Harem Trigger is an adult-oriented FPS in where we play as a regular student simply called “M”. Upon beginning, he immediately witnesses some form of gas attack in his school that causes all the females to go feral with lust. Luckily for him, he is saved by the only seemingly sane girl left, who promptly gives M a gun that can shoot the sanity back into girls. It is an odd tale for sure, though it is told in quite the tongue in cheek manner and never seems to take itself seriously.
Your first gun will be a small SMG and a sawed-off Shotgun like weapon. Some of them may look like actual firearms, but they only shoot a pink mist that blasts the clothes right off of its target and puts her in a state of ecstasy, unable to fight any longer. These girls are like the zombies in Left 4 Dead; they will sprint right towards you without any sense of self-preservation and overwhelm in great numbers. They are even deadlier in fact, as while they may playfully kick and slap you, they can also grab you for massive damage and require you to rapidly left click to escape their grasp as soon as possible.
Gameplay is a mix of old school design and new. You move very quickly and are easily able to run circles around most any foe. There is no regenerating health, it is necessary to break apart boxes scattered around the level in the hopes that they have a heart item to heal with. None of the enemy attacks are hit-scan, meaning that a skilled player can avoid any damage and encourages movement instead of camping behind cover. Where the more modern design comes into play is in the gunplay itself. You really do need to aim as shooting from the hip is insanely inaccurate, to the point that it feels like most of your bullets disappear into the ether once they leave your barrel.
Your character can only carry two weapons at any one time, and he does need to reload as well. Other than that, for the most part, it does feel like the shooters of yesteryear. As ridiculous as this may sound, I could not stop thinking how similar this felt to Serious Sam as I faced overwhelming numbers of enemies and rarely stopped firing. The beginning sections, the ones that you will see from the demo really doesn’t represent what you can expect from Harem Trigger. One may assume that it will be a one trick pony and that the easy to handle starting enemy is all it has to offer. That would be a huge mistake, as you will soon find out this title is full of surprises.
There are many enemy types to contend with outside of the basic girls that sprint at you. Some can fly, others have various different types of ranged weaponry, and some carry shields leaving very little vulnerable spots to shoot at, to name a few. Choosing your targets becomes vital as you unload into the seemingly never-ending horde and dodge out of the way of incoming bullets. Once you start your reload animation you can’t stop it either. A better option may be to fire until it is nearly dry, switch to your back up weapon, and then take the time to reload when the coast is clear.
After a few levels, you also gain the ability to temporarily slow down time after a certain amount of kills or damage received. It helps massively while trying to make a precise shot and you don’t have to reload while in that state. There are multiple guns you can purchase with the credits you earn from completing a level. They must first be unlocked via special conditions on a case to case basis, though are easy tasks to accomplish like defeating a certain amount of foes in slow-mo or being grabbed enough. Soon enough, you’ll have access to a plethora of weapons ranging from missile launchers, several types of machine guns, and sillier things, like a hand pistol where you shoot out of your finger.
There is a surprisingly large amount of weapons to play with and taking two that complement each other is a pretty good idea. Say a long ranged rifle and grenades to nail incoming hordes, or an SMG for midrange and a shotgun for when they get too close. The environments change from level to level. Some may be large and open-ended, as well as have jump pads like if we were suddenly playing Quake 3, while others will have you trying to merely survive three minutes in a small arena. That in combination with the continually emerging types of enemies will motivate us to experiment more with our weapons.
I did not expect to be using jump pads to launch myself dozens of feet into the air and rain rockets down into a horde of hostile schoolgirls eagerly awaiting below when I booted up Harem Trigger. Nor did I expect the gameplay to be so darn solid, fun, and engaging from the basic looking corridor shooter the demo made it out to be. It is nearly comical how deep you can immerse yourself into it and are desperately trying to survive the onslaught of schoolgirls because it gets quite challenging later on. When starting a level, you are given a choice of three difficulty settings. Hard is the one you should go to if you are familiar with old school FPS games. Normal is for those who just want a bit of a challenge and Easy if you simply want to enjoy shooting the clothes off of people.
The clothes mechanic is quite the handy way to tell at a glance how damaged an enemy is. Good thing too since you do not have much time to examine things as this is a pretty fast-paced game. The more torn their clothes are, if any is even left, the closer she is to being defeated. It really helps out in those split-second decisions in whether you decide to rush a ranged enemy that is readying for an attack or choose to punch a hole through the enemy forces and run past them to get out of a sniper’s sights. Another unique aspect compared to other FPS titles, is that you should not aim for the head here. Their weak spot is their groin and shooting them there will take them down much faster.
Levels typically require one of three things from you. To survive a given amount of time, manage to reach a specified location, or take out a certain amount of foes. All of them are pretty short, and won’t take much of your time to complete. And then you have full-fledged boss fights. Despite already having learned this was a far better game than I initially thought it would be, I was once again surprised when I reached a boss fight. They are great. I was baffled when I reached the first boss and soon found myself weaving in and out of strategically placed rooms to avoid the incoming fire of a chain-gun toting enemy. While pinned down by heavy fire I also had to deal with her rapidly approaching grunts and take the occasional potshot when she lost my position. With that image in your head, you can see how one can very quickly forget they are playing a hentai title shooting the clothes off of girls.
