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

To put it simply, this is very tame for Studio FOW. This might be because of Steam's rules against rape and similar content, but the result is the same.

The game looks great visually, but in terms of enjoyability, there are games on this site which are just plain more fun to play. This shouldn't have happened with professionals who had a very large budget to work with.

This is early-access though, so significant improvement could be seen in the future. But for now it's just surprisingly bland. I'm really surprised at how they ended up being behind the amateur western ero-game creators in terms of making a game which is fun. If it didn't have such great graphics, I don't even know if I'd recommend it at all.

I don't understand the point of a million dollar game, where they did not develop any technology to literally shit out every possible sex position with the characters but instead we re stuck with 1-2 felacio, 1 sex scene with a human and then we got 3 bestiality scenes for no fucking reason.

Also the game has no sense of real progress, everything is unfinished, not even half-backed additions to the game. Features are not even tapped, they are either holding back content to MILK even further people or they are incompetent enough to not have developed those features yet.

The writing is not that bad, it is actually progressing way faster than it should be in my opinion. Instead of US the players discovering what is each faction, we just get exposition diarrhea, with Demi being the Deus ex machina of knowing everything.

Again I do not understand, I can not fathom they fact that the H-scenes are so mediocre, with more than half of them being fucking tentacles and beastiality, or zombie men(?).

I wanted so much to like this game. And parts of it are actually good. But the good parts are too disconnected from each other, and the bad parts are too common.

The game feels fairly polished...about equivalent to a decent (non-hentai) indie game. However, even after a very long development period the amount of playable content is still very minimal. The space combat is really good...challenging but not punishing. The ground combat, on the other hand is terrible...when you win, it often feels like a foregone conclusion...when you lose, it often feels like you never had a chance.

The story just isn't interesting. I gave it a shot at first, but after half an hour or so, I was bored with it and just started skipping all of it. Worse still is the dialogue. Think Leisure Suit Larry, and all the obnoxious non-sexy sex jokes which are neither funny nor sexy.

But perhaps the biggest missed opportunity once again is that the sex and the gameplay are as disconnected from each other as usual. You play some game, and then you get some sexy time. It makes both feel tacked on.

That being said, its not like there is much competition in adult action games, and there is plenty of redeeming value here. Others will probably like this a lot more than I did.

Had tons of fun so far.

Actually really enjoy the ground combat scenarios, ladies are all fun as fuck and well voiced, story is the kind of parody sillyness I expected. Don't let the Early Access status fool you, there's a fair bit of stuff to do already, even if the cast currently available is limited.

The Pandora (sex scene simulator/scenario build room) is not the most organic way to stumble upon scenes certainly, but the content there so far is is good.

Big bonus for the, eh, 'inspired' by Mass Effect 2 scenario setup / feel, it lends itself well for an erotic game as well, gives a way to introduce new crew mates and display their personalities nicely in the 'Recruitment' missions.

I was torn on which rating this game should receive. As an overall product it probably should get at least 2 stars in it's current state. If the combat systems will be updated in the future, it might even be a decent game.

But let me get to the point, which most people already touched on. This is advertised and this should've been a biggest porn-game made. But it doesn't even come close to fullfilling that goal. All it has - some lewd dialog outside of sex-scenes, and a bunch of animations, that are not even tied to one another in any way. Only a couple of them have a "Cum" button, and 90% of them don't have even that amount of interactivity. And the animation quality in my opinion is actually a bit underwhelming. Don't get me wrong, it's good, but i've seen much better quality from other creators.

As of 0.1 this game is a complete joke. It might change in the future, but i highly doubt that, since the core systems are already in place, and it is unlikely, that they will have time/funds to re-imagine their approach to the adult-content in the game.

