Unreal Engine - Completed - Subverse [v1.1.0] [Studio Fow]

Review as of 1.0

Great game, I would say it's one of the best indie game out there, the gameplay (I really enjoy grid turn base combat), the story, the characters etc. And with the adult elements, it could be one of the perfect big adult game out there.

But it just unfortunately (sadly and miserably) fails to be a good "adult" game... because most of the sex scenes were most behind some GIFs-playing thing called PANDORA (which offers a little interactions, dialogues or even dirty talks from the girls)???

Though of course there are some scenes part of the main story (devotion quests, Ela's first cutscene) but it's just not enough compared to effort Dev given to those PANDORA stuff (I mean some scenes were hot but it's not that different from scrolling through rule34, Pornhub or other porn websites rather than playing a "ADULT GAME")

I wish more scenes were part of the actual gameplay instead (like devotion quests for each girls, that's how the adult scenes should be integrated in the game) (or better Ela's cutscene where she shoots a scene with Captain for example) (or even in an easier way, making some lead-in dialogues and lead it to existing PANDORA scene, that'd be a bit more acceptable)

Great game but the potential of being the perfect adult game is wasted

V.1.0
Pros:

• Good character designs
• Great voice acting.

Cons:

• Grind is still a nightmare, simplistic gameplay should not overstay its welcome by being mandatory to perform 30+ hours into the game for 3 minutes of content.
• Questionable gameplay design, bullets that move slower than your ships, instead of being a shmup where you gun down enemies on a fast moving ship there is a lot of waiting for your bullets to reach the enemies to damage them.
• Even decade old fire emblem knew speeding up repetitive animations and wave reinforcement was necessary in the isometric battler, but not here, you will slog through the grind with unskippable slow animations.
• Barely any character development, despite setting up introductions and plotlines, the only relevant content you get with them is... more grinding. Not exploration of their personality or sexuality, just more copy pasted battles.
• Animations are very sparse and lackluster compared to the dev's old production, in terms of both quality and quantity, made worse by the plot segregation from the scenes/loops itself.
• Of all the things to cut corners on a 20+ hour long game, I think the character plotline conclusions being a powerpoint slideshow is a mistake, its bad enough that they weren't developed, if even the grand payoff and conclusion isn't being taken seriously by the developers, how are the players suppose to feel attached or care?
• Yet another moved goalpost, game has finally left early access after years of development but promised content has been announced to come in dlcs instead of the finished game.
• H animations being locked away in Pandora, a restrictive scene viewer that doesn't let you cycle through whichever animations you want, instead of selecting whatever you want to enjoy at the moment, you have to preselect and lock in 1-5 specific animations you want to view and have to exit out every time you want to change content, which get very tedious as the majority of content in the game aren't long animations, but repetitive seconds long short loops.
• Who was the intended audience of this product? Were their backers and buyers celebrating that there are SFW restricted characters and censored-only content in the game?

1.0 Review

Got this on Steam years ago when it first came out, but what a disappointment it turned out to be.

Excellent production quality for a porn game but that's it. Subverse is unfortunately hampered by bad writing and an awful gameplay loop. Ultimately the porn scenes are locked behind an animation viewer with 0 actual interaction besides a very restrictive camera pan and zoom. Very few scenes even have a climax, just a single animation loop. You unlock scenes by leveling up your characters which forces you to play through either a space shooter and turn based grid battles, and both are tedious AF. Each girl also has a devotion quest and some alternative costumes, but they're locked behind leveling up so you're again forced to go through some very tedious gameplay.

You'll get a better story, gameplay and fap in games with a fraction of the budget of this game.

Painfully average sex game. There are much better visual novels out there. And this one fails to deliever on basically every aspect of it. Along with ludcriously frustrating and boring gameplay.

Uninteresting combat mechanics. A pisspoor story. And a setting written by what 15 year olds would consider edgy, funny, and meaningful.

