Review: Agent of Love

From Delusional Inc, Agent of Love is a free-to-start josei otome game centered around solving mysteries and dealing with family drama. The season-based game offers the prologue and chapter one of each route for free as you play as the police chief’s adopted daughter. Forced by your job as a detective into an underground society full of crime and intrigue, you never expected love to come your way. What new secrets will you unlock?

Right off the bat, it’s important to note that this is a freemium game with all the expected trappings and structures therein. After the first free chapter and prologue, there are sets of unlockables for each of the love interests. There’s the main story (22 to 23 chapters), an 8-10 chapter “his side POV,” a couple chapters of epilogue, and a secret scene. Compared to a lot of other freemium games, it’s not a terrible pricing structure. You don’t have to pay for each individual chapter, for example, and it’s a not a terrible way to create a modular game. Doing some quick math, it’s about $13-15 per love interest route, so about $80-90 for the “full” experience with all six love interests currently available. This doesn’t count new seasons planned for the future. So while the pricing structure allows you to buy as much or as little game as you want, you have to decide if it’s a price you’re willing to pay for the amount and quality of game provided.

The discussion of price is more pertinent for this game precisely because of the pay scheme. The price for the “full experience” also sets it up to be compared with other games of a similar retail value, and I’m not sure the overall production quality lives up to that expectation. The writing is perfectly fine. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but I can appreciate the more mature and nuanced approach to the story they’ve taken. The detective angle is very fun and engaging. The love interests themselves are, again, fine. There’s a little of everything personality-wise, from the childhood friend to the mysterious doctor to the “it’s okay, he’s not actually your brother” character to the tsundere coworker. Their sprites are polished and professionally rendered, but they’re pretty standard ikemen-style characters with fairly unremarkable designs. The same can be said of the CGs—serviceable, but not extraordinary.

The rest of the visuals and the base functionality, however, are unpolished and underwhelming. There aren’t any bespoke, hand-illustrated backgrounds, the game instead pairing the illustrated sprites with filtered photographs. The UI is both visually and functionally simplistic. It gets the job done, but it’s not very aesthetically pleasing. At first glance, it seems like some of this may be the consequence of cross-platform development between mobile and PC, but based off screenshots, it’s not particularly optimized for phones either. So it just feels like an overall incomplete game with the bare minimum attention paid to assets and development. In that specific way, it’s very much like other freemium games.

If you want a straightforward otome game with handsome men and a slightly more mature bent, this is the game for you. If you like the ability to only have to pay for routes you want to play, this game is perfect for that, as well. It has a lot to offer for the casual romance visual novel player, and it’s certainly not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. It is very clearly, however, the result of a development process that favors quantity of monetizable content over its quality, so having that mindset going in makes it a more enjoyable gameplay experience.

You can get Agent of Love on Steam, the Google Play Store, and the App Store.