Well. This is definitly game with porn, not a porn game. Amount of nonsexual cutscenes makes you think that you are watching a movie. Yeah, there are a LOT OF CUTSCENES. Plot has potential here no doubt. Sadly most important parts are lacking. Space combat is so boring due to lack variaty. You are equiped with special attack (1 of three) and dodge. There are a lot of missions which consist only on surviving few waves, same thing with ground combat but imao it is done better. There are more enemies with specials abilities, shields etc. You can choose 1 girl and 3 (currently out of 4) minions with their own abilities.
Most important porn. It seems MC is not going to be in center of attention. Scenes including MC are minority, currently Doc has 2 with him and rest are monsters. Those are pretty good but unfortunatly there is only 1 angle, most of them are loops and some are reused animations but with different waifus.
In summary. Was it worth to wait? Well, not really. Expectations were not met. Was it worth to spend money on it? No, I pity people who did. Was it worth to test it? Yeah, I had a decent fap.

AS A PORN GAME:
Well, i have been "playing" for about 1 or 2 hours right untill the sandbox part.

This game has been uploaded to a porn site , so i will probably be unfair, but i have to judge it as a porn game.

As a porn game it has 1 first major issue which is that instead of building up, it builds down. All those irrelevant dialogues turn the experience quite annoying.
This insane amount of "funny" dialogue, made me chuckle once in the first 5 minutes and that was it, but this thing doesnt stop, doesnt want or maybe doesnt know how to do different, i saw no indication of that.

The worst thing is that in the dialogues you can read that the writer is aware that this is a porn game, and people wants that, but it fails miserably to deliver.

The sex scenes with the acting work pretty well because of the awesome design department.
But, since its nothing more than sex scenes with almost no context, for me, it becomes an out of context porn scene, and for that matter, real porn is better.

if you live in internet and like meme culture and you are younger than 25 and also if you are drunk, you will like the porn part of the game.
For me it is a little more complex than usual porn card collector.

AS A GAME:
The game part if you like this card collectors and stuff, is a pretty good game, with very good music and visuals. It definetly looks like a AAA game in many parts. If it continues with this concept and adds more content to that part, it wil be awesome to play.

Right now the porn part feels disconnected or out of context, but the game is solid, i will play it caase i like it. I just think is a poor porn VN/game

Disclamer: This review is from the point of view of someone who did not hear anything about the game until a month before launch and whose opinion is based solely on the game itself, not the politics around it.

In it's current state, the game is more than a little disappointing. It has high production value and great presentation, which leads you to believe you're in for a jolly grand time of a raunchy Mass Effect fuck-orgy.

Well, you're not. Instead, you get blasted with expositionary dialogue at every turn that'll bore your brain out, intersected by passable, but wholly unnoteworthy Shmup and Turn-Based combat sessions, and more exposition sequences maybe sometimes spiced up by actually interesting dialogue that doesn't serve the sole purpose of explaining the game-world to you.

But nobody gives a shit about that, right? It's a porn game, if we can play shitty MTLs and Russian crackhead games that make no sense as long as the porn is good, we don't care, right? Well, that's where, to me, the most disappointing part of Subverse comes in.

The sex scenes amount to little more than a few second looped videos, some premium scenes have a speed slider with a cum animation. The animation is top notch, the waifu models are hot, and the voice acting even hotter. Sounds good so far, but they are completely ripped out of the game and utterly without context. You unlock additional scenes for each character in a Gallery called "Pandora", with PP points that you gain while raising affection with that character. And then, you just watch the loop. That's it. There is no story progression towards these scenes, no dialogue before, during or after. They are completely weightless and devoid of any eroticism, and frankly have no justification of being part of a game. You could upload these online (which people have already done) and they would lose nothing, so what's the point of building a game around them, then? Even their own flash games and movies had more context.

As it stands right now, the game is passable, but leaves a bad taste in your mouth considering the budget and vision behind it. Games like Paralogue and Wildlife have similar quality of animation that are completely 3D and with customizable characters, and about the same context to them as of right now. Especially when it comes to the Xeno-scenes, I find the lack of context actually detracts so much, because without the context of a woman going on all fours to let herself get fucked by an animal, it's completely weightless.

One can only hope that this wasn't their first idea, and they just ran out of time and money, and made mistakes along the way that caused this lackluster implementation of literally the most important part of a porn game. We get it, game development is hard, no hard feelings. The game has a lot of potential, but only if StudioFOW takes the criticism to heart and works to at least add some more dialogue to the sex scenes, in an ideal world they'd rework the whole system to accomodate more pre- and post-sex dialogue and add some story element to these scenes.

