Hyperdimension Neptunia U: Action Unleashed

Skip Straight to the Horny Parts

Synopsis

A dissappointing Nep

"Hyperdimension Neptunia U: Action Unleashed" is a non-canon beat-em-up (bmup) game in the Neptunia series, developed by Idea Factory, Compile Heart, and Tamsoft, and Published by Idea Factory International. It was released initially for the Vita in 2014 (2015 internationally) and re-released on steam in 2016.

Hyperdimension Neptunia has been popular in the world of "cute, and kinda horny" games since the first release in 2010. Action Unleashed ups the ante a little bit by being the first game in the series to include a clothes-ripping mechanic. As you fight through hoards (and I do mean hoards. Too many hoards) of enemies, if you take too much damage, your clothing rips, making you more vulnerable.

The game revolves around you, controlling ten characters in tag-team matchups to go on quests. The eight CPUs and CPUs Candidates (basically gods in the Neptuniaverse) look for action for the two newcomers, Famitsu and Dengekiko (named for the Japanese game review magazines), to write articles about them.

The core gameplay is just beating up vast amounts of enemies. Unfortunately, the 'difficulty' comes solely from the fact that many of the enemies are HP sponges. You run around, killing hundreds of enemies literally for about 15 minutes, then a boss comes out, then you kill him, and that's that. The variation in enemies is incredibly limited, and it gets old fast. Once you get an item that allows you to activate HDD mode, Neptune can beat entire levels by simply mashing X.

That's all there is to this game. You fight large groups of homogenous enemies, You get a few bits of VN style story in between, and you unlock a few costumes and weapons. Not nearly as many outfits as you'd expect, though. These are acquired by gathering medals from the enemies you defeat. One of my main complaints here is that when you gather enough medals, there's no notification that you've earned enough to unlock anything, you have to actually go and look at the medals page, scroll through every monsters, and see what's changed.

Horny Parts

The following is a list of Horny components in this game, in order from least horny to most horny

• HDD Mode

  When the CPUs enter HDD mode, they seem to get about 8 years older, get bigger boobs, and do a lot more damage. They are also chilling out in skin tight suits and have a bunch of floating robot parts around them. Don't worry, the HDD mode clothes rip too.

• Costume Break

  When your characters take too much damage, their clothes break! Oh noooo!

Horniest Part

• Nude Mod

  It just wouldn't be a PC game if there wasn't a nude mod! The only one I could find was on Undertow, which took quite a bit of clicking through articles to actually get to. The mod does what you'd expect. Instead of getting to see a bra and panties when taking damage, now you get to see everything! It even updates the title card.

The mod is pretty good, although there's something about the nipple placement that seems off. I can't really put my finger on it though.

Rating

Negative

I really wanted to like this game going in because I love Neptunia, but this game just failed to deliver. I appreciate that they tried to increase the horny factor by adding clothing damage, but it's not enough to hide the fact that there's maybe 20 minutes of game here padded out with hours of fighting the same enemies in the same environments over and over again. If you want some good horny Hyperdimension Neptunia fun, then I suggest you play Gun Gun Pixies. At least that lets you take the form of a tiny lesbian and jump onto Neptune and Noire's bare boobs.

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