Parent's Guide: Criminal Girls: Invite Only - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Criminal Girls: Invite Only is a dungeon crawling role-playing game with a bit of a difference. Although most of your time will be spent wandering through corridors, fighting fantastical (if a little creepy) monsters and solving a few door-and-switch puzzles, you'll also need to encourage your all-female party in a rather... unique way. This being a role playing game, your companions can learn new moves and grow stronger as you progress through the game - but in order to teach them new moves for use in battle, you'll need to break out the whips, cattle prods and feathers and teach them by force. Via a short touch screen mini-game, in which you poke the symbols that appear over the girl of your choosing's body (using both the front and rear touch screens), you can "discipline" your girls to unlock better, more powerful moves for your party.

A dungeon crawling role playing game at heart, as you explore the corridors and hallways of the game's multi-story tower, you and your party will get ambushed by various enemies, triggering some simple turn-based battles. Although your team and the bad guys will be taking it in turns to attack in familiar role playing style, the way you have to choose your attacks here is equally original too. Rather than choosing from a pre-defined list when your go comes around, instead, each of your female party members will shout out one of the moves they know at random, and it's up to you to choose the move you want from their preferences, whether it's a straightforward sword-slashing attack, a healing spell or a super-charged fire punch. While it's an interesting idea, this does mean that you sometimes won't have access to the moves you want on each turn - if you're desperate for a healing spell, but all the girls have shouted out are offensive ones, you'll have to just hope and pray your foe doesn't do too much damage. The more enemies you defeat, the stronger your party members will get - although you may find you need to 'grind' a bit, repeatedly facing off against weaker enemies to make yourself stronger, as most of the game's bosses are a bit on the challenging side.

Many Japanese role-playing games feature small amounts of titilation, but Criminal Girls really takes things to a whole new level. A frequent mini-game involves 'motivating' the game's voluptuous female characters with riding crops, feathers and cattle prods, by touching various "temptations" (basically, small squares) that appear on the screen to administer their 'punishment'. Usually dressed in revealing outfits or lying in provocative poses, the screen is initially covered in a pink mist, but the more you whip/tickle/electrocute, the more that wears away to reveal your 'victim' underneath. Bad language also crops up in the dialogue from time to time - words such as 'b*stard', 'b*tch' and 'sh*t'. But, at least in terms of graphic, bloody violence, it's actually pretty clean, with enemies simply disappearing when defeated.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: PS Vita