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

You know it's not a particularly good game when the 4-5 star reviews are short and say basically nothing while the 1-2 star reviews are the constructive ones.
People waited years and after the early access version got delayed once or twice all you get is some mediocre shoot-em-up gameplay and very short 2 second-loops for sex scenes, but then again it's not the first time Studio FOW ends up disappointing people...

Honestly, don't bother. For all the money and time they got to make this game with, it's just a huge disappointment. Constant delays and dumb excuses just to get some shitty gameplay and 2 second sex loops. Meh
It probably won't be much better even after it gets out of Early Access after a million years of "development".

17Gb for basically nothing? Nah, stay away. All the scenes are uploaded on other sites already anyway. Don't waste your internet bandwidth on this.

I really liked this game. Models and music are great! Dialogs are voiced and it is very helpful and refreshing for English adult game. Story was quite entertaining. Combat is a bit too hard but it is possible to beast this first act.

bruh this hella dogshit lmao
how this game got so much money for production is an actual crime, so many white knights defending this absolute crap of a game in this thread, renders are dogshit, looks pixelated
ppl called this the new pinnacle of adult games, get out of here, this game doesnt even waft a fart compared to BADIK or any other ACTUAL top game
1/10 dogshit story sucks, renders are ANCIENT
theres ZERO content, for 17gigs, took so long to come out, cost so much money, absolute robbery, gotta hand it to the devs, they got a nice payday for this cus they havent invested a single dime on making a good game.

Not sure what everyone is crying about, but for a first version release, this game far exceeds what most adult games on this site accomplish. The cutscenes clip (for me) and admittedly it was hard to care about the story, so I skipped a quarter of it, but again, this is the first release.


Even if the story wasn't for me, the dialogue was funny and every character had their own voice. Also, every character was voiced. Loved the voice acting.


As far as audio goes, the sound effects, music, and voice acting mix/mastering job was good, which is amazing when most adult games don't know how to at least keep gain levels around the same, so that there aren't dips or spikes on volume. I've mixed and mastered many projects and while the mix in this game didn't blow my mind, I'm telling you, it's far beyond what most adult games offer. The music and ambience was nice and fit well in the background. The different effects on voices for robotic characters and the perfect amount of reverb did not go unnoticed.

As far as menu and navigation, I did notice a lot of loading screens, but they were short lived and will likely improve in the future, along with some of the bugs I've run into. All in all, it's great to see a good menu with a ton of options. Not once did the game's navigation feel clunky; flying through space from planet to planet was simple and straight to the point. Love it.


Some people that make adult games forget to ask themselves about the game loop and play patterns. I can't count how many games I've played where the gameplay is me CTRL skipping through boring and unnecessarily lengthy text. Either that, or I'm clicking "kitchen", "room", or "other room" and finding repeated dialogue until I trigger an event. These aren't gameplay loops and they aren't fun. The ground and space combat was fun for me, though. Not overly complex and straight to the point coupled with fluid movement and animation is a big + for me.

I will say that the erotic scenes, in comparison to the clear effort in everything else, felt like an afterthought, but only for there being so little of it. The scenes themselves were hot and the animations... I don't have words for how hot the animations + sound effects + voice acting came together for great scenes.

While there aren't many erotic scenes, I'm excited to see more introduced. I will say, though, that I was hoping to find NTR in this game and didn't find any. The girls getting fucked by other creatures when MC doesn't even care isn't NTR. Still, I enjoyed the hell out of this game. The scenes were hot, the gameplay was fun, and while I didn't care much for the story, I liked the characters and found myself laughing from the funny dialogue.

I think people missed what this game is.. it's a game with pron elements.. It's meant to be an adult comedy with some seriousness sprinkled in places.. This game isn't a visual novel.. People who talk smack about steam reviews are full of shit.. People like what they like. If you don't like it, it doesn't mean it's bad. Imo the game looks good, needs some improvements, but that might come later on since it's still EARLY ACCESS..