TL;DR: The rest of the game is passable if at least the sex is good. Right now, it isn't.

[vo.1]

What a huge disappointment this is.

I'll get the good points out of the way first. Voice acting is great. The girls are nice eye candy. That's about it.

The gameplay is bordering on "good" but it lacks depth. The ship combat is fun for a while, but there is no sense of progression. All missions play out pretty much the same way. The upgrades for the fighter ship are pitiful. It increases basic facets like damage, shield, energy by 5%... which is not even noticeable. We can only upgrade the first pip of each upgrade line, but if the continuation of these upgrades are limited to higher % of the same thing, that is incredibly dull. The secondary weapon for the ship changes based on who you take with you, but that is the only customization that really affects how the ship fights play out.

The ground tactical combat is pretty much the same. It is almost good, but severely lacks depth or meaning customization. There are no equipment, There are no skill trees. You can unlock new monsters, but they all come with preset skills and passives that just get stronger as they gain lvls. The wasted potential is huge when these monsters are established as genetic amalgations of various beasts/aliens. You would think there would be a game mechanic that lets you breed/engineer/fuse these monsters to create something to your liking. The battlefield lacks any sort of terrain effects or cover mechanics. This lack of depth results in gameplay that starts out pretty fun, but gets old incredibly quickly.

The "story" is pretty laughable. The tone of the game is that of a porn parody that constantly breaks the fourth wall. It relies heavily on meta humor and crude vulgarities to get it's laughs. I mean, it did make is chuckle a few times, but these are cheap laughs. Because the game takes itself entirely as a joke, it's pretty hard to get invested in the plot they are trying to deliver. Each planet you visit adds nothing to the plot. There is a short paragraph of meme filled joke about the planet and you either do a ship or ground combat. There is not a single choice to be made, whether it be in conversations with girls or in relation to the plot.

The "porn" aspect of this game is ultimately what brings it all the way down. What a ridiculously stupid system they devised. First of all, the scenes are literally 3 second loops. The gold border scenes are glorified flash animations with a speed slider and cum button. Their idea was to have a bunch of these short animations and let us "create" our own scenes by mixing 5 of them. It's fucking retarded. You get no sense of a coherent scene by doing this. You just watch a bunch of animation loops that may or may not lead into each other. None of the scenes have dialogue of any kind, written or voiced. It's entirely unfappable. The nail in the coffin is that this entire system for dishing out sex scenes called "Pandora" is sequestered away from the plot progression. It lacks any set up or context. It seems meaningless and it really is. I played the entire game without even going back to Pandora until the end.

I mean holy shit. I can't believe this is what they came up with after raising literally millions of dollars. The gameplay of this game might be above par when considering that it's a porn game. Unfortunately, the game absolutely fails on the porn aspect. Thus, we are left with just a mediocre game that we probably wouldn't bother playing if it didn't have naked chicks.

We waited a long time and this is what we got ... we got the second cyberpunk
In general, the game has potential, in a year or so it will be completed...
but it's strange of course to release a "raw" game


Animations : 7/10
Story : 8/10
Gameplay : 5/10
Minigame : 8/10

So, it's finally out, is it?

Here's my summary of what this game is: A Beautiful, Bodacious Mess.

I'm not going to waste your time (or mine) saying too much, so here are the essentials.

If you like sexy babes brought to life by excellent voice acting, the occasionally humorous script, and these same babes sucking on your dick 24/7, it's the game for you.

But in between these girls, are a wall of repetitive battles, grinding, space shootouts, more grinding, lack of context, more grinding, and no interactivity with most of the beautiful shit you can see around you.

Is it nearly as good as it was hyped to be? No, it falls so flat that it can start a new religion with a certain group of people. Is it a bad game by any means?

DEFINE GAME.

Because to me, this is hardly a game. It feels more like a chore. Its one of those 'games' that you would rather know the story by watching someone else play it and skip all the battles in between to get to, and then rip out the CGs and Porn scenes to watch on their own.

