Unreal Engine - Subverse [v0.9] [Studio Fow]

This game is a real mixed bag, mostly bad though. You play as the Captain (thats his name) of the ship (Mary something...). He seems to be heavily based on Deadpool from the 2013 game, not the more recent movies. You start with EDI (Sorry, she's DEMI) and you get the rest of the crew through the natural progression of the game. The mechanics of the game work well enough and I only got stuck forcing me to restart once.

The voice acting is superb. Its easily part of the entire game. Even though the dialog can cringy with its self referential humor and it's LONG boring lore dumps. If you like lore, there is a lot of it in Subverse. In fact, the game warns you, the player, that there is a big, incoming lore dump. The issue with these lore dumps lies in the fact that the game forgot to make sure that the player actually cared about the story before hitting me with the lore. If you're looking rub one out real quick (as the game early on refers directly to), you're probably going to be disappointed. You get access a couple of loops early on, but you can't view them again until the game gives you control (more on that later). There is about an hour of tutorials and dialog to get through before you have access to freely view H scenes, but its all a 15 or so second loop. They character models look great, but these loops take a lot gameplay to acquire. You have play, get the other characters and build up PP points to unlock the loops.

Let's talk about gameplay. It's basically two old games with a new coat of paint on and them. Asteroids and the strategic xcom type games. Think about that for 1 second. Asteroids came out in the last 1970s! Xcom's gameplay style is also decades old. The asteroids gameplay is fine, you can upgrade the ship's weapons and abilities. The xcom gameplay is OK, but it's kind of hard to see since the camera is zoomed out a bit too far. I think it's an attempt to cover up how low quality the xcom character models look, but that's just a game theory. After about an hour of tutorials, dialog, and combat, you finally get control to make decisions and do things. The game specifically tells you that. Now you can explore the Captain's ship and now you experience another big mechanic of the game: Point-and-click. That's how you explore the interior of the ship. You do this, too, for navigating the ship to other places once you get control. The game also makes sure to specifically say it's as simple as point-and-click. That self referential humor comes up, a lot.

Here's my problem with this game. Like the Deadpool game from 2013, these jokes have no replay value. You hear them once, maybe you chuckle, but if you play again, or have to restart, it's the jokes that you've already heard. The point-and-click is underwhelming based on what FOW was hyping this game up to be with its Mass Effect comparisons. The xcom gameplay is generic with confusingly outdated characters compared to the dialog character models. And the asteroids gameplay is fine, but its asteroids! This a PC only release running on my hardware designed to run MGS5 on max settings. Subverse could literally be run on an android device and it would be stable. Not to mention, the H scenes only account for about 16 minutes of this roughly 4 hour game. They're asking $30 only steam for this game and don't think it's worth it. It's in early access though so maybe they'll fix all of the problems I've just pointed out (no, they won't, but a bit more content is supposed to be coming). It would be better if Studiofow just sold the H scene loops separately and spared the world the hype of this game with awkwardly duct taped together gaming mechanics with a bit of porn on the side. This game is (so far, it's in early access :/) a complete disappointment, but Studiofow raked in the money, so they'll be fine.

I expected more.. This game feels like those old poker games where you get cheap porn pictures as rewards...

I though the game will be something like Mass Effect, were you can walk arround and that it would've more sex options..

Despite being an adult game, 95% of your time playing Subverse is not porn.

A complete turnaround compared to StudioFOW's videos where 25 of the 30 minutes are porn.

This game is the equivalent of watching a 30 minute school hentai where 95% of the episode is boring filler. I don't think StudioFOW realize just because you say "cock" doesn't make it an erotic situation. It's just locker room humor and there's nothing pornographic about it.

If the characters were likeable and the plot was good, I could've tolerated the parts of the story that do nothing. This sadly isn't the case, the main character is annoying and the actual funny moments are too far apart.

I'm hoping the plot gets more depraved and more sexy situations happen in the future. The character design and animations are great, they just need the context and set up to be considered a proper porn game, otherwise this is just a gallery viewer and I might as well do a faster match 3 game in between the galleries.

Note I am a big fan of StudioFOW and I love the spinoffs and artist collabs this world has created. This game isn't it however.

I for one enjoy both the ship combat and grid combat systems. not many VN type games have minigames and the ones that have any are a big plus in my book. It is still a quite fledgling as a game, but for an initial release, it is pretty good. scenes could be better, but it is in early access. There is a lot of potential for improvement. but the bones of the game is good.