Note this is a [Early Acess] Review and will be edited to the final.
This game is an Easter Egg game (means it is just filled with joke references).
This game has great visuals and nice voice acting, but the more you play the less you will get interested in it.
From the weird jumps in the story line that makes you wonder if they put the storyboard in a wood chipper or that they are doing this as an excuse to show nice pointless cut scenes.
The dialogue of consent sex jokes, 4th wall breaking, or Easter eggs just makes you think that the so called story is just to pad out the game time and makes anything 'serious' pointless.
Exaple: "I am using mind control powers to make you commit genocide... now show me your dick."
Or the actual game play missions is put on repeat over and over with no creative differences in anything, to where it gets really boring, fast.
I want to like this game, I admit it, but its hard to take this game serous when its obvious the development team isn't.
Quick edit: also its a porn game made by a well know porn making studio... with little porn in it right now...

WHAT A SCAM!
you got your answer.
The game has one of the shittier mechanics I ever saw.
It is supposed to be an adult game with over 1.6M$ capital but what it actually has is only 9 scenes of a few seconds that doesn't exceed 200Mb in total.
Not recommended to play for now until the full release of the game.

Original backer here. I knew what to expect with regards to the SHMUP and grid combat gameplay and honestly, those expectations were met. The gameplay is decent, the music is amazing and the dialogue can be quite witty and nerdy...but that's not really what everyone came (hah) here for, is it?

As far as the actual sex scenes are concerned, it's shocking how basic they are. The adult "portion" of the game is literally just a gallery of 5-10 second loops which are almost completely detached from the actual game and story. You can unlock them in whatever order you like, whenever you like, with no context attached to any of them. There are literally dozens of free flash games (and even RPG Maker games) from 10+ years ago that do a better job overall with the hentai, even if they don't feature fancy 3D graphics from the Unreal engine.

As a whole, I understand that Subverse is still in early access, but unless some relatively major changes are made to the existing structure and flow of the story/game, I don't see how the devs can salvage literally the most important aspect of their game. I sure hope I'll be proven wrong and be able to recommend this game in the future.

Low amount of content compared to the enormous download size. Only the first act is playable and the content that is present seems somewhat unpolished.

Space battles involve fighting wave after wave against enemies with a pitiful peashooter and special attacks that recharge too slowly. Player has a large hitbox which makes dodging bullets annoying, especially since most enemy attack patterns are effectively area denial because you can not pass between them. Common enemies have tiny hitboxes and seem to follow the player's movements so usual shoot 'em up tactics like strafe aiming works poorly. Bigger enemies are incredibly bullet spongy and take a long time to destroy without special attacks, even though they are easy to hit. The ship upgrades are boring percentage upgrades. There is no way to swap out the primary weapon and there are only two options for secondary (which must be pre-picked without knowledge of what kind of enemies you will face), with third one forced in certain missions only. Despite this, the space battles are not difficult, only annoying. Perhaps the devs should have assigned the space battle portion of the game to someone who actually plays and enjoys twin stick shooters and knows what makes them click.

Tactic game seems overall a bit more thought out than the shooter part of the game, but there are major problems with that mode as well. Biggest problem is that enemies will spawn in waves, randomly dropping anywhere in the map. This makes any kind of tactical unit placement pointless, the only point is to plan your movement and attacks so that you can take out maximum number of enemies before they can execute their turns. There seems to be some kind of system where different units or attacks are more effective against certain enemies, but there's no clear way of knowing what does what. Low amount of units in the game limit the gameplay options.

The story advances with prerendered cutscenes and fully voiced dialog and there is fairly large amount of both. It's actually quite jarring because often the game will advance from dialog sequence to cutscene to shooter game one after other without any chance to go to menu in between.

The sex scenes are not prerendered, but instead done with realtime graphics. But the level of interactivity is minimal and you can't even change the camera angle, so they might just as well have been prerendered. They contain no gameplay whatsoever and take no advantage of being done with in-game graphics.

Overall the game is grossly unfinished and unpolished. The dev team's ambitions can be seen, but at the current state the game is at risk of becoming just another porn game where shitty gameplay serves as a bad segway from a sex scene to next. All things considered, it's hardly even worth downloading at the current state, unless you're really interested in tracking the progress. But there's a glimmer of hope that some day when the full game is released, it will actually be decent.

It's a solid polished game with generic space opera plot, but bad fap material. The mechanics are primitive but they are well thought and polished. Specially the twinstick shooter space battles. Only complain is the difficulty which is overall easy. Dialogues and voice acting are woth mentioning too, some VO actors delievery is stellar. Now for the porn part... it's nothing special really. Around 25 animations from which 4 are multistaged and the rest are 2-3 second loops.

