I really want to love this game, but at the end of the day I just can't. At the end of the day, I gave this 2 stars for its current execution and 5 stars for its potential for an average of 3.5 stars, but I rounded down because I just couldn't justify giving it 4 stars at this point.
First, I should start with the good things about the game. I love the variety of models in the game. I know they aren't the most diverse or realistic, but you're supposed to be on vacation surrounded by lovely women, and most of these women fit that bill. Also, I am the kind of person who loves sandbox and likes a little grind in the game to make the content payoff worth it and there is definitely grind and content galore. But this last point also forms the crux of my dismay at this game: the game's mechanics make progression confusing and often counterintuitive.
Many of the best interactive games - lewd or otherwise - attempt to design the structure of the game in a way that keeps progression fresh, new, and somewhat intuitive to keep the end user immersed and engaged. This is something that is very hard to achieve and, because of that, most lewd game developers prefer to stick to the visual novel style of gaming so that they can control the story beats and the pace of progress. For the few intrepid developers that try to create sandbox games, the risk/reward balance is extremely tricky as it is supremely difficult to create a system where progress feels natural and rewarding while maintaining the user's sense of autonomy and self-determination.
If anything, Holiday Island's biggest failing might be its ambition. Over a dozen women, over a dozen locations, numerous player stats and npc stats, dozens of actions/interactions with hundreds of permutations based on character/time/location combinations and further augmented by numerous vaguely defined success/failure gates and unclear payoffs make it a massive undertaking to figure out how to move forward. Now the developer has tried to make the carrot of content a little more obvious with success conditions listed in the in-game cell-phone, but the process is so punitive that it becomes a stick in and of itself. Here's how it usually plays out:
Dev: to see this scene, you need 80 lust and meet them in their room
Me: Okay, I will try to raise their lust by kissing them - that seems lusty, right?
Dev: Love check failed - you have raised anger and lowered love and affection
Me: okay, I will grind to give gifts to lower anger and spam hugs to increase love and affection
- 15 minutes later -
Dev: anger lowered, affection and love maxed
Me: okay time to try that kiss again!
Dev: Love check failed - you have raised anger and lowered love and affection
Me: What?! It said I achieved max love, am I supposed have more than that?
Side note - yes, you are supposed to have more than that.
In the end, you are constantly playing this meta-game of trying to determine which actions/interactions will allow you to progress which stats and by how much until you reach a cap that can sometimes be raised to get access to further actions. It's basically trial and error to find a needle in a haystack which you then spam until you have to go look for the next needle and none of this screams natural, intuitive, or even fun progression. You're left to either constantly rollback, cheat, mod, or slog - all of which are non-immersive, to say the least.
Rant aside, if the devs can figure out a good way to make it more obvious what you need in order to achieve and action, what the likely outcome of that action is, and a little less punitive of missteps, this could be a really great game - it's got all the parts it needs, it just needs to connect them a little better.