I let negative reviews persuade me to wait to buy College Kings Act II and III and found I loved them as much as the original. I wasn’t going to let negative reviews do the same for College Kings 2 Act I and bought it the day it was released. Once again I can’t agree with a lot of the criticism after finishing it and ended up enjoying myself. The one thing I want to talk about first that is a legitimate criticism was the lack of players being able to import saves from College Kings 1. I can understand that the developer probably figured that the Path Builder would be sufficient and on paper it is but in practice not so much. The path builder allows you to pick what your choices were from acts I through III with great detail. The problem I had was that once the game began it seemed to override some of my choices. For instance I picked that I had Lauren as a girlfriend, because in Acts I-III I did, but soon after starting CK 2 she was downgraded to “friend” for no reason and the rest of the game it was like she had no memory of our time in Europe. We went from sharing a bed after being her first to her only being comfortable with me sleeping on the couch after a party which just made no sense. Hell her sister Autumn had more attraction to me in CK 2 and in the first three acts I was strictly friendly nothing else. I don’t know if being able to import my saves would have fixed any of this but I would like to think it would. Otherwise I can simply say that in CK 2 I was very unhappy with how Lauren was handled. That being said there was a lot to be happy about as well. I really liked how things were progressing with Aubrey; Riley; Amber an Autumn. It felt like they all had a bit more time this act and got fleshed out nicely. I do wish Nora had more time in this act as I felt that Act III really started making interesting to me and I was hoping to build on that but she was largely absent. Emily was always a character I hated but at the same time enjoyed the interaction between the MC and her but she was also largely absent. The fight system was revamped and I actually liked it this time. I felt in CK1 it felt too random and hard to figure out a strategy but in CK2 it felt like the stances and details added made it much more fun and seemed more natural. I went from skipping fights to happy to play them. Sadly there was only one fight to partake in on my play through. The art models and object detail remained the same high quality as in CK1 and is still up there with the best in the genre in my eyes. There were transitions added as well for things like night to day and montages and they were really well done. The humour was also top notch, without adding spoilers I will say the whole carnival sequence was hilarious. CK2 added sounds to the lewd scenes in the way of moans from the girls. I would say that they didn’t really do anything for me. You can turn them off if you don’t like them so they really shouldn’t bother anyone. I think having actual voice acting would have been a better use of audio upgrades, granted that would have been a much larger expense and a lot more effort. The lewd scenes themselves were well done as before but there did seem to be less of them. As with previous CK acts I found the “chuckles” bit in the dialog to be overused but more so early on than later in the act.
I played College Kings 2 on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs or glitches outside of the path builder being wonky with relationships. You can manually save any time and there are fifty four save slots. Alt-tab didn’t work.
Game Engine: Ren’Py 7.4.11.2266
Graphics API: OpenGL
Game Version Played: 3.0.5s
Disk Space Used: 6.61 GB
GPU Usage: 0-28 %
VRAM Usage: 871-1691 MB
CPU Usage: 2-5 %
RAM Usage: 3.0-3.7 GB
Could one call the first act of College Kings 2 the weakest in the series thus far ? I think a case could be made. I would however have to say that a weak CK game is still better than most adult visual novels out there. People complained about length but I finished Act I in six hours and thirteen minutes and that is longer than it took me for CK1 Act I, II or III so I don’t know where people found it short. Despite the handling of Lauren’s and Nora’s angle and the lack of save imports there is a good game here and I liked where much of the story went. I paid $17.48 CAD for the deluxe edition of CK2 Act I and it was easily worth that price.
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 22.0.1 | Garuda Soaring White-tailed-eagle | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.17.3-zen1-1-zen