There you have it folks, it's a solid game but bad porn.
P.S. Overall level of polish is worth mentioning, it's rare nowadays to see a game in early access, specially an adult game with almost 0 bugs.

The Subverse game mate… such a disappointment more than Cyberpunk even, they made the same mistake that I see over and over again, they try to appeal to everyone but at the end for obvious reasons only the most fuck up crowd remain.

They advertise the game as “build your harem of waifus” yeah... this ain´t it chief.

And the animations are the same short gifs or loops present in all other games and not really that much better animated than what you can find in games of some talented developers, sometimes its even worse. Really disappointing for a game with more than a million dollars in investment.

The other aspects of the game are also so generic, basic combat and basic space shooter, in the end you will be better just watching the gifs animations in the Hub.

Tragic waste of resources and manpower. I'd give it 0 stars if I could because there are zero redeeming features here. I can see why Studio FOW wanted to try their hands at making a game, they want to get filthy rich, but evidently they don't have what it takes. They should stick to what they're good at, which is making sleazy animated movies.

1.6 million dollarydoos upfront and they put out what is unironically, constructively, truthfully, an unsalvagable mess.
Any rating above a two is sunk cost and cope.

Technical Failings
The game is 17 gigs and yet everything is liverendered. The total number of CGs in this game is 27(25 actually, they're already recycling) and if you go on rule34 all of them put together as .webms don't equal 200mb.
There is no costume system, no complex loop controls, no free camera to justify the "right" way of doing it; it just makes the game run like crap and be a bloated, animation error filled mess. Honey select, let alone a AAA Hgame this is fucking not. This is a barely newgrounds flash game at 1000x the size.
Everything in game is liverendered which is why it's both resource intensive, glitchy, and has a loadcell between every button click. Every background in this game could be a prerendered loop , every CG a string of .webms, and the game would run on your smart toaster. As it sits you need a moderately decent PC and GPU to play it on Low-med. Which is a better experience than ultra by simple fact they added seisure inducing motionblur to every scene. They aren't doing anything fancy with lighting either to justify liverendering; everything is corner lightsource, and their models texture maps have typical baked in shadows. Right off the bat the game needs to be totally rebuilt from the ground up in concept and architecture to make this the ~900mb mobilegame it actually is supposed to be on technical merit.

The sprites use freeware tier assetstore animations and there is no lip sync mocap
Kills it as a fully voiced game to watch them bumble through the same 3 poses and generic reactions and For Studio FOW being a purported animation studio it's just embarrassing.

Story (narrative)
>butchered
It's a one hour pirate hunt game intercut with expositional cutscenes clearly originally meant for dozens of chapters in the future. The demon girl and the bar is clearly meant to be the first, not second companion. It introduces a creepshot mechanic (not currently in game, wew) and use for the trash items you collect all game... at the literal end of the game. It also introduces something sorely lacking , motivation for anything to happen. Why game. The demongirl's race has tragic backstory.exe preloaded and colors you against the imperium. If only you weren't on paper already fighting them. Everything is out of order and a cludgejob.
The larger metaplot has nothing to do with this builds gameplay outside of cutscenes. They drop scenes from other galaxies spoiling the entire story and potential double crosses because they didn't have shit for a build longer than an hour or two without it.

SexScenes
Surely studio FOW nailed the one thing they're good at right? The whole game can be unplayable as long as they delivered tens of minutes of high quality animated sex scenes....
>They fucked it up
Demi doesn't even have nipples.
The loops unilaterally are very low quality. Short, choppy, and not complex. Only "premium" scenes have a speed slider and cum button, the latter not even working on the 3rd girl. No camera control, no zoom, no multiple angles, no multiple part or progressive scenes. And they have zero dialogue or framing due to the ridiculously poorly thought out pandora interface.

25 loops. I kid you not, there is less than Three Minutes of unique rigged animation in this 1.6 million dollar game, and thats being generous.. There are 3 girls with 9 scenes... but note I said 25. Demongirl is already an asset flip for two of her loops. One stolen from the scientist and one for the robot. They aren't sitting on some treasure trove of rigged animation for their models just around the corner, they're already running on empty.