3/5. I understand that it's the first time Studio FOW has ever made a game, so I'll go a little easier on them. But the only thing they can do at this point is to fix the game with future updates, otherwise, it's pretty much a borefest with the occasional blowjob.

> > > sex scenes are (too much) disconnected from the gameplay < < <

I would rate this game/scene viewer a 3,5/5 so I'm beeing generous here, but I believe once the final game is ready it will be worth 4/5.

The animations look amazing, I like the characters, I love the idea to create mantics, etc., there's a LOT to love! But oooh a small detail... the sex scenes are disconnected from the actual gameplay... <whuuut say again?!>... Yes, the scenes have almost nothing to do with the gameplay. The first scene I unlocked was a mantic I didn't met yet having sex with a waifu :/

There's a point system which lets you unlock scenes of the waifu's you have on board your ship. The problem is that these scenes have nothing to do with the gameplay, breaking the immersion. This is just so dissapointing. If they would have made the scenes connected it would have a 5/5 from me easily. Also if you lose in combat... nothing. Like... couldn't they make the waifu gets taken by the enemy ('taken' in multiple definitions of the word) with some storyline immersion around it? Give the player some incentive not to lose, of which there is nothing now. Off course this would also require a more non-lineair storyline increasing production costs with animations only beeing triggered in certain situations, etc. But nope, thats too much asked for this supposed to be €40 game at release.

Again the animations look next level and you can see StudioFow has done an amazing job for this (I know I'm repeating myself), but then again the scenes are discon..... Uh you get my point...

The spacecombat with the Fenix ship is pretty cool and very nicely worked out, although after 3-4 minigames you get the idea and it becomes easy. It's nice though different waifu's give different secundary weapons. But the 'overall' game strategy for your primary gun stays the same. If StudioFOW could change some game elements forcing the player to use different tactics it could even be much more / next level fun.

That said, I'm still happy I support StudioFOW and I will continue in the future, cause obviously they have some very talented people and we need more companies like them.

Animations : 11/10
Story : 8,5/10
Gameplay : 3 /10
Minigame : 9,5/10

very bad, no scene control, boring gameplay to stupid dialogs. I bought it in steam and refunded than,3 scenes in2 hours of gameplay. Disgusting. Do not recommend and think that it is extremely overhyped!

Average gameplay for 18+ games, poor quality of dialogs- "You killed them, can I suck your you cock", low quality renders, animations from 2010, low design level, models are far away from originals, something new, overall 2 stars.

I'm not a fan of bullet hells, but the turn-based part is fine. As always, the art and animation is high quality, like all StudioFOW stuff before it. You gotta unlock the porn parts yourself though and they're all short little clips. But they're all repeatable, and anything that's got repeatable sex scenes is fuckin good.

Full disclosure - I didn't back this game and didn't follow the hype train at all.

Yeah Subverse is pretty decent. But it kinda feels like everything good about it has some sort of drawback in the same area. Like somebody made a wish on the monkey's paw.

Take the CGs - they're great quality, Studio FOW does it again. But the majority of them are accessed through "Pandora" which is essentially a scene viewer.
You get one recruitment scene per girl in the game, which is contextualised as the girl now being officially part of the crew so you rock the kazbah. Great. But everything else attached to them in Pandora just exists in this nebulous vacuum. Here's Lily getting fucked by tentacles - how did the tentacles get here you ask? Doesn't matter, they're here now. Enjoy.
I'm still kinda torn on this - it facilitates the player to only view content they want (which I appreciate) but by removing any narrative context to why it's happening it kinda dilutes the impact. Yeah we're fucking the sexbot upside down now, tubular bro, but if there was no setup to it what's the point?

Then there's the actual gameplay. I laud a western adult game maker for putting more traditional gameplay in, so that's a plus. But the actual gameplay is really shallow and repetitive, so that's the monkey's paw.
Gameplay is broken down into two sections - Space Combat and Ground Combat.
Space combat is a top down asteroids-esque shmup, it can be fun for a while and they try to keep it fresh with various enemy ship factions which all have different units, shots and flight patterns. But it wears thin pretty fast. Even with the gameplay loop of getting resources to upgrade the ship to do more combat it feels pretty bland right now.
Ground combat is a complete slog by comparison - there's more going on compared to the space combat (different enemy classes, status effects, ranges of attacks, supers - the whole megillah) but god it's so slow and they just throw dinky enemies at you endlessly. At least the space combat is in and out bland, ground combat is just tiresome.