If anything this is the least interesting game I've played, I've even bought the game back when it showed promise, unforunately that promise fizzled up when the combat mechanics came out. Turning away from an actual meaningful story or characters to sex jokes and poorly written characters. The entire reason people would play this is because of the characters, and they are laughably poorly written.

I am a fan of their animations but htey should've stuck to animations or gotten a game studio to make this game instead of in-house. Its very apparent this is their first game, and it shows how little understanding they have of what people want from a game.

If I am somehow more invested into a puzzle game like Huniepop and not this, it tells me the game-loop in this is poorly concieved. People do not want to work for every single scene with a character. Either decrease the amount of encounters and reduce the grind, or stick to one type of game.

There are already better games of this caliber that are hentai games that exist that do it better. This is also the problem with how poorly optimized the game is, and how lifeless the sex scenes are. What could've been a meaningful, fun time, is reduced to poorly built out, sex scenes that have nothing in them of interest.

This is probably the harshest review I've ever given to a game, but other than making a whole new game, this is a travesty of just a bad game. Don't waste your money, don't waste your time, find the videos online and avoid this game. Cause thats the same experience as it is in game.

Review for v1.0

Subverse is a game I've kept track of for a long time. With the literal millions going into the budget and a team of talent putting it together, this felt like it could be the first real BIG lewd game title. Now in a sense that's true, because it's no real question that this could be considered "AAA" in the world of lewd games. Unfortunately that title, perhaps unsurprising to many these days, isn't exactly an indication of something being good.

I've been a long time advocate of writing being perhaps the most important element of a good adult game, since that's typically what grips me into wanting to actually play them in the first place. I planned on sinking many hours going through this and giving it a real in-depth review, expecting it to keep me hooked enough to do so. That plan has since fallen apart, as after experiencing the writing in this game, I asked myself why waste any more time on this and downloaded a full save for the gallery. With that being said, here's where I will put the fair disclaimer that I did NOT play though all of this, and thus haven't seen a large majority of the content. I specifically played up until the missions where you recruit the elf pornstar girl before I just couldn't do it anymore.

I've seen the comparison made a few times and I think it's apt: this is like Borderlands writing smashed together with a Mass Effect inspired space opera of sorts. This game REALLY wants you to know it's a porn game. The script is filled with never ending cheesy lines, fourth wall breaking jokes, and just an overall juvenile level of humor that's baked into almost every facet of this game. For me, that makes it incredibly hard to actually care about anything going on let alone take it serious. You could argue I'm a fool for trying to do so in the first place, but the game is half story-related cutscenes that I have to sit there and watch (or skip) to progress.

It's not as if I necessarily hate the characters, as they feel endearing enough when they aren't plagued by the umpteenth corny porn joke, but another aspect that made it hard to enjoy this was the MC. The game offers no choice, nor is the MC any form of self insert. He's a smuggler with an Australian accent that wears panties on his head. Much like everyone else, it feels like half his dialogue is porn jokes. I just feel nothing towards his character and there isn't anything changing that in what I played.

As for the actual gameplay part of the game, there's only two parts where you're actually doing something outside of clicking into different rooms on the ship. The SHMUP ship combat and the tactical unit-based grid combat. Both suffer from the same issues: being repetitive and lacking depth. To unlock most things in this game, including a large majority of the sex scenes, you have to grind XP for the girls to level them up. You get XP primarily from these combat encounters, which means you'll be doing a lot of them. It almost feels like because they decided to have these two styles of combat systems, neither of them got enough focus to make them truly engaging beyond the first few battles you do. They almost overstay their welcome more than anything.

Now obvious praise where it's due: indicative of the huge budget, the production value of this is insane for a lewd game. Fully voice-acted (and done well too), many fully animated cutscenes, lots of work put into the UI, music, sound effects, etc. etc. etc. Too many details to name, but suffice to say this does feel like a game with a ton of work going into it. Which is good, because it is. It's by no means average.