Harem Trigger is not content just sticking with the same gameplay all throughout. It will occasionally spice things up through a variety of ways. One such way is the sniper levels where you must defend a position at any cost. These stages are very open, giving enemies many areas from where they can pop out of and attempt to overrun you. You can adjust the magnification of your scope to zoom in your view to easier see your targets, or zoom out to see more of your environment. Then you have a realistic bullet drop mechanic, in where your projectile will slightly arc down the longer the distance of your shot is. With how slow the rate of fire for the sniper is, missing a shot can be fatal, so adjusting your aim accordingly is a must.
Slow, well-placed shots will be essential when on a sniper level. Shooting a girl in the groin will take her down in one shot, while it may take a few more if you are aiming at her body. Luckily, we can still use our slow-motion ability, and that also means we no longer need to reload after every shot. That will be your trump card when you are being hopelessly overrun. You are not entirely stationary either during these sections, you have a small area you can move around in on your vantage point. That is very important to remember when enemies bring in snipers of their own, and you are given a brief moment to dodge out of the way if they get a shot off before you do. These are some of the most intense sections of the game, and even a boss fight is centered around sniping. Not since the Stalingrad level of Call of Duty: World at War have I experienced such intense sniper faceoffs.
If you don’t like these levels, you can pay a bit of in-game cash to skip any stage you choose and move on to those that you enjoy. All of the weapons are unlocked via other means, so you won’t miss out on anything if you don’t complete certain levels. Another way Harem Trigger switches things up is by shrinking you. Some of the girls will be shrunk as well, though not all of them. These giants are indestructible and may accidentally kill you by stepping on you. It is was quite neat seeing the school from such a tiny perspective and terrifying when these giants actually noticed you and tried to catch you. Also quite awesome is when you get to drive around in a helicopter and shoot at them to replicate that one movie scene where King Kong is swatting at planes.
By now, I’m sure many people are wondering where the hentai parts of this title come in. Well on two occasions. The first is when a girl grabs you. Once she has her holds on you, she will perform various sexual acts like footjobs and unwanted fellatio. Up to three girls can catch you at once, and there are various different animations that can play out. You do not want this to happen, as while being sexually assaulted, your life will rapidly start draining until you manage to struggle yourself free via rapidly left clicking. The second occasion occurs on certain special story-based levels, in where you are captured for a variety of reasons and must have sex against your will. In these, you can change the camera around to any position that you like and can choose when your character ejaculates.
All of the sex here is of the female domination variety. You will always be tied up and have no control of the events occurring. It is not a fetish for everyone, though is hardly the main focus of the game and an addition that can be skipped or turned off entirely in the case of being grabbed in game, for those that don’t care for it. When not fighting it out on the battlefield that was once your school or in a lewd section, you’ll be in one of the many cut-scenes that occur before and after every level. Most of it isn’t voiced and is told solely through text. The English translation is pretty decent with only a few errors here and there.
The entire plot revolves around trying to stop this outbreak, as well as saving a few of your friends along the way. There is quite a lot of dialogue that occurs, and while decent enough for what it is, can all be skipped if you choose. Its music is all upbeat and cheery to fit with the tone of the game, though there is a severe lack of variety. In fact, that was what made it so tempting to skip all of the cutscenes, merely to avoid listening to any more of a track that plays far too often. While on the topic of negatives, I should mention that picking a resolution over 1080p will cause the game to letterbox. It will cut off good chunks out of both corners of the screen and even weapon models, making it very difficult to gauge your surroundings with that pseudo tunnel vision.
Even when cranking up all the graphical settings, the game still has this blurry look to it, as if it was rendering at a much lower resolution than even 1080p. The way your character holds his guns is sure to annoy some, myself included, and some of the weapons such as shotguns feel far too underpowered. Strangely enough, even the boxes containing the power-ups take far too much damage to break apart. It takes a good couple of seconds and an entire clip to crack one open, making trying to do so while in battle too risky and defeating the purpose of it being there in the first place. This is only a real problem in the small arena levels that task you with surviving as you get no downtime to slowly try and pry out a health item, though even with all the time in the world it is an unnecessary quirk.
Your enemies, for the most part, feature decent AI and can navigate around the levels fluidly. They do seem to completely stop functioning if you engage them from too far a distance, only standing around until you defeat them or get close enough for the AI to register your existence. Enemy types are easily recognizable from one another, so like being able to tell how much damage they’ve taken by their torn clothes, you can formulate a strategy as soon as you take a glance into a room. Even your primary foes never stop to be threatening as they can quickly be the end of you if you get too cocky or ever stop moving around.
Not counting the hentai levels, there are slightly under 30 of them to get through. Each of these stages does a decent job to differentiate themselves from one another and can be replayed again at any time for extra currency. Alongside weapons, you can purchase some permanent stat boosts to your character such as more overall health or bullet time. I never found them necessary, but they are there if the game starts giving you too much trouble and you refuse to skip any levels. Overall, Harem Trigger should take you a couple of hours to complete. Disappointingly enough, there isn’t anything unlocked once you do so, be it a new weapon or a simple test room to view character models and clothes damage.
Harem Trigger is not perfect, but man did it far exceed any reasonable exceptions I had for it. It has clearly had quite a lot of love and work put into it by someone that knows how to create a good FPS. They also went above and beyond to keep the gameplay varied with all manners of interesting twists to keep you entertained all through the 30ish levels. On top of that, there is also a ton of guns and achievements to unlock, bosses to fight, and women to save. The hentai aspect and the fact that you are literally shooting the clothes off of your foes may be enough for some to immediately dismiss it, though if you’ve ever wanted a Serious Sam like game with anime waifus, Harem Trigger is your game.
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