HunieCam Studio Review

Despite being a bit too overt with some of its sexual content, made worse by a later patch, I really liked HuniePop. It was a game about learning more about and establishing relationships with a diverse and interesting group of characters, including a catgirl, an alien, and even a spoiled little mall brat. It featured sharp and clever writing with high quality voicework, and was a pretty compelling puzzle game to boot. So when I caught wind of a sequel, I noted it, ignored it for a couple months, picked it up to play, and… yeah.

HunieCam Studio Review
Platforms: PC(Reviewed), Mac, Linux
Developer/Publisher: HuniePot
Specifications: Intel i7-4790, 16GB of RAM, R9 390, Windows 10

Set in universe 2B of the ever developing Hunie Multiverse, HunieCam Studio puts you in the role of a nonexistent manager of a cam girls site. A job mostly consisting of recruiting women, helping them gain a few fans with a photo shoot, sending them to strip on the internet in exchange for money, and then reaping in the goods to further expand your operation. It’s a click heavy management game, more along the lines of a social or mobile game than a proper simulator. As a member of that genre, it’s well devised with enough mechanics gradually introduced to the player to remain engaging as time is of the essence, and you always have something to keep you preoccupied.

While all well and good, the most interesting part of HuniePop, its dialog and characters, are unfortunately put aside. The eighteen employees at your disposal, made up of new and recurring characters, are only characterized interstitial quips, their designs, a few traits, and a two sentence bio. The only character to get meaningful dialog is the sex fairy Kyu, who presents a raunchy, witty, and overall funny tutorial, but nothing else.

Meaning the game’s quality is built on its cosmetic premise and the underlying gameplay. Where you maneuver your girls around across nine locales, trying to keep profits up, invest in upgrades, train your employees, make payroll, and build yourself a nice little harem of cam girls. You do that for about two hours, and the game comes to a close. You are awarded with a penis trophy depending on how many fans you accumulated, which I didn’t realize on my first playthrough, and some tokens to unlock new designs for your girls, and vary up the screen you stare at and click for hours.

There are strategies to maximizing your fan count, but all you get for it are cosmetics and a score. Once you unlock every girl, see what their profile says about them and wonder how well devised these characters could have been in a hypothetical HuniePop 2, there really is nothing more to gain by playing this. HunieCam is engrossing; those two hours I spent on my first playthrough passed by very quickly, but since the game is largely the same after that, I saw little reason to go through with a second one, amounting to only about four hours of playtime before I got bored with it. Bored with the gameplay, and tired of the mostly static viewpoint of a city, drawn in a bubbly, bright, and cartoonish art style that is a little too reminiscent of cheap social games and things like Bratz dolls, not helped by those white heart pupils.

HunieCam Studio is good for what it is… but that’s about it. It’s a social game fleshed out and given an interesting subject matter and some mechanical depth, and little else. It can be an entertaining and replayable two hours, wherein you feed a girl some coke, send her to a sleazy motel, give her some pills to cure her of her of a venereal disease, and send her to get a cake so you can corner the market on the cake farting fetish. Beyond that layer of personality, it’s nothing special, and is largely devoid of what made the predecessor what it was.

I mean, there are no catgirls, aliens, sex puzzles, bribery, trivia, or tits. You can barely even jill off to this! How can you even call this a spin-off, you degenerate smut peddlers?