The last part of this is the sex. Again given the super high production value and the teams previous works, the scenes LOOK great and are animated very well. But the thing is, what is really separating this from being a gallery viewer you have to grind to unlock scenes for? Honestly, very little. This is because like 90% of scenes aren't actually built into the story but instead just exist to be viewed solely in the gallery. It's another thing that makes it hard to really connect with characters, but considering the games writing maybe it's a good thing the scenes don't have any dialogue either. So maybe they lack on certain qualities, but are they still satisfying to view so to speak? Yes and no. There exists what are essentially premium scenes that have a speed slider and a cum button, but those make up only like ten percent of the total scenes available. The rest exist as short loops without those things. Not to mention the extremely limited camera control, where penetration is often hidden. Edit: I took a look at some of the devotion scenes, and again while high quality, they suffer from similar issues. It's just a longer cinematic you have no control over with characters I don't really care about.

I feel like I've ranted about this more than put together a coherent review really detailing why I don't like this, but the TLDR is that while yes this is obviously not your typical porn game given the money and development that went into it, it ultimately fell short for me as a game that just couldn't keep me engaged into any of it. If there's anything I could have personally changed about the game, it would have been to take itself more seriously and ironically engrain the actual sex scenes into the story. The trend of me being let down by games I've waited a long time for unfortunately continues.

First of all I need to say that the worst part of the game is the dialog and it made me cringe more times than I can count. It makes fucking Borderlands of all things look like a masterpiece by Nietzsche in comparison.
Just because it's an adult game doesn't mean you NEED to say an obscene word every sentence, worst of all spoken by Australians with a thick accent. UGH that should be considered a war crime.
Also, if you break the 4th wall too many times, the whole roof will fall on you and you won't have a story left because you don't care enough about it. Which in turn makes us not take it seriously either and skip through the dialog.

Gameplay consists of rounds of bullet hell and turn based combat ala heroes 4 scattered on planets you need to discover just like in mass effect.
Sex scenes are unlocked by leveling the girls and they aren't part of the story except the first ones. Which is the other massive stain on this game. How can you sit in development for years and not think that maybe you should integrate the sex in the story or gameplay, and not just leave it like random r34 to be viewed on the side?

This ain't the one, chief. The score is not compared to other games, I'm scoring this game as per the expectations they've raised for soooo long.

Gameplay: Fun but gets stale/repetitive.

Lewd content: Lotta scenes, only 15-20% of them with option for climax and speed/variety slider. The latest added scenes in Pandora are often not lip-synced properly or with visual glitching. Seems the team was in a rush to release the product.

Humor/Script/Story: abysmal, juvenile. Ha-ha, dick ships, flat sex puns 95% of the script, but game still trying to convince you this is a high-stakes mission you're on. You don't play that game for the story AND the lewd, only for the lewd (and it seems that was the goal of the studio).

Notes: Last version I played of this game before its release was 0.8. I feel like almost nothing changed, aside from adding devotion cinematics, re-ordering menu contents and cutting the huge game size. In fact, in 0.8 there was a pretty cool experimental interactive Taron scene from Act 2 that was cut (remade into a static Pandora scene). So in some sense 0.8 seems superior to me, as it attempted to achieve something that's actually better than a ton of RenPy games - interactivity (yea, imagine actually utilizing Unreal Engine).

This game deserves way more respect and praise both for what it is and what it represents as the "1st AAA" game of this genre.

-INTRO-

Subverse is not perfect. I would go as far as to say it isn't even what I wanted it to be. That said, I think it blows 99.99% of it's competition out of the stratosphere. For that reason alone it gets a 5 star rating from me. At it's core, this game is a high production value VN with turn-based strategy and shoot-em-up segments to break up the HEAVY dialogue. I find myself fast forwarding through the exposition a few hours in, and while the story isn't anything revolutionary and the jokes don't all land, a certain self aware tongue-in-cheek charm permeates the entire atmosphere. Demi's naivete and matter-of-fact sexual directness, Dallick's stoner, street rat persona, The Captain's lecherous aussie swagger... Studio Fow clearly put forth great effort to bring these characters to life and I appreciate the art direction, character and sound designs and self deprecating humor.... however, it's obvious that this is a product of a film studio and not a game developer. While none of the gameplay is particularly bad, it's not terrific either. I'm having fun playing it, but the porn, the sole reason this game exists in the first place, is tucked away into an animation viewer in a menu. I would much prefer being able to initiate a scene by speaking with a waifu and either prompting her myself or being propositioned. It feels disconnected from the rest of the experience.

