MG:SB Expansion: The British Are Coming
As promised, the expansion for Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business was released last week. Rather than being a free DLC, it was added directly to the original game. If you already owned the game, you just had to update. If you buy the game now, it includes the expansion.
I enjoyed playing the original game, and love playing the expansion. It expanded everything: new mini-games for the lunch dates, new outfits for your executives (so many new outfits), new features for the main game, and tons of new story content. That includes a third and final story arc to the game, which wraps up with a spectacular and satisfying conclusion.
Tone
The tone is consistent with the original game, still full of over-the-top absurdities, interspersed with the occasional genuinely affecting moments.
The (entirely optional) smut peddler now sells, in addition to the original pin-ups, erotic vignettes that pair together two of the twelve executives from the original game. Each vignette ends with a sexually-explicit illustration. This adds some actual erotica/porn to the game, although as before you can 100% skip it and miss nothing about the main story or the dates. But if you were like “why is there basically no sex in a game about Sexy Business?”: now there is.
Pronouns
Unless I missed it, the original game never referred to my character with pronouns, only by my chosen title. The expansion referred to my character as “they” at a few points. I’m guessing everyone gets “they”, although I don’t know. (My avatar has an hourglass figure, a beard, and chose “sir” as their title, so they do have a gender-ambiguous presentation.) I kind of felt like it was the gender-unknown they rather than the nonbinary they, which particularly amused me when used by the people who’d known my character the longest. ‘Yes, yes, we’ve known sir forever, but we couldn’t presume to know something as private as their gender.’
Gameplay
The new third act adds two of the major players from the first two acts as executives for your company. You can increase affection with them as you do with any other executive. But while you unlock story arcs with the other executives by increasing their affection, you unlock story arcs with the two new characters by progressing through the business campaign. The story arcs of the two new characters also are not romantic and do not have “establish romantic bond” as an option at the conclusion.
So they’re not love interests in the same way the original twelve are. But the story arcs are great and they further the main story.
The business campaign has a lot of new complexity in the third arc. If you've unlocked all three, the game now lets you pick which one you want to play when you start a new game, and ranks them in order of difficulty. So if you wanted to progress in the dating arcs without dealing with additional complexity in the business campaign, or if you want to practice on easy mode for longer, you’ve got that option. The new "lunch date" games are good -- they add more variety to the lunch dates and shore up what had been a weak spot in the game.
There are “lose” conditions in the game -- failure to make timely loan payments, or failure to beat a timed boss in time. I’ve lost to timed bosses twice, and doing so meant I had to restart the fight from the beginning, with a new timer. I’ve never failed to repay a loan on time, so I don’t know what happens if you do that.
I enjoyed the added complexity in the business campaign. It has new stuff that makes your company more powerful, and also new problems that mean you will need the extra power. It’s a lot more to manage, but I beat the third arc on my first playthrough of it (with 37 whole seconds to spare!) So it was challenging, but not too challenging to be fun.
SPECIAL NOTE:
One of the new complexities is “teamwork”, where two executives get better if they work together in pairs. When you raise teamwork between two characters to 6, you unlock a vignette between the characters. CHECK FOR THESE BEFORE YOU FINISH THE CAMPAIGN. Like all the other content, they’re replayable at any time ... but only if you watched them during the campaign where you earned them. I earned a lot of ones but missed the notification of “vignette available”. When I finished the campaign and went to look at them, I realized the game had only recorded the ones I’d already watched. Oops. (Teamwork resets at the end of the campaign, which the game had warned me about.)
I think there are 182 of these? Because there’s a vignette for every character pair and there are 14 characters? There’s a lot of these.
I’m gonna play the game some more to unlock more of the vignettes, but I don’t think I’ll be unlocking all 182.
[Edit: 132. Only applies to the original 12 executives, not the two added in the expansion.]
Main Storyline
The main storyline now has an EPIC conclusion. Very happy with the ending.
Overall, extremely pleased with the new material. I spent about 15.5 hours completing the third arc, and then started a new company because I wanted to play more and also so I could unlock more vignettes. The gameplay changes greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the non-story parts of the game. Definitely recommended!
This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/665067.html. Please comment there using OpenID.