Unreal Engine - Completed - Subverse [v1.0] [Studio Fow]

Yeah, so I'm conflicted on this. Well to be honest, I'm not. This i s a really bad game. It gets boring so fast. So there's basically two game-play loops. Spacebattles and land battles. Both are pretty cool, the first 10, 20 times you do them? But then you have to do them like 480 times over? And there is not much changing. You're doing the same thing over and over again. For what? For discovering stuff to "level up" your waifus and see them nude and do naughty things OUTSIDE of the game in some in-game studio.

So yeah, the porn part is also separated from the gameplay loop. And this combined makes the game feel like such a waste of time.

You are basically a hamster in a hamster wheel clicking to get points to unlock videos of 3dcg porn without any connection to the story.

I paid for the game because I wanted to contribute to a serious attempt to make an AAA game. The voice acting, graphics, everything is AAA, except for the game itself which is such a bore. I can't bring myself to finish it. And I have tried twice...

Let's get the obviously bad out of the way :

- Everyone has already said it : too much grind, the available galaxy map is filled with arround 500 planets. 1/3 of the planets is just an "assign a waifu and get instant reward" mission. The rest are shmups and tactical turn-based mission that get repetitive really quickly.

- Also a common criticism : Sex scenes not included in the gameplay or story outside of some exceptions (recruitement and devotion quests). Scenes are in a separate mode where you can buy and watch them with resources. That's not how you do porn game, it feels artificial.

- Too few skins for the waifus, and most of them you unlock at the end of the game. Would have been better to give customisation options more progressively.
I heard that they will add skins in futur updates so maybe it's an issue that will be solved.
Also give us a skin for the Huntress without her helmet for christ's sake, she's such a cutie it's criminal to hide it !

- Sometimes they try to get creative with the missions but end up being more tedious than anything else. But hey there's a skip mission option if you fail twice so whatever.

Now the good :
- Animation quality is top notch. Shame that there isn't more camera control during scenes.

- Chara design good and varied.

- Writing isn't really that bad. Yeah there is a lot of corny jokes about sex and dicks but what did you expect. You get used to the self-reference 4th wall breaking jokes fairly quickly as well.
I think what saves it is the voice acting which is REALLY good.
Story is about gathering a crew to fight a totalitarian prude state, nothing groundbreaking, get the game moving forward.


Overall imperfect but still somewhat good game. Still giving a good grade despite all the flaws because it's better quality than most porn games getting released...
If they listen to criticism, they might do really good games in the futur, if they keep creating games that is.

I could write a detailed, elaborate review for this game. I could. Unfortunately, this damn game has SO much grind, nonsense fillers, and exhausting activities, that I do not find myself capable of going into much detail. For this reason, I am going to write a long, yet general overview of my experience with this game. Enjoy.

Let us just start with the positive sides. Animations? Great. Wonderful, even. Writing? The developers are consistently trying into making it Deadpool-esque, fourth-wall-breaking parody. Did they succeed? Well, it's not fantastic, but it didn't make me cringe or anything, so the dialogues themselves are decently okay.

The overall plot is well-thought, with the characters being sympathetic, the main villain charismatic, and you do want to know what happens next, or spend more time with the girls. Which there are eight, each with her own side quest, dialogues, reactions to the main plot events, stuff like that. Mass Effect if it was porn.

The girls are… well, I cannot say that they are written badly. It's just that all of them, except for a few, have personality archetypes based on varying degrees of whoreness. Milf whore who likes big monster dicks, demon pirate whore, porn actress whore, dwarf-esque warrior whore, big mommy warrior whore, catgirl lesbian whore, etc. There is a singular nice girl, who begins as a villain, then joins the team, and a somewhat nice hacker girl. So, if you're into whorish character whose entire personality is to fuck, fuck, fuck, then great! If not, then you are going to feel grossed out, uncomfortable, and regret wasting your time. But they are all pretty hot, at least. Didn't make it better for me.

Animation are great. Voice acting is top-notch, actually took me aback to hear such quality. Sexual scenes are… well, some of them are great. Some are meh. A lot of them involve disgusting xenoporn, futas, comedically large cocks, whatever. Really, some scenes here are so damn gross that urgh. If your tastes are more on the vanilla side of things, then immediate skip. Seriously, believe me. Most of the scenes aren't part of the plot, as they are just a collection of scenes you can grind for, but the ones that are a part of the story can be pleasant. Anyway, nothing to complain about here.