-IT'S JUST A SCENE VEIWER?!-

While the copious amount of sex the crew allegedly have with each other is heavily referenced in dialogue amongst themselves and with the people the crew encounter, it's not accessed naturally enough for me to believe it's actually happening outside of Pandora, the scene viewer, or the occasional pre-rendered cutscene. Grinding missions to level the waifus in order to buy sexy loops is one of the least engaging ways to integrate sex into a video game I have ever encountered. Brothels and strip clubs in video games have been around for a long time and in the one's that I've played, they are just... there. They exist within the greater world and I have the choice to navigate to and utilize them or not. Go in, spend the money you earned from questing or selling loot and reap the reward. Simple and clean. Most importantly, believable. I had a choice to go on the quest. I had a choice to spend that money. I had a choice to get to that small section of the game in the first place and because of that, the sex feels natural. Here, it feels like I'm grinding the actual GAME sections solely for resources just to then open a menu and watch a gif. That wouldn't be much of an issue normally. However, this is a porn GAME. THE porn game. Making the sex neither interactive nor meaningfully customizable is a true shame, especially considering the size and scope of what was planned.

-LET 'EM COOK-

Studio Fow was leagues ahead of their contemporaries in terms of animation, direction, depravity, and presentation at the time of this game's announcement... some odd years ago. Multiple Blender artists have since eclipsed that level of fidelity and I'm not as impressed or shocked by what they've brought to the table during this game's... controversial development period. That isn't to say the sex in Subverse is bad or boring. In fact, some of the scenes that have leaked over the years are still some of my favorites of the 3D/Animated/Rule34 category. It feels dated-on-arrival, unfortunately, and that definitely hurts the experience. That said, the smut still does it's job well. I be goonin.

-SO WHAT NOW?-

Subverse is a success;
A success in game development, making it's way through early-access hell
A success in proving that there is a real, viable market for NSFW video games
A success in being of high enough quality for people to see it's creation through, both financially and in terms of hype and community

But now what? Does Studio Fow support the game for years with bug fixes and DLC? Do they go back to making movies? Is another game planned? Was this entire thing a fluke?

I'm glad to see 1.0 sitting beside the title and I plan on finishing this game. Though... when I finish playing and see how much time I've spent during the session... I can't help but feel like this is all pointless. Subverse and all other games on this site exist to satisfy that longing for something missing. This game in particular is the best example of that sentiment. 4 years have gone by and it seems as though nothing has changed. A lil more polish... a bit more self awareness... another goal reached... and yet... more of the exact same thing we've come to expect over the course of this journey.

-TLDR-

A fun, yet paradoxically hollow experience that deserves to be recognized as the miracle that it is. If this isn't the future of adult gaming, I like to think it could be the spark that ignites a renaissance; Subverse may walk so that something greater can run. Time will tell.

Loving the update guy's, been so waiting for this.
Been following you and playing this for years now on Steam.

It's ad that my old saves don't work, but I can see how much your changed the game, and it's running much smoother.

Wish there was a hardness level box, I would set the game harder, but still loving it.

I am hoping that I can change the outfits on the girls soon, I don't know if this is a future update, or, that I just need to get my girls devotion level higher..

I am also pleased to say that I am no longer having problems with solar systems being cleared but saying there not all cleared.

Anyway, i'm going back to having a Mary time on the Mary Celeste

Here is my comment from a different site that people may also enjoy reading


I have been playing this game since it first came out, they had a lot of little bug's when going into different system's for a while as new locations were added, but after a lot of work and many years they have the game finelly compleated.

