Teatime is one of those game companies I can’t make up my mind about. As I understand it they’re affiliated with, or part of the same company as Illusion, a company I hold in high regards. Like Illusion, Teatime specializes in making 3D hentai games but unlike them their primary genre is lolicon. Sounds like a recipe for success if you ask me!
Delicious lolis is one of Teatime’s strengths and in a sense what defines them as a company. Love Death 3 is yet another showcase on how excellent they are at rendering loveable little girls and the subtle cel-shading only adds to the appeal of the game. Teatime has always had this strength, but at the same time they have never truly grasped the technicalities of 3D gaming. The controls are nothing short of abysmal. It’s like no-one at the company has ever played an FPS in their lives. All of the lessons learned from 15 years of 3D games are lost on this game.
LD2 was a technical mess with load times over 5 minutes long and constant crashes and various bugs. It was more or less unplayable. I was hoping LD3 would solve some of those problems and while the load times are slightly better (but by no means good), the game still suffers from several technical issues.
Most of the blame can be cast on the game’s engine, which is either poorly made or just outdated. It seems to constantly be shuffling things in and out of memory which causes the game to stutter even on a modern computer. This is the year 2008 and 3D graphics are not rocket science anymore. Most problems have already been solved and it’s not pushing that many polygons to begin with.
That is another problem I have with this game, and it applies to pretty much all 3D hentai games: all of the rendering budget is spent on the characters and none on the surrounding environment. The characters all look great but the environments are terrible. Nintendo 64-terrible! And I’m not even joking. I understand if they want to put most of the processing power into the main actors of the game, but this is ridiculous.
I had some screenshots of a few bugs and glitches, but when I went to find them for this blog post they were gone! It turns out that every time you start LD3 the screenshot counter is reset and new screenshots will overwrite the old ones. Fantastic!
I can go on and on about the problems in this game, but let’s mode on and talk about the most important part of any hentai game: the sex play.
LD3 is a for all intents and purposes a visual novel so naturally there are a lot of story and dialog to get through. It will take you several hours before reaching the first consensual sex scene and then they all seem to follow one after another before the game finally ends. However, if you’re as impatient as I you can jump out of almost every conversation and roam the game world freely.
While roaming you can look around for special items and outfits as well as interact with any of the girls in the game when encountered.
This is where the game gets weird. Aside from talking to them like you would expect, you can also do more questionable things. For instance you can edit their physical proportions by dragging sliders, in case you want the girls to be shorter/taller or have bigger/smaller breasts. You can also grope and molest them, whereas they will complain and scream but will eventually climax. If you can get them to orgasm a couple of times they will fall over and you can engage in sex. If the girl likes you she will gladly offer herself to you. If however she doesn’t like you enough it will essentially constitute as rape and she will cry for help and struggle. I know that some people find that super sexy. I’m not one of them.
The sex itself is visually pleasing but doesn’t offer anything new we haven’t already seen in other hentai games. There are a set of different poses you can use and you only get to control the speed of the animation with your mouse. The animations are okay but somewhat exaggerated. A bar fills up and when it’s full the girl will come. It’s not nearly as deep or fun as the sex play found in Artificial girl 3 where simultaneous orgasm was an important part of success.
There are other ways you can interact with the girls this but I won’t dwell on it. LD3, like other games from Teatime, look deviously great in screenshots so to give you a better sense of the game I posted a (safe for work) video below.
Love death 3 – Realtime lovers is a partially attractive game with some major flaws. Still, if you’re able to ignore its painfully obvious problems you may at least enjoy the visuals or the story if you read Japanese. Fucking around in the environment can be fun but also frustrating when the game engine rears its ugly face. Every time a game like this is released it saddens me how much potential was lost because of poor technology and low ambitions and talent.
Score:
2/5
