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Set in the year 2037, you are Leiji Osumi, undercover investigator at Free Alliance Moon Base D-02 and have been sent in order to try and resolve problems that have recently been occurring at Base. And so begins your adventure.

Critical Point certainly has one of the more interesting story-lines amongst bishoujo games outside of Japan and is the first science fiction bishoujo game that has been released outside of Japan. The story was written by Kenichi Matsuzaki, who was heavily involved with the popular anime series' Macross, Gundam, Orguss and Bubblegum Crisis. This alone should tell you something about the quality of this game. Though having said this, don't expect that this game leaves little in the way of adult bishoujo artwork. Having arrived at the moon base, you will shortly discover that not only do you have to deal with technical problems, but the staff, which consists of mostly female members, appear to have been affected by an inexplicable sexual insanity. Critical Point features well over one-hundred CG artworks, several of these with multiple variations. This is where the two versions of Critical Point differ. The limited edition features the original Japanese artwork while the regular version uses artwork that has been edited to remove the mosaic censorship from the sexually explicit images.

If you have never played a bishoujo adventure game before, they play very much like a ''choose your own adventure'' book. You read through the story in a text window at the bottom of the screen and you will see the events on the screen, such as characters that you are talking to, what the characters are doing and what location you are at in the game. Although there is no animation, the characters poses will change to indicate how they are feeling, whether they are happy, nervous, embarrassed, etc. At several points, you will be presented with a list of options, for example, asking you where you would like to go or what you want to do. Critical Point is no different in respect to the traditional bishoujo adventure game and features no less than three main story-line branches and twenty-five endings. Critical Point, being a science fiction adventure game set in a military location in the midst of war, it may be no surprise that many of these endings will result in Leiji Osumi meeting his death.

In order to play this game, you must select the correct options in order to find your way to one of the several happy endings. This is not always easy as the options may not always be obvious. An incorrect choice may lead to your death. Having said this, I would personally consider this one of the easier multi-ending bishoujo games. Later on into the game, when given two choices, it's often that choosing one will allow you to progress while the other will lead to certain death. This isn't always the case though, and a total of 18,000 lines of dialogue in Critical Point make for plenty of story development between choices. The text script is also superbly written and grammatical errors and typos are extremely rare.

As mentioned earlier, Critical Point features sexual artwork making this an adult game. The characters in the game vary greatly, from the cute young looking Reiko to the cold haughty Lai Wong. Critical Point features eight main characters (That is, characters that you see often), seven of these are female. The actual artwork in Critical Point is very good. The mosaic censorship in the limited edition is very light and doesn't get in the way of the game, as this game, despite the many sex scenes, is more of a story driven game. That said, towards the end where the story is reaching the climax, I really did feel that the sex scenes got in the way of the story and was often tempted to skip through them (though I never did). Once you have seen any particular scene, you can then view at any time in the CG gallery.

The graphics and artwork style in Critical Point uses mainly pre-rendered 3D backgrounds, although real-life photographs are sometimes (rarely) used as well. The characters are anime style, but more detailed than animated anime. The artwork is quite different from Will and Peach Princess' last game Snow Drop. It appears a little simpler. More ''solid'' may be another way of putting it. In addition to the graphics, Critical Point features the original Japanese voices for the female characters, sound effects and music. The voices are excellent and vary in accordance with the characters. They really do sound as you would expect them to from looking at them. The sound effects, while not used too often, are of high quality. You will hear things such as alarm sirens, sliding doors, gunshots, explosions and thuds. The music is, in my view, the most impressive of the audio used in this game is the music. The original Japanese version of this Critical Point used MIDI music and in this version, the MIDI music has been converted into a very high quality wave format. In fact, it's very unlikely that you will notice that it was converted from MIDI. There are many tracks that all fully emphasise the events taking place in the game. At the same time, they always seem to convey the futuristic atmosphere of the game. The only real improvement that I can think of would be the addition of a music room, such as the one found in Snow Drop, as the music is not CD-audio based, which means that you won't be able to listen to it in your regular CD-player.

On the whole, Critical Point is certainly a worthwhile game and will please both players who are looking for a good story and those who enjoy the artwork. The game is not overly challenging, but is a very large game and is still likely to require a few hours of your time in order to see everything. I would especially recommend this game to anyone who is considering buying a bishoujo game for the first time, especially existing fans of sci-fi anime.