SMACS Review

[CottonFluff]

So I threw together a written review of Zekel's SMACS Idle game (with his blessing). I figured it would be fun since we don't really have many spanking games on the site to talk about, and it makes for some good community interaction opportunities if we share experiences related to something this unique.

The review contains spoilers, so if you'd rather play it blind, I recommend downloading the game and giving it a shot before reading the full thing. Either way, you can find the most recent version on Zekel's official thread here: http://animeotk.com/forum/showthread...l?t=23836.html

It's a bit wordy, so I decided starting a new thread would work better than bogging down Zekel's thread - I'll post a link to this article there. If you have any input about the review, feel free to give comments and suggestions here (and let me know if I got something wrong! It was a lot of stuff to parse through as an amateur reviewer, and it's entirely possible I attributed something to the wrong person. But no worries - I will gladly fix it or post a correction at the end of the post if you let me know). If you want to give more input to Zekel about the game, feel free to post it in the thread linked above.

Happy gaming!

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SMACS Review
By CottonFluff
September 21, 2015

Idle games are a dime a dozen these days. Games like Cookie Clicker, Clicker Heroes, Bitcoin Billionare, and AdVenture Capitalist litter the internet with simple situations that people can waste hours on, just tapping their mobile screens or breaking their mice with incessant hammering. To be fair, they have their charm – easy to pick up, very addicting, and in some cases, quite creative in their excuses to have you digitally pick away at an infinitely-sized mountain with a toothpick. There’s just something satisfying about watching those numbers go up that makes us want to come back for more.

To this end, Zekel has brought us our own idle game – a spanking themed fetish idle called SMACS (Schoolgirl Maniac’s Academical Correction Simulator). At the time of writing, the most up to date edition is the 1.3 version with a mod by zae to add extra content to the experience. This is a good thing, as additional content in a game like this is what brings you back for more. While I’m not sure if there will be many more updates, the fact that there’s already a small modding community for this game certainly promises a decent amount of longevity for this one man project.

The game starts with you as the principal of Click Academy, an all-girls school looking to start a tradition of corporal punishment. From the get go you can pick your implement of choice: Paddle, Cane, or Strap. You must then roam the halls to hunt down mischievous schoolgirls and – what else – call them into your office to spank them. Skipping school, swearing, bad grades, vandalism, and even the act of “yuri-yuri” are all considered punishable offences out of the gate, giving a nice variety of options for the aspiring disciplinarian. Once you call them in, you get a nice little picture of the troublemaker, with a text prompt telling you how she acts as she stares down her impending doom.

This is where SMACS becomes a little more complicated, but in a way that doesn’t hamper the fun. Spanking a student builds up Authority, the currency in the game used to purchase upgrades. In order to gain the most Authority for each spanking, you must gauge the girl’s repentance and punish them appropriately. If a girl is truly sorry, you can get more Authority with fewer smacks, whereas defiant girls require a firmer punishment. The goal is to find the “sweet spot”, not too light but also not too severe. This number will fluctuate as the game goes on, giving the more sadistic players their chance to give it their all with the unruly ones, while the gentler punishers will still be able to give the more apologetic brats a fair deal without penalty.

When you first load up the game, the interface can be a little confusing. The game has instructions, but much like games of old, you have to read the manual to figure it out – no in game tutorials for this spanky simulator. Fiddling around makes it pretty clear that the game is entirely run by mouse controls – left click to purchase upgrades, and right click to open up an info window. The right click option truly is your best friend, as it’ll tell you all of the statistics of whatever object you are looking at – from Authority per second to Spank Effectiveness. Upgrades come with a small bit of flavor text to help flesh out the game, which is a nice touch.

To punish a girl, you simply click on the picture of their bottom in the game’s HUD. Each image is expertly crafted by Zekel to give a fun visual experience, with excellent sound effects, a light jump from the girl with each swat, and an eventual crying effect as you get closer to the “sweet spot” (right clicking the image will also give you a text clue to help). At the start, you are only allowed to give six of the best to the girl’s clothed behinds, but as you collect upgrades you will be able to perform more strokes per session and gradually strip the girls down to the bare for increased punishment power.

