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

Sex should always lead gameplay in a sex game.

The gameplay of this sex game is a poorly design space shoot em' up with a sex scene gallery you need a thousand dollar graphics card to enjoy.

The description of this game mentions StudioFOW is responsible for animations involving monster gangrapes, but Subverse's content remains relatively vanilla.

2 stars. Poor.

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.

Downloaded the full game which was such a large size and a lot of time only for it to take me to the store page. Tried to figure out how to open it and kept being pointed to links that lead to empty pages or places that no longer had any files to download.

These guys need to go back to just making porn shorts. This is a game where the porn feels so far removed from the game (mostly just relegated to a gallery) and you're left with really boring gameplay and PAINFULLY unfunny Reddit dialogue.

Most of the time when you get an actual cinematic in the game, you hope for something like their old work and then it's just an establishing shot before we go back to the boring visual novel format.

There's clearly hard work put into this but, man, they do not know how to write parody/satire.

I feel like people are being pretty harsh on this. My thought is that, now that it more or less has the production quality of a legit studio mainstream game, people are now rating it on that scale. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of dirty games aren't anywhere near that, so I'm going to rate it on the scale that I would rate its peers:

Presentation: 10/10. Menus are well presented, scene changes are fluid, characters are voiced for all dialogue, UI's generally make sense. Honestly a rarity for this genre outside of VN's

Porn: 8/10. Smooth animations, attractive characters, reasonably varied content, and there's a decent amount of it. Definitely a cut below something like insult order or illusion in the metric of quantity though. Then again, the game isn't done yet! Also worth noting that in those titles, the sex is the gameplay, whereas this has other things going on. The big thing I'd say here is that I'd really like a free camera. I also wish there was more body type variety, but I know that's a steam thing. It's wild to me that a reasonably proportioned athletic adult woman would be flagged by steam if it's presented in this style simply because the fact that her tits aren't massive means she looks too young, but I digress.

Gameplay: 9/10. Yeah, it's a little repetitive and yeah it gets grindy, but I've yet to find an adult game here with genuinely enjoyable gameplay that doesn't get a least a bit grindy. The controls are responsive and fun, so better than most, and there's a fail catch where if you lose three times, it'll just put you past the mission, which I think is a great idea in the genre.

Story/storytelling: 9/10. I see a lot of complaints that the story is kinda inconsequential and that the humor is crude and forced. Maybe I'm just immature and easily entertained, but I was laughing my ass off at most of the jokes, and the story was good enough to keep me interested. In my opinion, it has the right amount of weight. Not so little going on that I don't care, but not so crazy and dark that I feel guilty wanking to the characters (looking at you, Ricca....)

All in all, 5/5 for this genre for sure. A fantastic first attempt to make a game, and I hope it proves profitable for them!

Tragic. Simply tragic. These guys have been making animations for years, and made the mistake of thinking that experience would cross over to game-making. They really, REALLY should have started with a less ambitious project.

My gut instinct would be to give this 1 star purely due to the level of disappointment it has given me, but I'll be more objective and give it two stars for the few good points it has.

The good:
- Nice graphics

- Decent body physics

- Good animations, if you ignore the occasional improper alignment/clipping

The bad:
- Writing quality that would make an adolescent feel second-hand embarrassment, let alone somebody actually old enough to legally play the game. No exaggeration, the writing tries so hard to be funny while failing so spectacularly that it causes me physical discomfort.

- Not so great gameplay. As many others before me have pointed out, people don't make hybrid games very often, and there's a reason for that. They should have either focused on making it a schmup or a turn-based strategy game, not both. Both of the game modes are bare bones, shallow, and get old fast. The schmup parts were kinda fun for the first twenty minutes or so, but quickly outstayed their welcome.

- A nearly complete disconnect between gameplay and the smut. This, in my opinion, is the biggest blunder they've made with this project. Porn games aren't exactly known for excellent gameplay, but when the focus of the game is the sexy parts it's a lot easier to overlook and tolerate shitty gameplay. But the porn in this game is literally just looped seconds-long animations you unlock via an in-game store using points. This was an incredibly dense move on their parts. Why on earth wouldn't they integrate the smut into the gameplay? Make it so you can seduce the aliens on the battlefield and fuck them into submission, make it so you can board the enemy ships in the schmup sections for a 'hacking' minigame where you fuck the enemy pilots to take them out of commission, etc. As it currently stands, there is no connection whatsoever. It's just a standalone game with fanservice scenes for unlock.

Gods the wasted potential irks me. So much sexual stuff could have been used as gameplay elements. Make it so not only can you fuck enemies in the tactical sections, but have status effects. Flash enemies your tits to stun them, make it so that fucking the enemies is OP but every time you do it you get stuffed with cum, and if it happens enough you'll get cumflated and suffer penalties to movement and agility until it all leaks out. Make it so you can get pregnant from the encounters, then eventually birth new alien soldiers with enhanced abilities.

