Sometimes you just have to let your morbid curiosity get the better of you and take the plunge into something that internet spouts hyperbole about. And sometimes it pays to be your own judge. Such is the case with ecchi puzzle/dating sim HuniePop, as this game is actually pretty fun. Although it does a few things to try to set itself from it's counterparts, it's has one design decision that hurts it a bit.

The game is a dating-sim that has your nameless protagonist having a dream of a failed attempted at hitting on a girl at a bar. They wake up to find the same person in their dream in their room. She announces herself as Kyu, the Love Fairy. Her purpose is help you become the biggest player in town and with her advice and encouragement, you can succeed. There are 8 girls in town to date, and you can chat them up to learn about their stats, which you then need to remember when they quiz you. Doing this gives you Hunie Points, which are used to increase your traits. Traits will do various things during the dating segments to help you succeed at them.

The dates are actually the puzzle part of the game. It suddenly becomes a match-three game like Bejeweled. There are several types of tokens to earn affection points in, and depending on the girl your are on a date with, they will receive more or less points. And of course getting match-4 or 5's are the best to do, but they require some luck. Getting combos are more preferred. You can also use Date Gifts to help you out in various ways, like turning all the negative-point broken hearts into bells, to give you more moves. To use the gifts, you need sentiment points. And Passion tokens increase the amount of affection points you can earn from any given token match. Once the fourth date is complete and it's night, you take the girl home and, of course get it on in a 'climaxing' variant of the match-three game. In this mode, you constantly need to string matches or combos together to fill up the affection meter. If this isn't done, it will drain. A little too quickly at times in fact. So this portion can take longer than necessary. Outside of this, you will need other gifts, to help you out. You need to use the Munie gained from dates, and buy gifts for the girls based on their preferences. It might take more than one gift to do this though. You can also buy food to make them more responsive to talking or even going on a date. However you can even get them intoxicated to earn more Hunie points while talking to them.

And this is where the game's game's biggest shortcoming possibly lies. While the game is a dating sim, and even advertises itself as having visual novel elements, it fails to fully capitalize on that premise. Other than the intro and outro scenes, there is zero character development. All that the player is left with are characters that posses a one-dimensional presentation, making the game feel a bit shallow. This certainly isn't helped by the fact that the dialog is was written to be edgy, and drops the 's' and 'f' bombs. Although the game isn't afraid to get a bit racy either. Kyu's or Audrey's commentary can also be borderline offensive. Sometimes to the point of being comical, but offensive nonetheless. It's certainly groan-worthy. I just wish there some development there to shine some of these characters in a better light.

But ultimately, this game manages to get by on the strength of it's match-three formula laced with the dating-sim gimmick and the humor itself. It should be noted that the version on steam is the edited version, and the DRM-free version on MangaGamer is the 18+ version, making the game an eroge, and thus even racier. It's the same price and comes with a steam key anyway. There are ways to patch the censorship, however. Music and voice acting are serviceable, and there’s some bits of humor there to help it along. Although the language is strong and the game can get racy, it still a surprising amount of fun. But it's lack of any kind of story or character development hurts it a bit. Still, it's worth a look for those who are curious and are hungry for a match three game with a twist.       

The Bottom Line: A fun yet racy take on the both the puzzle and dating sim genres despite not capitalizing on the visual novel elements.  

Acquisition Method: Digital Review copy provided by Mangagamer