Overpromised underdelivered even after stalling for so long. If you've been paying attention to Kickstarter, they promise a whopping 22 chapters that should be an indicator that the game is never going to be finished.

The game is boring, and by StudioFOW standards probably the worst in terms of animation. Stick with the StudioFOW films.

As a hybrid of shmup games and X-Com (god, what a mess of a combination), it is iffy. As an adult title, its a mess. The design team wanted to make an honest to god game, but the face of the game is its adult elements. If you were to pick this game up at a sale, you wouldn't know what you're in for at a glance.

The elements of its adult nature and its two opposing genres, all clash.

The writing thinks its funny; the decent voice acting only serves to highlight how painfully embarrassing that fact is.

The world already has Geometry Wars, X-Com, and the vast landscape of adult titles. Pick one; attempting to crash them into one another has led to this extremely polished turd.

I actually supported this game on kickstarter, as I was all about getting a high quality porn game with decent gameplay. This game delivered on a lot of things, but failed on the most important thing; The actual porn. The porn is a afterthought almost despite being the number one reason I bought this game lol. The scenes are all animated at least but there's barely any interactivity with sex scenes if at all. And the writing... At first it was silly but funny. But the self-awareness got annoying. Not to mention the jokes just didn't land or got repeated in slightly different ways.

The actual gameplay is is decent. Not stellar but serviceable. The voice acting and graphics are top notch though. The girls are hot as well so no issues there. But all of that overshadows the actual sex scenes and to be frank that is way you are here. The major saving grace is that this game isn't finished, so this can be fixed.

Absolutely hyped, absolutely lacking. My understanding of porngames comes from whats available from F95zone - maybe Maids Mansion and True Love before that, this though... Its a spaceshooter with a... lackluster story and plot, with very wierd constructed sex scenes. If you like the ancient spaceshooters of the 1980is this ones for you, of you're looking for anything that would give you a story, a feeling or a boner - then look away, this game is.... Not what you're looking for.

Do you like turn-based tactic games than you should play xcom
Do you like multidirectional shooter than play geometry wars
Do you like porn games with story play summer gone
Do you like cringe than play subverse.

The gameplay is fine, like Asteroid and any turn based tactical game basically, in a simple way. And the space navigation part from Mass Effect, which i loved in that, but extremely quickly felt like a chore in this.

But it is a porn game, and i was expecting interactive hardcore stuff. It's StudioFOW, and they've spent their time on this instead of making their awesome videos.
... It's basically just a tame seamless gif, with juts some of them having 3 speed settings,
and a finale.

Oh, and it loads more often than GTA Online! (How is that even possible?!?)

Gameplay Ok.
Graphics pretty good.
Porn is boring.

3/5 is generous, but it is pretty well made for what it is.

The game is pretty OK in the current state. I like most are dissapointed in the H-scenes being glorified gifs but as I see it they are going in the right direction. Hopefully they will listen to the community.

This is not a good game. As a porn game, this is just a glorified gif player. As a regular game, it's incredible boring. The battle section are a really dumbed down bullet hell, the ground combat is just a dumbed down RTS. There is no deep, nothing, just a way to make the game bigger.

The most important part of a porn game is well... the porn. StudioFOW made a name for themselves off movies and all they made after 2 years and 2 million dollars was less than 6 minutes of no dialogue loops. There are countless indie creators that do significantly more without demanding your money first.

Overhyped game, that known a lot much wieer than f 95. Poor gameplay, below average animations with wierd angles of camera. This game don`t deserve this attention, but this is great, that in future we can see games with sexual content, not only vn

Overally, the game is pretty okay.

But this is a porn game. And the porn part is problematic. I fully expected to get some natural transitions between story/gameplay and porn part. And that happens, three times, on "introduction" of the character into our group.

Apart from that, every scene is accessed through "PANDORA" system, which is to say the least, not very exciting. Scenes don't happen naturally, interactions with characters not in the story are also not natural.

Scenes are rather basic. There are two types of scenes, most of them are "basic", which are just simple loops. In the more advanced scenes you can also control speed of fucking, and decide to cum. That's it. Even though it's a 3d game, you can't even control camera. You have similar control as in flash games from 2010s, just with better graphics.

And this is the most disappoint part of the Subverse. If you've expected to play groundbreaking porn game, go play something else, from 2018 or even earlier.

But the technical side, apart from long and often loading screens the game is pretty good. The main problem is just, if the game "just" gets expanded with new scenes, it's not gonna stop being average.

