Bazooka Cafe (PC) review "An adequate presentation and more than adequate bust size can't save the otherwise completely inadequate Bazooka Cafe"

If you had a harem of busty lasses that you could bed at the drop of a hat, chances are that you'd be a pretty happy guy. That's exactly the situation you'll be in as Bazooka Cafe's protagonist, Hideyuki Mizuno. After his father, the owner of a bustling cafe, suddenly collapses, Hideyuki is left with no choice but to take the reins and run the establishment. Lucky for him, all of the workers at the cafe happen to be cute girls with outrageously huge gazongas. Breasts large enough to have their own gravitational field and that laugh defiantly in the face of physics. Sounds like a good time, right?

Sort of. Bazooka Cafe's story revolves around four beautiful girls: Mitsuki, the ditz; Cocoa, the woman you regard as a maternal figure; Narumi, the brash, combative type; and Yayoi, the mature businesswoman. There's no hidden complexity here -- the cast is little more than a sampling of anime stereotypes. On the bright side, the actual plot is fairly fun to read through, as Hideyuki encounters all the inherently humorous harem antics you'd expect. Even so, claiming the story to be anything but fluff would be an outright lie -- this game exists for one reason: the sex. While Hideyuki might struggle to run a restaurant, he certainly has no problem serving these anxious hostesses a dish of his own, and does so with frightening regularity. You can expect the pants to come flying off at least once every five minutes once you've gotten close to one of the leading ladies. It's the very definition of a sex romp, but don't expect anything too risqué -- every scene is vanilla to the point where you could actually lose interest in sex long before the credits roll. The bigger problem, however, is that most of these scenes consist of a mere two pictures (with the second often being roughly the same as the first) and a whole lot of text. For a game focused squarely on the forbidden act, it's odd that there's so little to ogle at. The game does earn bonus points for letting you and your lady friend liberate yourselves in a back alley, but otherwise, don't expect too much.

If it's gameplay you're looking for, though, the cafe's fresh out. As with most games of this sort, you'll spend most of your time clicking through long passages of dialog and occasionally making choices that determine which girl you end up with in the end. The problem here is that you'll make a whopping two to three decisions that actually affect the outcome. What's worse, those decisions directly ask you which girl you want to be with. And you thought dating was a challenge. Once you've chosen your target and actually start dating her, the gameplay is over -- you'll spend the duration of the experience reading through text and watching Hideyuki express himself the only way he knows how.

With an expression like that, this can't be consensual.

Freelance review by C J (September 05, 2008) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.