with a young lady when Kyu from the first game shows back up. According to her, it seems two nymphomaniac space whores are going to do bad things to Earth soon unless someone has enough experience with threesomes to please them to avoid this before they show up to cause trouble. With this premise in mind, you thus go to a resort isle near where they are supposed to appear soon, ostensibly to the ladies of the island to get some rest and relaxation, but secretly, to get enough experience with threesomes so you can stop said space harlots from screwing up the planet.
The gameplay is basically the same as the first game, except now you must ping-pong between two women on the date, and each has a "stress" meter, meaning if both ladies are too stressed, you lose automatically, meaning you must ping-pong between the two and keep their stress from getting too low in between getting Match-3 pairings. Otherwise, like any other Match-3 game, you must match up tokens till you reach your score goal to beat the levels on a square-based grid.
The gifts for dates were also overhauled. They must now be purchased with currency consisting of different fruits instead of the "Munie" and "Hunie" of the first game, and each level you beat will award certain fruits as well as certain conversation responses with the ladies outside of it as your currency. Stats to acquire certain tokens easier are now tied to the gifts system, so you must be wise in purchasing the exact gifts for the ladies, whose tastes are quite varied. The visual novel style conversation scenes now introduce a penalty/personality system in which certain girls reveal traits like jealousy, being old fashioned, and other quirks that further influence the gifts they like and conversation options likely to score bonus fruit.
The rest of the gameplay is otherwise the same as the first game, with the only difference being there is far less time before the sex scenes are shown (about two levels with the same two ladies must be beaten before seeing one). There is a censorship option to cover the ladies up with bras and panties, but the actual scenes leave nothing to the imagination as to what happened much like the first game's scenes.
Graphics follow a similar format as the first game, except the characters got improved detailing for returning characters and the new ones follow a similar pattern, with lighter colors to reflect the tropical backdrop and scenery of the island setting. The sound features music with musical tones and instrumental tracks like before, even a remix of the ice rink theme that became rather memorable from the first title despite the fact the setting has no ice (though when it plays the game winks and nods at this with the characters mentioning they have a weird urge to ice skate).
Voices are arguably worse than the first game. While none from the first game were overly bad, and while most of the returning characters sound decent enough, some of the new voice acting is pretty grating, especially the "weeaboo" character and the ones with the British sounding accents sounding strange especially.
Controls are like the previous title in being purely driven by the mouse for the most part. The game stability is somewhat worse, being a memory hog and taking a long time to load up, though the actual game loads reasonably well, though some players have apparently gotten stuttery gameplay and Linux playing via Proton is somewhat fluky.
Morally, I won't mince words, this game is a moral dumpster fire.
Violence is pretty much next to nonexistent, but the language hits every type of profanity one can possibly imagine at one point or another. Sexual content is pretty much Sodom and Gomorrah level, even censored, as all sorts of incredibly crude sexual jokes and references to the human body are omnipresent. Even censored, threesomes, lesbianism and all sorts of sexual kinks and fetishes are on display or are discussed in flagrant detail. There is an optional "transgender" character, but this is something of a "bait and switch" as they never take off their lower clothing (which a male bulge can be seen in if you had them default to the male option), so this both a bit misleading and tacky, as the game pretends the character is otherwise female even if you picked the male option.
God's name is taken in frequent vain, and one character is even an apparent adherent of the occult and Satanism, they can even be given gifts in this vein. One character who is particularly offensive (though this was obviously intentional) is a lesbian Muslim woman who works at the island airport as a member of the TSA, an obvious jab at the fact Muslims are usually stereotyped as terrorists. The said character has some of the most sexually explicit dialogue in the game and is obviously apostate from their faith, just to make the offensiveness even more obvious.
From a gameplay standpoint, this is several steps down from the first game, with some wonky new mechanics that feel tedious and unbalanced against the player, and overall it's much less fun than it should be. From a moral standpoint, it's a moral trash fire that I, as a devout Christian, do not recommend to any of my fellow Christians or anyone of any Abrahamic faith under any circumstance. Even censored this is too degenerate for anyone but adults only, and I obviously would ask they steer clear of this for moral reasons.