===UPDATE AS OF 2021-04-03===

I was thinking about changing my review score to 2 stars from the current 3 stars; however, Subverse creators have addressed some of the issues in their latest post. I believe, that if that happens, or I'll see some improvements I will change the grade to 5 stars!

3.9/5 Stars
Gameplay: 6/10. Decent for what it is, basic turn-based combat/space shooter games. Not horrible.
Sexual Content: 5/10. The sexual content is decent, but very lacking. The world has a lot of lewd references and dialogue, but then the actual sex is relegated to an unlock gallery of scenes. Dissapointing, but I can say with more content it would be okay.
World/Overall Game: 7/10. Yeah the other two categories are a bit lacking, but the game is a 0.1 build, and theres obviously room a lot more content. As a cohesive game I think the game is quite successful, it just fails to deliver on either: Very good, engaging gameplay OR Very good, well done sexual content. Its a middling mix of them both, which is expected.

Definitely a game to watch, if it doesn't sit in development hell it could become quite good.

The Early Access release is only currently at around 10-15% of the planned content and even in its present state it's better than 99% of the content on this site. The low reviews here are pretty questionable in this context, but it is hard to judge everything on the same scale, when Subverse is clearly in another league (like the voice acting) and is competing with bigger titles. From a porn game perspective, the only major problem so far is the general disconnect between the porn scenes and the narrative. Only a couple of scenes were integrated into the story. Hopefully this will be improved.

There is too little content for something that took 2 years and 2 million to make. Don't get me wrong, what is already in the game has a LOT of polish for a NSFW game but its terribly limited.

The gameplay and porn does not mesh together at ALL. They might as well have released a game and then released all the porn loops on their website. It feels like they really wanted to make a game but couldnt decide on how to combine the gameplay and the porn, and what we have here is a messy grind to get gallery unlocks. In the current state of the game, that's basically it. Its a shooter + xcom game with a gallery with half decent porn loops.

The only saving graces in this game arethe voice acting, character models and character designs. The dialogue is awful, the porn is subpar, the game is subpar and repetitive, the story is better than average.

Verdict? Dont play the game for now, it might get better but for now just wait for someone to upload the loops on pornhub or something and jack off lol. The gameplay is not worth the porn.

If you know Paralogue, Paralogue basically has a stacked porn with no game. Subverse has a game with a mediocre porn. Lol. At least this is a step towards AAA porn games.

-Dialogue is ok.
-Voice acting is good.
-The flying gameplay is actually fun.
-The turn based combat is exactly what you'd expect and if it's not your thing your going to hate it just as much as i do.
-The sex scenes are great, really good job on the physics and animations. It lacks some basic functions found in similar games such as being able to change camera angles.

Overall: Well polished game, but it's just criminally boring.

Currently (v0.01) the gamehas stuttering issues in cutscenes which i expect will get fixed.

PROS
Visuals: The game looks great; the character models and graphics overall look pretty nice.
VA Performances: It seems a lot of effort was put into the voice acting; and it shows. Each character has their own distinct personalities which are all performed superbly.
Gameplay: While a bit difficult at first, at least for the turn based sections, I soon found myself having fun playing it. A sort of "come for the porn, stay for the gameplay" sort of thing.

CONS
Adult Content: Weirdly considering Studio FOW made this, this is the weakest part of the game. Not for the lack of it per se, there is a generous amount in the game, but for how it's implemented. Firstly; scenes are pre-rendered and as such, at a fixed angle; a cutscene more or less. Considering how good the rest of the game looks, it's baffling as to why they wouldn't just render these scenes in game with all the extra freedom and fidelity that would bring as they're clearly able to. Secondly; only a slice of these scenes are incorporated into the actual game, with the remaining majority only accessible/unlockable via the in game gallery, with these scenes being much shorter/simpler than ones encountered in game.
Writing: Cringly self aware does not begin to describe this game's writing. Despite the quality of the voice acting, it feels almost betrayed by the fact these characters will not waste any time reminding you that this IS a generic space game with sex and boobs and how funny that is. It's a shame, as Studio FOW put a lot of effort into crafting this world with it's own identity, where it succeeds, yet insists on poking fun at itself as being a by-the-numbers space game at every turn, so unrelenting that it very quickly becomes exhaustingly distracting.

In summary, I liked this game. It's not great, not terrible, and normally I'd say that, as an early access game, these issues could be rectified eventually. However, if we assume that what we have here is the foundation for what a more complete Subverse will be; Mass Effect with a sprinkle of porn, then that will become a big, big problem very quickly; as I assume that the vast majority of backers wanted it other way around.