I was one of the original backers, having long been a fan of Studio FOW. The game's premise and the initial art was well-pitched and they seemingly had a solid plan for the entire development process of the game and were supposedly in content with current professional members of the gaming industry with experience making games.
To be frank, Kickstarter is a cesspool full of lies and tears, and if you support a game there, there's a 90% chance you're going to get scammed even if you do get something at the end. It is very easy to run off with the money legally due to the legal jargon Kickstarter itself smugly wraps itself in to sleep at night.
But this seemed like a good bet and honestly, as long as a good attempt was made I would be satisfied making helping Studio FOW see if this might be a way for them to breakout of their somewhat underground pron indie status.
Jeeeeeeeezus christ, what went wrong. Where to start? From the get go to when the game was presented exclusively to backers, the feedback was harse and fiercely negative. This, unsurprisingly, caused a war between the white knights and people who just wanted a decent game, with the devs deleting a lot of kickstarter updates and steam posts and I guess hoping that the screaming white knights left in a void--with some posts even still referencing ones that had been deleted--would make it seem like a good game.
After numerous missed targets, they eventually backtracked on their entire kickstarter plan, scratched out their release date, and decided to launch in EA instead with the plan to launch soon and release the rest of the game in episodes, because, you know, gamers sure love paying full price for 10% of a game that may or may not ever get finished. In came the massively negative reviews that were cushioned by the white knights. Seriously, go read some of the reviews--they recommend the game but then talk about how the game is unfinished or how it has a lot of problems in the actual review but don't want the game to look bad or want to give them a chance, lmao.
Studio FOW, upon seeing the deservedly poor reaction to their very expensive game, decided to keep it in EA. Why? Because when you release your reviews basically get cut off between EA and release and EA scores don't affect your release scores, lmao.
It's now been in EA for like, I don't know, going on 2 years now with very little progress made.
What's wrong with the game? Well, it's basically a visual novel with game elements, which isn't exactly rare, and not a problem in of itself. The problem is that the ikaruga/asteroids knockoff and the shallow as all hell tactical RPG minigames are, well, terrible and tedious, so the game part of the game simply sucks. I've seen some people say it's too hard, and whiel there are some awkward difficulty jumps, no, it's really easy and boring.
Okay. Well, many visual novels have throwaway game components.
Yeah, well, the story itself is also utterly pointless... making it kind of a lackluster VN. Like, it doesn't even take itself seriously. Imagine a chinese knockoff Deadpool with the cringest lines you can imagine in a game with the most deadpan sexual innuendo imaginable. That's your character + cast.
Unfortunately, that cast is all bad, as they play incredibly hard into stereotypes with zero variance or flavor, so you can practically map out how your interactions with them will go from the start. Most of the girls are just outright sluts that have no real clear motivation to keep you from sexing them but do it because, I guess, the game needs some kind of development?
And oh boy, the pron. You'd think this would be the game's one shining grace, given Studio Fow's history. Nope. Not only are all the heroines incredibly safe sterotypes in both personality and design played without variance, all of them are incredibly forgettable, which isn't helped by the frankly hilarious 12-year-old edgelord-just-discovered-porn of a story.
It's all also presented to you out of the story (pending a few exceptions) in some cheesy menu-based system where you piece what are efectively gifs (since there's no interactivity like rotating the camera) together to create your desired 'movie.' Yep, that's the pron system. Used to be that you played the pointless game to unlock random, out of context pron scenes in this, but boy did they take note when their face base told them to shut up and turn right back around with that nonsense, so they've been improving it quite a bit--I'll give them that much.
The only positives I can say is that the voice acting isn't terrible and the models are pretty, if boring.
I'd call the game painfully vanillia if not for all the monsters/tentacles the ladies can sex, but they are ESPECIALLY out of context and are basically just random scenes, and as a lover of this kind of stuff, are terrible scenes anyway. The rest is pretty vanillia and not very imaginative, which is weird to say for Studio FOW.
I honestly don't know how they could screw up the one thing they were known for, but they did.
Frankly, this game is a very poorly designed gif CG unlocker where you play stupid knockoff versions of game systems to earn points for the CGs while enduring a throwaway cheesy pron story--that is literally how the game plays.
It'll be marginally worth getting CG rips from if it's ever actually finished, but it will never be a good game, but even if you're hoping for a fun, sexy VN, you ain't getting that here either.
Please don't waste money on this game. I sincerely hope Studio FOW goes back to videos after this, because Subverse is nothing but a waste of time for all of us.