The game battle's are a mix of space battles and ground battles.

If you find the game to hard there are also train's you can get for this game.

This game is not for children, there is a lot of sex in it and a lot of swearing as well as drinking etc.

But most adult's who are into lewd games will love this game and enjoy playing it right through.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Version: 1.0
FOREWORD: I didn't get pass the tutorial. Quickest game I've ever dropped on F95.

[Story]- The voice acting is of quality, but feels weird. A little like Mass Effect 1 where there's a disconnect between lines. There are dialogue controls, but it defaults to autoplay. I didn't get to mess with this, but the autoplay flow was pretty good. The animation was terrible. It didn't really match the voices. Despite there only being one language(English), they didn't bother to lip sync and it looks stupid.

[Gameplay]- Controller control scheme is complete $%^&. Unconfigurable, and secondary fire is on the left instead of LB, while dodge was put on the RB for unfantomable reasons. You also dodge in the direction you're aiming... NO Controller icons or instructions. They do things in every mode, but you're left to figure it out. Mouse and keyboard configurable for every mode, but you can ONLY configure either a mouse button or keyboard key, not both.

[Scenes]- The scene control system(Pandora) is complete %^&*. Unexplained controls, and hard to figure out even with configuration and experimentation. Controller is even worse. You can "somehow" get to the camera menu and use d-pad to "navigate" it, but good luck with that. Some ability to hide the slider and no ability to bring it back. I liked how realistic Demi's mouth looked during the scene, and that's as far as I got, because I can't play a game where I can't even work the controls. Again, mouse and keyboard "works", but it's not Keyboard only or mouse only. You can't control the camera with the keyboard Or the controller(you can if you can manage to activate the camera menu "somehow").

Almost all of the new scenes are terrible quality. Clothes and penises clipping through, weird looking penetrations, skin texture looking like they forgot the word texture while rendering, blurry views so you probably can't tell the quality is shit, joints and body parts are extremely jarring once you pay attention to them

It's very clear that this is a cash grab and that they're just doing it so they can finally complete the game.

This game is like a river that is a mile wide but only an inch deep.

There is a lot of content here, but none of it feels fully fleshed out and well designed.

Everyone reading this knows what this company is known for. The problem is, rather than staying in their wheelhouse and doing something that probably would have been awesome for their fans, they tried to make something for everybody, and in doing so, you can't really tell who this game is for.

During the Kickstarter they did an excellent job of baiting Mass Effect fanboys like myself into thinking this would be a game for us. To keep us happy, they ended up putting all the monster stuff they're actually good at in the Pandora system, which is awful on pretty much every level. This decision pissed off their normal fans who like that stuff, because it's all disconnected from the storyline and not implemented well.

The Devotion Quest scenes are awesome, but they are the only scenes in the entire game that are. The scenes in the Pandora system are at best mid.

Gameplay-wise, this game is a massive grind. They would have been better off picking one of the two game systems, focusing entirely on it and discarding the other one. Having two completely independent game systems within this game is a really weird choice.

This game is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with AAA games today.

I highly recommend you just wait for somebody to rip all of the animations and just watch those. This game sucks.

This is a weird game that's almost reflective of how unready we are (despite knowing about this for YEARS) to score these games. The first self-proclaimed AAA porn game.

The story is good. It's not the best I've seen on this site. But it's good enough to make me want to keep playing.

The production levels are ASTOUNDING.

The girls are...fine? I think halfway through making this game, someone told FOW that, for better or worse, people play games like this to form the emotional connection with who they're banging. Anal is hot. Strong girls being weak to anal is hotter. That confident tanned tomboy childhood friend being weak to anal? Yeah that's the good stuff. I can see any ass get plowed by a dick. We've become so degenerate that we want to get to know them first. Truly disgusting.

Unironically; as this game just nails the porn part, I find myself wondering if they're doing enough of a good job with the hand-holding part.

