Let me start by saying that it's great you decided to revisit the sim-genre, as LOP was undoubtedly your best game imo.
I think the backstory is good, it certainly offers a lot of possibilities. Now I've barely played through twice (the first run was cut short by a nasty bug), but here are some issues:
By far the most important and the most annoying aspect is driving the car. I think the manual driving barely adds something to the game and it soaks up time just going from one place to another, especially when you need to repeat it 100 days. Suggestion: make the car drive automatically and just be able to click where you want to go. Important here is that it is a quick action (e.g. not a 5 second drive). An example of this is used in a classic DOS game called Jones in the Fast Lane (let's call it a grandfather of this genre, without the sex :P): take a look at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Y7JMIXvVw , at 1:11 the player is visible in the middle of the upper street and is moved by a simple mouseclick.
The second issue I had was more of a balance thing. For example, the IQ stat (and thus small talk) can only be improved by the intro and an expensive item. It made it very hard to get positive results even on the C customers. And after I got the item I went to 400+ on IQ at day 100.
Something similar occured with the striptease stat. While my other stats were high enough to do the B customers without any doubt, the striptease stat was low (presumably by bad luck on the C customers?) and therefore not often succesful and not increased further, which forced me to waste time on the C customers. While this time it happened for the striptease stat I could see it happening for almost any of those, there's little control in raising them. Some more events or possibly actions in places might solve this (for example, maybe add a +1 to striptease on stripping at the strip club?).
A last note is about the events. As they are now it's sort of static, the sex with the mafia boss will happen whether you want to or not, you always sleep with the guy at the gym, etc. For one I would like to see more choice in that (with the mafia boss I could think of making some agreement to come up with the money before day X, and if you do it like that you get a bonus lesbian scene with the friend as a thank you or something).
Secondly, ideally I'd want to see much more scenes like that (possibly with dependencies on eachother) to give some more control over how you want to play the game, by giving certain stats or in the bigger picture leading to a certain ending.
And thirdly, not as important but it would a nice touch: how about some interactivity in the scenes (like in your previous games, some mouse actions or something).
Finally a small list of bugs I encountered:
- The fuel fine can take you into negative money, which makes doing almost every action impossible because of "not enough money" (including the ones that MAKE money (!!!)).
- The achievement banner does not disappear automatically.
- The underground dealer has no tooltip (I didn't realize I could go there until later on).
- Many texts are in the wrong place (for example 'taking a day off' has the same descrïption as finding a customer).
Good luck with finishing the game (and hopefully expanding it with some more scenes/options).