The writing/story has it's own foibles - to clarify, right now theres about 3 hours or so of worldbuilding and maybe 15-20 minutes of character building/sex build up. Not super keen on that ratio, but they're setting up a sci fi universe so it's not a deal breaker. Nothing about the story is really original, stuff you've seen/read/played before but it's competently put together so it doesn't really feel hackneyed (it dances around with this idea that humans are perceived as an invasive species to the galaxy, which is neat, but then forgets about it soon after).
Moreover the characters, whilst a little cliche here and there, are genuinely pretty charming - heroes and villains alike (we'll come back to the villains later) and I did want to keep playing to see their antics.

The actual line to line dialog is another story. Do you like old memes and 2013 style Reddit/4chan shitpost humour? If not, then saddle in buckaroo because this will be a trip to the groan zone. For every 1 joke that lands about 6 crash and burn like the Challenger. Obviously mileage on this will vary - some people really like that style (more power to them) but it's not really my bag anymore. Like, seeing a space alien called "Sandy Glitchford" make jokes about squirt porn and 'Colonial Troopers' nearly made me check my clock to see we hadn't gone back in time a few years. I appreciated the Hawaiian shirt though - nice touch

So those villains. They're cool. It introduces several enemy factions and characters, many of whom working at sinister machinations unbeknownst to others and it's definitely enjoyable to see it all unfold. But here's the rub - this is a porn game, the threat of death for any of our characters (particularly the player characters and all the H-content ladies) is negligible. Generally in a porn game the threat of failure is a losing CG or a bad end or something.
I won't lie, as mentioned above I had no real knowledge of this game or its content going in. I assumed because it was Studio FOW there'd be all sorts of gangbangs/rape losing scenes/interracial cuckold blackmails/women getting fucked by animals etc.
But nope, there's none of that. This thing is as vanilla as a soft serve - like if you're thinking of playing this game but saw the NTR tag - don't be put off, there's no "real" NTR here (a few Pandora scenes of the girls getting worked over by some of the aliens consensually is as close as it gets)
So what's the problem? So it's vanilla, who cares? Who doesn't like vanilla? Well, if I want to take the threat of killer robot sex-droids seriously I'm kinda going to need to be sold on the idea that they might violently rape my Cockney Space Devil Pirate girl if she loses in ground combat to them. Because there's no actual suspense or worry about a bad end it makes everything in this game, from combat to the actions of the villains, seem kind of impotent.
Example - there's a weird space pirate frog guy in the early game, and the game sets up that you stole his sexbot from him. Great. He wants to fuck his sexbot that you cucked from him. Great. There is absolutely no way he can ever do that in the game - lose to him in a boss fight, you gotta redo the boss fight. No NTR. No bad ends. Which, considering FOWs repertoire, is a shame in my eyes.

As a final point - game's also a bit technically ropey. There's loading screens out the ying yang. None of them too long, but it gets tiresome seeing the 3 rotating background images over and over. Also the game crashed fatally during an H-scene once and softlocked during a couple of space battles (wouldn't progress even though all the enemies were dead). But it's early access, these things might get swept away in future releases etc.


Sorry for the 2000 word essay. Game's pretty good but has problems. If you like good vanilla CGs (with or without context) and can sit through a real mixed bag of dialog and repetitive gameplay then you'll have a good time. If you don't ? Then you're not really missing much.

I played the 0.1 release for a few hours through the first chapters and a bunch of side content and stopped at the beginning of the second chapter.

I guess in everything we knew these guy were good, top even, they still are good. The visuals are great no matter at which part of the game you look character, ships, effects, animation. The voice acting is great. The sex scenes that I've seen are well made but unfortunately quite disconnected.

And that is were it stops. Everything else feels lackluster, uninspired and/or amateurish.