And then I'm like "ok, yeah, but how many objectively worse HS/Koikatsu games have you given a 4 or 5 to?" and yeah fair enough; 5 it is.

I didn't like the game's first release. Nobody did. That's why the score is so low. So we're also unprepared for games like this when we score them on this website.

I'm just going to leave the 5 here and hope that this game is considered mid 5 years from now when better high budget western porn games start cropping up.

It is actually really hard to fairly rate this one, because this is the closest we've *ever* come to a full length, 3-D epic-styled hentai game. That in itself is pioneering and there is a fully fledged out story with cinematics throughout the game. For that, I give the highest praise to StudioFow. This review will be based on the game itself.

Full disclosure- I played the entirety up 0.9. I did not finish the game, but I used a full save to see the rest. I backed on kickstarter years ago and got to see it through development. I am not going to include the devotion cinematics in this review. I watched Fortune's, and it was fine enough, but I dont think i'll come back to it.

Art: I'm distinguishing art from h-scenes here. The animators did a fantastic job and the game looks amazing. For the length of the game, there seems to be very little frayed ends in terms of the quality from what I can tell. This is definitely the game's high point and I would give it a 5/5 if I was only judging the art.

Hentai: This part doesn't include art whatsoever, its more about the context of the hentai. A large amount of the h-scenes in this game is tied into what's called "pandora" scenes, which is basically a scene viewer that you need to use a special type of points to unlock which you can string together to make somewhat of a movie (but not really). Only a few of these scenes feature cumshots, and the "manticores", genetically modified beasts, are featured in a lot. I thought this style on the whole was a bit of a wasted opportunity. I'm biased because I dont particularly like the monster fetish, but most of the scenes just lack any real energy to it. There's no real roleplay, no power dynamic, it's just loops of 3d banging that you can find on the internet. The characters all have big personalities in the story, but they're absent from pandora. Something like a quick lead up context to some pandora scenes would help this tremendously, like MC beating Fortune in cards and booty was the bet or Demi (edit not Demi, the tiny blue chick) jumping on MC like a spider monkey when she is wasted. This may be fleshed out in devotion, I donno, but Pandera, specifically, is a let down. 2/5.

Story & Script: Like many hentai games, the story seems to lack real direction and identity. This is (obviously) a sci-fi game that parodies, at least in part, titles like Mass Effect. There is a massive amount of humour (attempts) and some real effort to world build.

This is the problem: a lot of humour is all sex puns and references to pop culture. It's dumb, very juvenile, and sometimes just too much. None of the jokes have lead up or thought, they are all like "that ship looks like a dick!" or "this silly character looks like a celebrity". Har har. It's annoying, especially because almost every dialogue contains a dick joke, but that in itself is not the issue.

The other side of this coin is that the story itself tries to be serious, so you have dick jokes and then all of a sudden they're talking about genocide, revenge, and political corruption. It's jarring, and there are exposition bombs all over the place that go from sex bots to attempts at legitimate world building. The writer should have either tried to make a fun, goofy story, or make a serious, less-dick-joke-esque drama. There's ways you can do both, but the writers failed pretty badly at it. 2/5.

Gameplay: For this one, I'm going to be charitable. Frankly, I didn't like it. BUT, large amount of effort was put into it, the space UIs look beautiful, and the SCHMUPs has a degree of fun to it. The tactics mode was broken in terms of balance, but since there were updates to it that I didnt play, I'm not going to speak to that. It was a grind, but, granted, I did put like 20 hours into the game grinding, so it can't be that awful. Similar to the story, I feel like they should of either put all their eggs in one basket by making either tactics or SCHMUPs fleshed out and interesting, or creating more variation in the gameplay, but it is what it is. Like I said, being charitable, i'll give it 3/5.

In conclusion, I want to reiterate that my 3/5 is a review of the game itself, and not what the game represents. Hats off to this studio for such an ambitious attempt and those that are interested should pick it up on Steam and judge for yourself. I do hope they add more content in the future.

