Hentai games are not often taken seriously. Some developers are putting in genuine effort to create worthwhile games, while others are content with putting out trash that people will buy simply because it’s cheap. Enter Hentai Crush; a game that sells for less than 2 euros, which is still overpriced given the content you receive.

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Let’s not beat around the bush here: Hentai Crush is a rip-off of HuniePop. It’s a hentai dating sim in which dates take on the form of an arcade mini-game, though Hentai Crush uses Puzzle Bobble instead of Bejeweled.

Besides the core premise, other gameplay mechanics and design choices are lifted straight from HuniePop as well, albeit without understanding how these were meant to work. For example, Hentai Crush has an identical system (using a very similar interface) where you can talk with the girls to learn more about them. This info is then stored in a profile and that’s it. In HuniePop, the girls would quiz you on topics you’d asked them about before and react to your answers appropriately. In Hentai Crush it’s just a worthless profile with no further impact on gameplay.

There are many examples like this:

• The orbs in the Puzzle Bobble gameplay are said to reflect personality traits of the girls, but this doesn’t affect the gameplay or objective at all; whereas in HuniePop it was critical for your score to know which token were most valuable to which girl.
• Hentai Crush also has a special resource styled after Hunie, but doesn’t have anything to spend it on outside of cheating during the mini-games. Since these are so easy already, I never used it for anything.
• You can also buy gifts, again just like in HuniePop, but this only acts as a boost to the relationship meter. In HuniePop each girl had unique gift tastes and you’d get a reward in return for giving them something they liked.
• And there are visual similarities as well. The interface design and menus look very similar to HuniePop, though a lot clunkier and less responsive. The actual dates also look the same, with the girl standing to the side of the game board while commenting on your skills. The game even has a fairy companion during these mini-games, but unlike Kyu she doesn’t have any role in the story. She’s just kinda there and is never acknowledged, which is… weird.

Most hilarious of all is how the game copies HuniePop‘s structure. It uses a similar system where you have an app that lets you meet with its cast of girls, who are SUPPOSED to be available at different times. This isn’t implemented at all. The girls are always in the same location and their availability never changes. What happens instead is that each level of the relationship (5 hearts, just like HuniePop) allows you 1 date and 3 questions, after which the girl will always claim to be busy. You then buy them gifts to boost the relationship to the next level, whereupon you can immediately start dating and talking with them again.

You can just go to a girl and, in 1 visit, max out the entire relationship by just looping through this process. There is an achievement for maxing out each girl in under 50 in-game days, which I got in a 1/5th of the allotted time once I realized how the game actually worked.

Another disappointment are the girls themselves. HuniePop was made interesting by the wide variety of characters you could romance, but Hentai Crush has a very clear preference. All its girls are around 1 meter 60, 50-55 kilograms, have large breasts, and are (with 1 exception) all virgins. Hentai Crush is the white bread of erotic video games. Sure, the girls have some variety in their designs and personality, but none of its is particularly memorable. You’ll have to excuse me if I am not about to lose my mind over such phenomenal archetypes like “sexy nurse” or “cute idol”.

What fondness one could have for the characters is further soured by the game’s translation. All the dialogue comes of as stilted, with some conversations going so far as to be actually confusing. The phrasing and word choice are just so strange; I often found myself having to re-read sentences several times to make sense of them. This is matched by your own dialogue options, which are just as awkward and sometimes actually bug out. Options are duplicated or lines from one option overflow into the one below it. It’s inexcusably messy.

Once you get to the erotic content, you’ll quickly notice that it’s nothing remarkable. Instead of the detailed CG pictures you unlocked at each stage of a relationship in HuniePop, here the girls will gradually strip down as you progress their romance. At 5 hearts you can then initiate a sex scene, where you button-mash or wiggle the mouse around while watching some animations loop. These are short, vanilla, poorly-animated, and lazy.

Each girl has 3 scenes and then you’re done. Of these 3 scenes, the first 2 are always the same foreplay scene—one with clothes, one undressed—followed by 1 scene of actual sex. Hilariously, the game has a meter that fills up as the scene progresses, but it never fills up all the way and seems to get stuck at random. They couldn’t get a stupid meter graphic to work properly. Amazing.

Hentai Crush is an extreme budget solution if you want to play a hentai game, but almost any other title will be a better choice if you got a few more euros to spend. At best, I’ll admit that the game has some decently-functional Puzzle Bobble gameplay and the character sprites aren’t horrible. However, the game’s cast is utterly bland and dialogue with these characters is borderline-unplayable on account of the rocky translation. The erotica is nothing special and 2 hours later you’ve seen it all; by which I mean you’ve seen all 7 brief sex scenes the game has to offer.

Splurge a bit and get yourself a game that’ll actually last you a while.