And like many idle games, this is where SMACS starts to shine. The upgrades in this game are custom-tailored for the spanking fetishist, such as school counselors that can build Authority for you without clicking, or improved implements that increase the effectiveness of each punishment. For many of the more significant upgrades, such as the implementation of spontaneous bag checks or monthly maintenance spankings, a cute little news report from the school paper will appear and give a delightful image of what the student body’s reaction to your increasing madness is. These reports are absolutely hilarious, so it’s a shame you can’t go back and re-read them once they’ve scrolled off the page, especially when you feel like reminiscing about your past acts of infamy.

This then becomes part of the fun of the game – calling it a “Spanking Maniac’s Academy” is extremely accurate, as the level of discipline and nigh fascist control over your domain goes from the standard to the slightly uncomfortable to the hilariously absurd. Certainly some of the upgrades can feel a bit abusive, but it gets to the point of satire late game. The fantasy aspect of the game renders it all a moot point in the grand scheme of things – girls may be getting over 100 strokes with a cane or paddle on their bare bottom while standing naked on tiptoes in front of the entire school, but they always make a full recovery and are generally off to perform some new misdeed without so much of a thought of what they went through before. Still, it’s hard not to laugh at how crazy the game gets when you’re setting up private islands as your own nudist colony/spanking prison and conquering entire countries in order to impose your new world order on the unsuspecting masses. Punishable offenses even start getting more diverse, with rioting and acts of high treason being brand new reasons to make someone bend over your desk. The zae mod even gives you extra clothing and skin color options, so alien hotties and demonic seductresses can become spankable in tight swimwear or neko maid outfits. If being an omnipresent spanking dictator looks like fun to you, then you certainly won’t be disappointed.

Unfortunately, this is also where the game’s flaws start to appear. After a certain point, manually spanking your girls will not net nearly enough Authority to make it worthwhile beyond perverted satisfaction, and eventually the game just ends. Even after conquering the dreaded “Discipline Dimension”, the game doesn’t give you anything resembling a victory screen or any kind of recurring upgrade to spend your points on. There isn’t even any kind of rebirth/ascension system to start from the beginning with bonuses to keep you playing like many other idle games have. You simply become a puppet master who wants nothing from his or her puppets. You can reset the game’s data by deleting the save file, sure, but essentially you’re playing the same game with no variance short of perhaps which implement you choose at the start.

Another small but not insignificant problem is that the game doesn’t auto-save progress, or even have a save button of any kind. To keep any progress you’ve accrued during your play through, you must completely close the game. If the power goes out or your computer crashes, you lose everything since your last game shutdown – which can be problematic when you spent two hours building up enough Authority to unlock the late game upgrades. While regular breaks will remedy this, it would certainly give the more obsessive players an option that doesn’t disrupt the flow.

But don’t let the negatives mislead you – the game is fantastic. Despite its flaws, the game is a wonderful mix of simple, addicting gameplay and perverted fantasy that will make most any spanko smile. While it started out as a mere experiment, it brings a wonderfully pervy experience to the table. The level of punishment may get a bit too abusive for some to finish, but it’s certainly a fun little experiment that I can’t wait to see more from. Even in it’s fairly well polished state I can already see the potential for future updates (perhaps an all-boy’s school version to sate the appetites of kinky headmistresses out there?) If Zekel and the slowly growing modding community continue to work on new and interesting content, then SMACS may very well become the definitive spanking themed idle game.


Bottom Line:

I highly recommend giving SMACS your time. It’s not perfect, but it’s a ton of fun. The lack of a save feature or true end game reward maybe notable flaws, but neither come across as deal breaker in my mind. Without a doubt, this is the best spanking related game out there right now.

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