Summary
Not worth the bandwidth, not even for free. Just watch the loops on Rule34 and you've gotten a better experience than the game they're from.
People will write thesis length dissertations about Subverse and hold it up there with Star Citizen as examples of the death of crowdfunding and runaway scope far outstripping skill no amount of money can be burned to fix. There are a myriad of less important major bugs and failings of game design that pale in comparison to nuking your story, progression, and putting out a generally bad product underneath the quality standard past work set for them.

Well... so much for a revolutionary porn game so far. To say I didn't really enjoy it would be correct, but let me explain you why.

Pros:
The game has excellent music and voice acting. That part really immerses you in the beginning so they are getting props to that! (even though it is kind of weird to see them talk and their lips not move, but that is just something that bothers me)

The gameplay is not amazing, it would probably work in their interest to reduce the number of waves, but it is decent enough!

The story is not that great, but it is workable. The humor will not be for everyone, but I liked it and I see what they are going for.

The cutscenes are great (not the porn ones mind you, as there are none)

Art style is nice as well.

Cons:

MAJOR lack of content so far. (which will be remedied with updates, I am aware it is early access but still. that is only if they listen to the criticism and learn from it)

No proper building up of characters! They all seem generic and uninteresting to the point that you don't really care about any of them. You can't really immerse yourself in the game if all the characters are mostly just whores thrown to the MC who is an asshole! Plus there are no dialogue choices so you can't really do anything yourself, it is so linear it hurts!

The porn scenes, that you would think would be bread and butter of such a game are horrible! Even compared to some free games on here that have almost no backing! 5 seconds animations that you unlock through points and are not even integrated in the story or mentioned?!? Not dialogue during them or before, or after them as well. I am BEYOND disappointed so far. The least they could have done is somehow implemented them into the story or added some dialogue, as the way it is so far reminds of poorly made flash games!

So all in all this is just an empty shell of a potentially good game, I am hoping they turn it around, but if it remains as is I will not pick it up again and I can't in good faith recommend this game. Neither to play for free, and especially not pay for it. I am still hoping they do something good, but this just reminds me of Cyberpunk, full of promises but unable to live up to even the lowest of standards...

Pros

• character design
• voice acting
• story
• humor
• visuals and feel of space battle gameplay
• MANTIC!

Cons

• PANDORA system is basically gallery of short (~5sec) looped animations, few scenes have speed animation sliders (animation varies with speed slightly), but other than that they are not interactive, which... is not much.

Nothing in that game can stand on its own.
For the gameplay there are 2 boring mini games: poor man's Star Control clone and a halfassed, tedious X-Com clon.
For porn there are just a few short porn loops rendered in game's engine with no context to the game's story whatsoever...fucking why?
If I was a kikestarter backer i would be pissed now. 2 Mils for that kind of crap?

To be fair:
The soundrack is the only good thing about this game. Whoever made the music did a great job.


Saw this coming though. I knew the game would suck anyway the moment they decided to sell the game on steam, since valve has the retarded policies like consensual sex between 3D characters and only allows glamour sex crap with barely any fetishes.

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Huh.. I'm actually writing a review for once, I'm new at this so it's probably going to suck! O.O I guess on the off chance someone actually reads this I'll make this as objective as I can.. And I won't mention other games although I'm tempted to make some comparisons..

(This whole review is only my opinion which is probs wrong plz don't eat me!)

TLDR!

I'm a picky bitch and didn't love this game. My real problem is the gameplay feels lackluster and the amount of time and effort they would need to put into making it any better would be much better spent on improving the sex scenes with variations of poses etc. Giving the player more options in the settings menu (things like individual character voice volumes etc.)


The Good
The porn videos are actually quite good! StudioFOW has great animations and this game has a slidebar thingy you can change to tweak what happens during them! Neat <-- That's points in my book!

The ship looks good and you get to see characters you've unlocked idling in different rooms, mousing over them causes them to look at you and they look gooood so overall it's a nice addition! <-- More points from me!