Really hope that they have an overarching post-release strategy where they will use the sales (with a price bump) of 1.0 to fund a decent amount of expanded content because as it stands, this initial release screams of massive resource mismanagement internally. I don't care about the stylistic elements people are taking issue with (fetishes catered to, dialogue/story structure, pandora narrative integration) but purely from a content design standpoint what we've gotten doesn't make much sense considering the time and funding allocated.

Yes, this is an indie game that only took one round of KS funding, it was never going to look AAA either in the presentation or gameplay departments and they do manage to get decent mileage out of strong cutscene direction and repurposed assets (some of the enemy models are originally from Paragon lol) but recognising their clear resource limitations they should have reigned in their ambitions extremely early. What they had as a foundation was a captive audience from their prior work, really strong character designs (and decently well defined personalities for said characters from a writing perspective) and a pair of shallow but serviceable gameplay systems (space and ground combat). The logical thing to do is pump the majority of your time and money into the good parts of that foundation (porn for the characters everyone likes in your porn game) and not waste it trying to implement awkward progression systems and feature bloat in all the wrong areas. Why does the DBZ power-up mechanic get set up in the main story only to be shunted down to the back quarter of every girl's progression and why does it even exist to begin with when ultimately the ground combat is so simplistic (as it should be), all that time and money spent on a mechanic that is utterly superfluous.

The progression itself is a mess, its scaled to fit the decent amount of (again very shallow) side content that all rely on you spending time with gameplay systems that aren't deep enough to warrant it but absolutely took serious time and money to develop. I don't understand that development goals here, any and all involved would absolutely be aware that the gameplay systems were not where the core appeal was and must have raised this internally, but at least judging by dev diaries, the messaging within the studio was to double and triple down on trying to flesh out the gameplay instead of playing to the actual strengths of the game (more porn, more character interaction). This whole project reeks of a disconnect between the leads and the people actually building the systems (surprisingly common at small studios), couple that with a really strange marketing and community engagement strategy that seemed to rubber-band from the initial "you know who we are and now we're doing mass effect with porn for our first ever game" bravado and then just flat nothing after the initial early access release, then a community focused regular approach with the dev diaries and social media presence and now back to the big trailers and "look its like mass effect" tone. Some of that is basic marketing logic (push the game hard when it comes out of EA to maximise first time sales) but the overall strategy, or rather strategies from the look of it, the past 4 years comes off as confused and muddled just like the actual game we've gotten here.

I don't think anything typifies the issues with Subverse and especially this 1.0 release better than the last act of the game. Last set of missions feature an infiltration sequence that (I'm not being hyperbolic) a first or second year game design student could whip up in a week or two, likely less. The "metal gear if it was a board game for children with learning difficulties" sequence is genuinely baffling and is immediately followed by two extremely boring boss fights that highlight exactly how little there is going on with the ground combat here (which anyone playing figures out much earlier in the game, so why emphasise it!) bookended by a series of final cutscenes that are some of the best directed in the whole game (but feature absolutely 0 porn in a porn game lmfao), it is such a remarkable feat of design whiplash that I actually might be sincerely impressed. Also Devotion quests unlock in the final act and they are for the most part a mix of the same shallow gameplay with admirable attempts to throw wrinkles into the formula (that struggle to overcome the sheer limitations of the core systems at play), bookended by short 'movies' ranging from 3-5 minutes in length. These are bound to be divisive, as they are by and large much more vanilla than what the core FOW fanbase probably wants/expects and they are some of the few times that the porn is actually attached to the narrative (not something that matters to me personally but I think open to valid criticism). It is more than a little damning that I came away from the DQs thinking "wow some of the best parts of this game are the non-interactive movies", none of them feature anything from their respective girl's progression systems either besides the actual investment to unlock them (no outfits, hair etc) since they are prerendered. This prompts the inevitable question of "would Subverse have been better if it was something like 70% FOW animation, and 30% gameplay?". A question I'm sure everyone involves doesn't want to be the primary take away for their audience here lol.