If the game had been like that, I'd have forgiven the mediocre gameplay hands-down, but as it stands now there's literally no reason I can think of to recommend this game to anybody. Writing's shit, story's boring, there are better schmups and tactical games, and the sex scenes are so disconnected and anti-climactic that you're better off just finding videos of them instead of wasting time unlocking them. Or even gifs, because that's what they might as well be for the length they have.

If you like grindy but shallow gameplay, the most obnoxious faux-edgy humor and the most tedious 5-second scene selector, this game might be for you.

In all honesty, none of the jokes land, the characters are utterly flat and you can see any attempt at humor from a mile away, while it being obnoxious. The gameplay doesn't offer anything, you're basically done with it after the intro missions, but they drag out for ages, there isn't one wave to beat, there are six, each taking like a minute to spawn without offering all to much variety or challenge.

The worst part has to be the scenes though. You don't really get scenes aside from the intro for each of the characters, which are then opened in a video player basically. For any additional scenes, you have to play missions to get points to unlock them. So you sit through 20 minutes of boring combat to unlock a 5-Second scene that doesn't lead anywhere and which just loops. No narrative explanation nor anything interesting happening. There is literally no further improvement made over just having the files on your computer and watching them in any other player, they are that disconnected from everything.

I mean, there is clearly comeptency when it comes to modeling, design and animation etc (You know that from the videos they make outside of this game) but whoever came up with the structure of this game has no idea what they are doing.

High production quality, but no substance. If there was actual content instead of annoying time wasting filler with just cringe, it might be passable. The actual content you're looking for can be found within minutes on other titles, whereas this is just a slog.

Highest quality lewd game out there bar none. The art quality, voice acting, and scene replayability are the best I've ever played, and while the dialogue and writing can be cringy at times, it can also be absolutely hilarious. This game is a must-play.

Is hard to judge this game as whole, so i will split it into 3 compartment:
1)Porn
2)Story
3)Gameplay

Let's start with the one everyone is interested, the Porn aspect of the game:

All porn present is simply CGI animations, sometime might be able to increase animation speed but thats it, no interaction with the scenes which is huge draw back for me.

On top of that, most of those CGI are unlocked in two ways:

1) Progress the main story

2) Buy them from Pandora with in-game currency.

In my personal opinion, this totally removes the fun of trying to trigger specific events by exploring or interacting with the characters.

2)Story, the story of this game is decent, it serves his purpose to introduce new characters/locations, but isn't anything epic that makes you carve for more when you close the game.

3)The gameplay, the gameplay of this game is divided in 3 sections, something close to a visual novel where you read the dialogues without any choice to be made, the space ship minigame in arcade style, and the RPG grid minigame.

The gun sections of the game are in my opinion extremely boring if you're not in the genre, and you'll be forced to do these in order to get in-game currency to unlock all scenes which is simply a chore to do, not fun at all.

The RPG aspect, as hardcore RPG player, is honestly trivial and not satisfying to play.

This game was a huge disappointment it feels like an alpha, they want to put too many things at once but they're not able to deliver any of them properly.

Is sad, because if they would have focus on only 1-2 aspects of the game (for example remove combat and make it more porn & story based, with more interaction with characters, explorations, different choices, and interaction during porn, it would have been so much better game.

Sorry for english.
The game has so many haters and fans XD. This is a standard kickstarter game. Promise a bunch of unbelievable content to get more money and now adapt to everyone. A mix that no one else makes tactical RPG/SHMUP hybrid. Games don't work like that. Developers simply do not have enough time and money to make it work. Cut some and focus on one thing they just do not have enough balls. It's the same with porn. They attracted such a different audience and now they can’t simultaneously do with the scenario that they have a vanilla harem game along with ntr monstr fuck. There are no balls to do one thing. Porn content just doesn't work.
The best potential of the game killed by marketing machinations to collect the maximum amount of money.
The game is just a waste of time

well this is a bit frustrating.

i don't care for the game aspect, i was here for the porn. had to get a save with almost everything unlocked from some guy over at steam.

visuals? sure, okayish. know the reason why the limited camera angles for the animations? use the universal unreal engine 4 unlocker for a clunky freecam and you'll see why.

they fucking didn't bother properly connecting the body parts that were supposed to be fucking. clipping galore, missing assets, the works.

i dabble a bit in animating. want things to look good or at least consistent from all sides? do it properly, cross the t's dot the i's, etc. it's time-consuming though. what they're doing is effecting the illusion of movement that only looks good at certain angles. shortcuts.

i can understand why they keep doing it (worked for them when they just made movies), but pretty sure they pocketed the surplus millions that didn't go into the voice or game design talent. the effort expended on what's supposed to be the main draw isn't commensurate with the amount of money being pumped into it.

tl;dr okayish (but somewhat derivative) character designs, sloppy animating, but then again that's how they rolled ever since their sfm days. reviewed for v0.5. snowball's chance in hell they overhaul their existing animations, but no harm in hoping

Comedy and HQ scenes. Boring sometimes during combat though. I was expecting more but they made a good job + still working in the game. So keep update or wait until they finish the game..... In 2 years XD

the game is really good , I am surprised it is receiving less than 4-5 stars , maybe most of them are old , hopefully people review their ratings , I am sure the game will get better and better , great game , keep it up please

I have been consistently disappointed on every update. Not just with the progress, but also with quality/quantity of the scenes, as well as the soulless story and dialogue. Legit I have seen better Renpy games on this site. I've given it two stars since the morsels of information on the outfits that we get given have been pretty solid. Too bad we've been cucked on every update for something that shouldn't be that hard to do for the time they've had.