The Bad

Ok... I need to be honest I don't actually like the gameplay.. I'll mention the humor in the next section (No big deal just not my thing) but the gameplay... Here we go.
I don't know who thought that the players who like turn based tactical games would also want to play (more like grind) fast paced plane-shooter games in order to unlock the scenes in this game. It feels almost like a mobile game 0.0 I feel like there should be an option to at least choose one type of minigame to grind.. (As I'm writing this it's like 6am and I haven't slept so I'm just going to say right now both space and ground combat feel MEH for their respective genres.. There's lots of room for improvement) The real part that upsets me (and why my rating is so low) is that it seems like the sex scenes were held back somehow? The longer you play the more they start to feel very shoehorned in between grindfests. Between the two forms of combat gameplay, the galactic map, the mission system, the interactive ship interior and finally unlock system for sex scenes it feels like the sex system is an afterthought :^( which sucks I really like studioFOW

I gotta go 2 beeeed! -_- Just know that I hope one day this gets SO much better!

The Ugly?

The way the slidebar changes the animation as well as the sound is neat but compare this to lets say other hentai games with a similar amount of dev time and it starts to fall flat.. It would be an Illusion if I told you there weren't hentai games out there with more to do option/position wise. (^;

To boil it down a little...Also to sleep soon..

Honestly if StudioFOW were to take the ship interior and the "Pandora system" (I think that's the name?) and just make the whole game focus on that IE the sex scenes and make the game elements optional/remove the grinding I think the game would be really good! StudioFOW has a strength and I think they should lean into it more in their games C^: (The real reason that years ago I ended up giving them money in the first place was THOSE SEX ANIMATIONS bay bee!)

Wow that was alot of typing for my first review ever O.O I wonder if anyone even looks at these? (I hope this won't post to the discussion forum..) Well whatever I followed the rules so now I get to give it a rating Wooo! Time for bed.

The game is in alpha so of course it's not perfect and maybe will never be, but it's good.
It has a story wich some may not find appealing but is well written and i personally find the cheesiness quite funny.
It has two different type of combat that may be also challenging at times which is a good variation in a smut game, since the gameplay/combat factor is almost always lacking.
I LIKE that the smut is not incorporated in the story apart from some scenes.. if i want to play i can play freely, if i want a quick fap i can unlock various sex scenes by winning and look at them whenever i want.
sorry for my english

Overall Score 5/10

Visuals(7/10):

The visuals and style is good. The game has a polished indie-feel. However, they used some postprecessing that makes scenes a bit blurry.

Story (4/10):

The plot is nothing special. It is a simple call to adventure story where the mc gets entagled in a scheme to fight against a tyranical power.

The simplicity of the plot isn´t the problem though but the writing and its pacing. The game trys to be "satirical" which beeing a porngame isn´t a bad move in itself, however the humor isn´t clever but in the best case silly and in the worst case adolescent and obnoxious. Even a satire needs interessting characters and Subverse fails to deliver in that end (especially the MC), even for a porn game.

Gamplay (6/10)

The gameplay is divided into two parts : Shoot ´em up Space fights and turn-based ground combat.

The space combat actually is fun albeit a bit bare bones at the moment. It plays well and feels difficult without beeing punishing. Especially the boss missions surpirsed me in a good way. It gets repetitive due to not having much content tho.

The ground combat on the other hand is kinda there and dissapointing. I see that XCOM gets thrown around alot as comparison, but this couldn´t be further from the truth. It is more akin to a hallow Heroes of Might and Magic. You position your commander and your generic mutant units on a small map and the burst the enemy down before they do and you have to be fast as new enemies will spawn in waves. Again due to repetition it gets tedious very fast as those missions exels at having not tactical depth whatssoever.

The porn (3/10):

This was the most dissapointing thing for me.
To be upfront, I am not into monstersex, so if you are you might get more out of it then I did.
First of the scenes apart from the recruitment scene aren´t integrated into the story at all. Instead you unlock them with currency you get for leveling up your waifus. The scenes are very short loopes and for the most part not interactive. They aren´t pre-rendered but as there is no camera control or even different viewpoints they might as well be.
Apart from bestiallity there just aren´t may scenes per character.

Try to be adequate, so let's score 0 to 5 - gameplay, graphics, plot, sound, and considering it porn game, need to compare sex scene - customization, interactivity, manipulation, animation, physics.

gameplay / plot - 2
sound - 3
graphics - 4
animation / physics - 0 (WTF - it tottaly shit, just change angle of view and you will see, how dick go through the body or even miss)
interactivity / manipulation / customization - 0

2+3+4+0+0/5=
Total score is 1.8