It's a shame because clearly a lot of talent and hard-work has gone into this project over a meaningful period of time, and there is such a good foundation here in terms of characters and atmosphere. I want to be clear that I don't think this is some irredeemable pile of shit or anything like that; FOW set out to do something ambitious (far too ambitious) and considering the strength of the initial ideas here (characters, world etc) its not hard to see why they would, however it is readily apparent that they quickly got themselves into a difficult position project management wise and that lead to crippling constraints on the end product. There's a general rule in creative fields that with a large scale project, you need to have the hard conversations early, clear restraints need to be set down so the project can be scaled (and costed lol) appropriately and the teams can know what they are working towards, and their managers can push them toward those *realistic* goals with clear messaging. This especially needs to be done before a public marketing push. Clearly, FOW (as an inexperienced team in this field) struggled with these fundamental principles and to be honest, its impressive that they were able to produce anything at all let alone something this decent. I hope they make enough to do further things with the Subverse IP, hopefully things that lean into their creative strengths.

1.0 out so i can put out a proper review after playing the game in the beta.

The fact that this game is around a 3star rating is a shame and why it's hard to trust the rating on this website.

U will find some walk collect sex scene rpg maker game with a 5type rating but they will put a 2star rating for this game.

Lets be honest, the work behind this game is BIG, it's not a cheap reusing the same image for 3 different scene, cheap 2d animation. If u just want a quick rub download the game, get a full save and go for the gallery.

If people don't enjoy gameplay i can get it, u can enjoy hentai game just for being able to tell a story in a different way. But you can also have hentai game with some gameplay and all. if it's not your thing, don't bother.

All the girl are really hot and you have a lot of different type, it's hard to not have at least one that will make you horny for her.
The story is not the best selling point but it's lot of joke reference and breaking the 4wall kind.

All the game is really well done animated, with really good job of voice acting and pretty good sound effect. Nothing cheap there.

I wouldnt call it the best hentai game, it's not for everyone, but it's really well done and it's hard to put low star when the game have so many good quality

The game has much better performance and runs well, the animations are what they are, my main issue was with performance which seems to have gotten much better than before so the game is good, not the best yet, maybe after dlc releases in future it would be but not yet

This game has alot of potential to be the greatest porn game western has made but they put a "immersive" gameplay,i rather play an actualy strategy game.lets be honest people play porn game to get some action but with a simple gameplay, not time consuming and not mental consuming.nice graphic and character tho.so just grab some full save somewhere and enjoy the "action" instead the "gameplay".

Review of v0.9...

I've only played a few hours, but I wanted to get my thoughts out there since I'm not sure if I will keep playing.

This game would have been so much better if StudioFOW took is seriously and tried to make a legit space drama porn game, but instead they clowned it up like Deadpool himself is making the game ramming in as much forth wall breaking and edgy humor and dialogue as they can. If they had made a legit serious game they would be taken more seriously as a development studio, but I guess they couldn't help themselves.

The character animations are good, but the cinematics are great. The voice acting is also very good.

The actual gameplay itself though is pretty dull. Grinding fight after fight for resources to upgrade your fighter or make new monsters for your army. The gameplay would be more manageable if the game had controller support, but it doesn't.

I didn't respond to much of the humor. The characters just sound like the try hards on 4chan. The one thing that did get a legit LOL out of me was when I came across their take down of Tim Pool. A lobster character wearing a beanie mocking Tim Pool reeing about not being able to use the Subverse name. I did really like that. Tim Pool is a clown.

The game isn't bad, but it could have been so much better. I'm not sure if I'll go back to it, but if I do and my opinion changes I'll return and edit my review accordingly.

StudioFOW has some of the highest quality content out there. And just like most who make porn games, they're output is slow. Having to trudge through some of the most awkward dialogue, jokes, and voice acting for the occasional sex scene is not great, but the few sex scenes there are are super solid.