The story reads like children's cartoon level villainy with some juvenile "sex, drugs and rock and roll" sprinkled on top of it. I chuckled at some of the humor but it fell flat about the same amount of the time. Humor is subjective though so there certainly people that will like this.

Game design wise there really isn't much there. The ship combat is the better part. The mechanics and controls feel good but it's just mostly the same. Defeating waves of ships again and again. There's different factions which have different ship and fighting styles. But since you aren't informed ahead of time (what are scanners again) you can't even tailor the one choice you have, you gunner, to the battle. The story/boss battles differ a bit have some additional mechanics but the number of those compared to the regular battles on the system maps is extremely slight.

The tactical side is even worse of. You can't even compare it to full fledged tactics game in the vein of Xcom. The closest would be Into the Breach but it's a few leagues below. No goals besides kill X amount of enemy waves. No information in regards to what spawns or where. No environment interaction besides some blocked squares. Few abilites and passives. Boils down to just a damage race and trying to eliminate units before they get a turn.

Globally there's really nothing to do. Commanders and and Xenos level up but there's nothing to choose, nothing to manage. Don't know if there are plans to add anything but the only thing where I can currently see this mattering at all is enemy stats going up faster than your stats so you have to start grinding. In my book that would be a bad thing.
Global ship travel looks pretty but that's about it. There no resource management, no opportunity cost. It just takes a bunch of time flying between planets. Right click to scan, left click to select. A bit of flavor text one bit of generic "event", ship or tactical combat.

Everything that is there feels polished. It's just that there is so few of it. Was there no game design vision beyond this? Then why try to make a game? Did they have a vision but not the skills to realize it? Usually that tends to lead to a buggy mess. I don't know what happened but I know I have a hard time seeing how they can improve things with additional chapters in this regard.

My opinion is that if you put gameplay beyond visual novel choices and puzzles in a porn game. Gameplay that is disconnected from the porn. Then that gameplay needs to be fun and be able to stand on it's own feet. I don't want to grind a bunch of stats/gifts to unlock porn scenes that don't even have any narrative connection. Especially not when the gameplay is repetitive and (eventually) boring.

I guess I'll give it another chance later down the line but from the looks of it I might be better off watching a cut of the scenes on a random porn site.

Verdict: No Recommendation

The good parts

• The voice acting is superb.
• The visuals are often nice, the art direction is great.

The bad parts

• Repetitive Gameplay. At its core the game is a kinetic novel with two mini games attached to it.
• The Porn. There's almost no lewd action during the game's story. The Scenes are seperated 5 second loops you can unlock through points. They have no context or dialogue.
• The writing is often terrible edgy, trying to be relatable funny but failing. Reminds me of the "Silence brand" meme.
• No interactivity. No dialogue options, no interactions during the lewd scenes. There's no reason why this game uses a AAA 3D Engine if it's not making use of it.

Conclusion: Subverse is the Last Jedi of NSFW games. A visually truly stunning game with fantastic voice actors and actresses. But in every other aspect of the game it falls flat and disappoints.

Review for Version 0.1

What this game is:
------------------
You play as a pervert mercenary tasked to overthrow the puritanian galactic empire of boredom, assisted by your crew of hot battlesluts. To do this you go on missions which are either asteroids/geometry wars style space combat, or squad turn-based ground combat on an iso-grid.

As you complete missions, you get points for unlocking sex-scenes in a galery. That's about it.

The good:
---------
This is easily the best looking and best sounding porngame on the market. In terms of presentation Subverse is a freaking artpiece, that puts everything else out there to shame.

It's also a proper parody, and by that i mean spaceballs-grade parody: The whole game is neverending train of 4th wall jokes, genre-savy puns and sexual innuendo. If you read other reviews saying the dialogs are cheesy: Those are people who don't understand humour and sarcasm even when they're being facefucked with it. Subverse is the Spaceballs of porngames - simple as that.

The actual game-parts of Subverse (space and ground combat) are... decent. They're more polished and deep than most other porngames, but still just minigames.

The bad:
--------
The porn-content of Subverse consists of maybe two dozen unlockable animloops. That is all: Two dozen loops with a slider from "slow" to "fast", and a "cum"-button. No positions, no interactivity, no complexity: Just a bunch of animloops.