I bought Subverse on Steam, driven in large part by the preview images. Playing the game has been an exercise in cringing tedium for the most part.

The Good
Excellent visuals.
Solid worldbuilding, though sometimes exhausting in its detail (much of which makes no difference to the story being told in the slightest).
Animations are very well done.

The Bad
H scenes are almost exclusively part of the gallery, and not part of the story at all. They are all animated, and really well-done, but also disappointing in their lack of interaction.
Bullet hell begins to get boring after a while, and the ground combat system is about as bare-bones as it gets.
The only choices to be made in this game are which planet's flavor text you'll be ignoring next.
The "pooter points" (ugh) system for the gallery is poorly implemented, making many of the scenes in the gallery inaccessible unless you've planned well in advance how to best take advantage of the system.

The Ugly
The writing here is atrocious. It is some of the worst, most puerile, edgelord crap imaginable. The devs mock everything that wanders into their adolescent minds with equal fervor. There is no subtlety. The humor slips past childish into outright stupid over and over again. You will find yourself rolling your eyes frequently, unless you happen to be in the same mindset as the devs, which would require you to either not be old enough to play an adult game, or have suffered a debilitating head injury at some point.

If you can plod through the game's "story" you might find yourself enjoying the H scenes, but those will grow stale quickly. I keep expecting more of this game than I should, because it looks like something that should be excellent, even if it falls far short of that mark in nearly aspect. I play every new update, and each time I am disappointed in the lack of anything that feels fresh or engaging.

Subverse is a good game but with lights and shadows. The story is not bad in the non-sexual side of it, a bit cliche as of a war against a bad empire and rebellion and all that. But sexually the story is horrible: all girls are full on "dumb sluts" and there is not much real work in giving them any real personality or any build up to the scenes with them. If we add that the overall tone of the game is a wanna-be Deadpool but not as well written, the whole story falls apart and becomes uninteresting quickly. Gameplay wise it has two sides to it: a twin stick shooter space battler which is quite quick and fun; and a turn-based combat which is a bit less fun but does it thing as long as you're not expecting a deep strategy game like XCOM. So, all in all it is a fun game to play, as long as you can manage to ignore the story.

Graphically the game is gorgeous as this genre goes, with lots of animations (not only for sex), great character models (even though it has too many non-humans in it) and lots of graphical little details you don't usually find in erotic games. Sound is also on a very high level for the genre, with voice acting for the girls, sound effects that do their job and a soundtrack that works very well and has quite some interesting tracks in it. So, as far as the technical aspect goes, Studio FOW has done an amazing job with the game.

So, it ends up being an unconfortable balance between fun but shallow gameplay, non-sensical story and great visuals. I'd say it's worth to play it, even if you don't like it a lot, just to see where more or less the limits of the genre technically are currently sitting, because this game shares that throne with few others.

My 1st review.
I'm so mad at them for destroyed my hopes on could be one of the best H Games of the year.
It was funny on 0.1 but starting on 0.2 it's just a cringe game.
And the most dissapointing things, the H scenes are just 2s Loop GIF with no cumshot.

Version: [v0.5]

Sex scenes: 2/5
My main gripe with this game is the sex scenes especially premium ones have poor choice of angles. Would definitely be better if they enabled free camera provided that they polished them to avoid clipping and other weird movements during a scene.

Story & Dialogue: 3/5
Story is pretty cohesive and the dialogue is great; not too dry nor overdone/forced.

Gameplay: 4/5
If this were just another space shoot 'em up and turn-based game minus the adult theme, it'd be a good one.

Sound & Music: 5/5
Sound and music fits well with whatever is happening on screen. Nothing that's blatantly out of place or warrants having the volume on mute.

All in all, it's a good space shoot 'em up and turn-based strategy game with a cohesive story and good dialogue but the main point is this was made by an NSFW animation studio with an adult theme in mind yet I just can't get why some premium/climax scenes have poor angles with no option for alternate or free-camera mode.

I own this on Steam and have played enough to give a bit of a review. StudioFOW has been in this game a long time and it shows. This is in the top 5 games that I have played on F95. Is it a great game? No. Are the scenes the best out there? No. Is the story better than a cake? No.
Regardless, 95% of the games available via F95 are incomplete, copycats, or just plain crap. This is not one of those.
Well worth the play, with very little "grind" and enough fun to keep a guy interested.