TL;DR Has potential, but needs to stay in the oven for a little longer
To put it bluntly, my expectations of everything on here is tempered by knowing these are predominantly games to jerk off to. But if you're going to advertise this as a proper game first that also happens to have porn, then it's only fair that I judge this with the same standards as a normal game.
And that's where this falls short.
Gameplay
As a normal Shmup/tactics game, it feels clunky/lightweight. Despite shmups being a 40 year old game genre, this feels like it was made in a vacuum without any of the basic features that even the older games had. While every stage largely consisting of flying backwards in a large circle holding down the fire button is true for basically any game in the genre, the lack of enemy variety and weapon patterns means you can get away without having to think about dodging. There's also no change in your primary fire besides a percentage damage increase and a slight fire pattern spread. There's no temporary weapon pickups or support fighters and stage hazards are just a bunch of asteroids scattered around with no variety. There's plenty of potential to introduce things like space mines or static enemies to vary the stages, but the current game feels like you're just playing the same level over and over again with no increase in difficulty.
The tactics aspect isn't much better either. Since hits are guaranteed and there's no damage modifiers for flanking or cover, you're heavily incentivized to just bumrush the enemy. This would be less of a problem if you knew where the next wave of enemies would spawn, but they just warp in from nowhere, and often in the middle of your team as well, meaning the lack of a cover/defensive system means you just get destroyed with bad spawns. And for some reason everytime you restart the level, the terrain changes slightly, which I wouldn't otherwise have a problem with, but since they serve no purpose other than to restrict movement, why bother implementing it in the first place? Other minor gripes like having melee attacks that restrict movement on AI that just prioritizes the closest target just highlight an inexperience with making games like this. And the fact that each planet just uses the same level asset makes the whole thing feel cheap.
Story
For a game that places as much emphasis on the story as it does, it falls short by the standards of both professional Japanese and Western indie releases. Even if the character isn't some sort of self-insert, and the story is linear, there should still be choices for the player to make, either to unlock scenes or develop different relationships with characters. Go play Rance instead if you want a good plot and better rpg mechanics. The voice acting is nice and well-done by Western standards, but Japan's been doing it for years, so while I give it credit, it's to be expected when you have the money to pay for VA's when every other Western indie dev only has a fraction of the budget. As for the plot itself, it's not nukige levels of porn-convenient/lazy, but not exactly literary award levels of writing either. It's cookie cutter and serviceable, which isn't something I hold against it necessarily, but at this rate it just feels like a poor man's Mass Effect, and that says a lot given how that trilogy ended up. The humor is the really obvious self-aware "haha, you're playing a porn game" kind of style, which some people might enjoy, but a lot of them didn't really land for me.
Porn
Maybe the jokes would be funnier for someone who had just experienced post-nut clarity. I wouldn't know, because the porn itself is so detached from the plot that by the time I'm done I don't have an incentive to resume the story. I'm surprised that Studio FOW didn't just subcontract the gameplay to another studio so they could focus on what they were good at. And by a porn game's standards, the porn on offering is pretty poor. I guess since they thought that if they made the porn completely detached from the plot, it would justify them adding the kind of scenes that they were known for with the tentacles/monster shit without overtly compromising on the plot. But what we get instead is just a reason to wait for all the video rips to be uploaded instead of having to download a 17 gig file and sit through a few hours of tedium to unlock. I guess I expected more than a few relatively tame 3 second loops and a variable speed slider, given their previous work. Most of the enjoyment of the porn comes down to the settings anyway, otherwise why have a game at all if you could just charge us to download the videos and save all that time making the rest of the game. And since I'm griping anyway, there's something about the blur and post-processing making it look like everything's covered in radioactive Vaseline that just rubs me the wrong way.
Verdict
Unfortunately, Subverse falls short by both the standards of a standard game and as a porn game, at least in its current state. *If* most of the money went to the VA's, it makes you wonder where all that time went since there's not actually much here at all in the first place. I'd respect it more if there was an option at the start that just let you skip all the game parts and go straight to the porn. Without it, it just feels like they're trying to pad out the game with busywork like a stressed out university student under the word count. Honestly at this point you'd be better off reading a space fantasy book for 5 minutes, playing Ikaruga and XCOM for an hour and then just looking up porn on the internet.
Neither the game nor the porn is worth the 17 gig download, at least at this point. Maybe it'll get better in a year or so, I'm just glad I didn't spend money on it this early.