Do they look good? Hell yeah, just like the rest of the game: No plastic-puppets, chunky polygons or clumsy anims to see here - those loops are artpieces. But they're still just a bunch of fucking loops.

Now combine this with the fact, that the "gameplay" of Subverse is just two minigames with variable enemies, and one has to ask the question: How much is Subverse a "porngame", when neither the "porn" nor the "game" is that interesting?

Of course the same could be said for hundreds of other "porngames" out there. Subverse isn't bad - it's "mediocre", and that feels disappointing compared to the stellar presentation and great parody.

Or to put it another way: Subverse sets such a high standard in presentation and writing, that it reveals how "meh" the average porngame really is. And at it's core Subverse is just an average porngame, dressed in a glorious shell.

It makes me wonder if this project maybe would've worked better as a softcore parody. Of course for that it would need proper gameplay to carry the story.

Conclusion:
-----------
Presentation = 110%
Story/Humour = 100%
Interface = 75%
Porn = 45%
Game = 60%

This is a lot longer than I intended. I ended up just having a lot to say about it so I've broken this review into parts and put a quick TLDR in bold at the bottom of each section for those who don't want to read it all.

This game is actually what got me into porn games when I originally backed it on kickstarter and I'm pretty disappointed with what we have so far. For over two million dollars I wanted a high quality porn game but what we got was a shmup game with porn literally pushed off to the side.

The Story/Gameplay
Let me first say that I do like the shmup/turn based combat in this game. I actually ended up beating every single planet mission because I was having such a good time leveling up the girls. I recommend it if that's the type of game you're looking for, but if you were expecting high quality porn from this wildly successful kickstarter then you'll probably be disappointed.

The story is fine so far. I didn't find it that engaging but it's still too early in the story (this update covers chapters 1-6 out of 22) to say it's bad and I think it has the potential to be fun once things get going. My biggest problem with the story is that it feels so disconnected from the sex. After you meet each girl you'll do a mission for them and then get the intro sex scene but that's it. All the other scenes are put into a type of gallery where you have to unlock them by using the game currency which means that every sex scene apart from the first viewing of the recruitment scene is devoid of any story/dialogue.

It kind of feels like they spent so much time on the story/gameplay that they forgot this was a porn game and didn't know how to implement any scenes into the story, so they just threw them all into a gallery.

The Sex "Scenes"
The sex scenes are way below the quality you would expect from this game. The old Meet n' Fuck flash games had more interactivity than any sex "scene" in Subverse. I use the term "scene" loosely because about 95% of them are just 3 second animations being looped and the other 5% are called the special scenes (they even say something like "these scenes were cooked up special in our porn lab") and they cost double to unlock. In these special scenes, you get a speed slider and a cum button. That's the entirety of the interactivity in this game. Surprisingly (at least to me but maybe I'm crazy), this game which was made using UE4 doesn't have an option to change camera angles.

95% of the scenes are basically just gifs with a special few giving you the bare minimum of interactivity.

The Voice Acting
The voice acting is pretty good. Some of it had me cringing and sometimes the characters would talk really slow which drove me crazy (you can skip a line of dialogue like you can in RenPy) but overall I thought the performances were good. The fact this game has voice acting would be a selling point for a lot of people but you should know that the girls don't say anything during sex (like I said earlier, there's no dialogue in these scenes). They still moan but it's a pretty short loop just like the animations. That being said, if you talk to the red girl at the bar about sex she'll tell you if you want to make her happy then to obey whatever she says in bed, so maybe dialogue is/was planned. Either that or it was just a throw away line.

The girls will moan during sex but they won't speak at all.

Final Thoughts
I wanted to like this game but it just doesn't land for me. This is more of a very long video with shmup gameplay thrown between cutscenes in order for it to be called a game. To me, it feels like StudioFOW tried to use their knowledge in Source Filmmaker to develop a game despite the mediums being very different from one another and it just doesn't work. There's hardly any context or interactivity to any of the scenes in Subverse which is kind of the whole point of making a porn game. Hopefully things will improve as we get closer to the finished product but until then I'd recommend playing almost any other game on this website.