And that's it. Yup, that's all. Gameplay is so atrocious that it should be outlawed on Earth and Moon. And I mean LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE ASPECT OF IT. Space battles? Games from the literal eighties did it better. X-Com wannabe ground battles? Ban whoever designed this. No, no, the developers even made such simple things like giving gifts to the girls, or buying collectibles in a shop, or moving around the map, or anything else, unbearable. Not kidding. Whoever was responsible for gameplay aspects, or game design as a whole, should be thrown to the big dicked monsters. Permanently.

With that said, you will spend dozens of hours of your precious life repeating the same tiresome two gameplay loops over, and over, and over again. Now, of course, there is an option to skip it, called “Victory Protocol”. But surprise-surprise, you have to die three times to activate it. Think it's going to help? In space battles, you will have to waste about three minutes on a single level. And ground battles can't really be skipped this way, because dying there takes a million years, about as much as to win them. Ugh.

The ending is abrupt and with a hint for sequel, I imagine. So, is it worth playing? If you have a lot of time to waste, and don't mind grinding for many, many hours, to see a bit of a decent plot and nice female characters? Yeah, go ahead. Personally, I regret the time I wasted on this, and would've been very angry if I valued my time in any way or capacity. Why am I writing this? God, I am so tired…

5/10 on a good day.

Brilliant in so many ways. Well written characters, great stories, fun world building, hilarious dialogue. Its like the characters are a love letter to all the horny comedies from the 2000's. I miss that era.

Game play is well fleshed out too. jumping between stick shooter and isometric turn based team battles.
I enjoy asteroid like shooters and the challenge level on this is pretty well balanced as the game wont let you upgrade until you get through parts of the story and the battler mode give an easier but fun challenge too.

Biggest thing in this game besides the visuals of course is the voice acting. you can tell the actors all had a bit of fun with this one.
Well done Studio FOW. Im picking this up on steam to support the developers.

What can I say? It's ass. Humour is dimwitted and abrasive and feels forced like three day constipation. I get it that it's a pee-pee game but chill.. not everything has to be a dick joke. Space combat eats a fat dick but that grid jumping combat felt natural, even fun at times without overstaying it's welcome. Considering where this game came from number of animations was oddly low and static. Like the whole game they're technically pretty and functional but man.. the constant dick jokes.

Would've definitely refunded if I had to.

Smut game with actual gameplay. You can actually explore the universe and progress through it instead of visiting the same 5 places over and over to try and unlock new "scenes". The voice acting is amazing and these are waifus you could actually classify as waifus.

I'mma gonna say it. I like this game a lot, but MAN did the story suck dick worse than any of the porn scenes in the game. For transparency I was a backer and played almost every version of the game as it was coming out up to Sova part 2 (save structure got changed and I really couldn't be bothered to replay it at the time).

The Visuals and the audio - bundled together because there is nothing to say about it besides it looks and sounds stellar. They nailed the look and sound they wanted for this game and I greatly enjoyed both.

Overall World Building and Lore - I enjoyed it more than the story and gameplay. Why I say that I will continue in later segements. But suffice to say that it it vibrant, interesting and fleshes out the galaxy very well.

The Jokes - some land and some don't. And some are the planet "Fuck That". NGL that one got me.

Gameplay - Space combat is great full stop. Ground combat is kinda ass. It got a LOT better over the years of updates, but its really monotonous and boring. I legit didn't need to use any mantics besides the first 3 you unlock even when swapping girls for the exp.

Devotion - Fuck me sideways. Felt like I was grinding PoE again. And for what you might ask? Close to nada. Sure you get an outfit for Pandora and one long scene and pinup photos... which kinda just exist in a seperate system that is kinda arbitrary overall. Also by maxing the characters you will have damn near double the amount of PP needed to unlock every scene in Pandora making that even more useless.

The Dialogue - I kinda started speed reading halfway though because a) there is much more of it than necessary to get the point across especially in the sidequests, b) its garbage. Don't get me wrong there are standout scenes and the VAs killed it. But you can only pretty up garbage only so much before people start to smell the odor of it again.

The Story - they were cooking something in the early parts and then someone must have lit a fire under their asses and it went from a decently paced story to a breakneck clusterfuck. No spoilers on this one. That comes later and hoooooooo boy do I have something to say about that.

The Empress - now we get into spoilers.
Its really unfortunate since this game could have had more, deserved more in terms of story telling and got a Road Runner ending. Funnily enough I remember them making fun of Mass Effect 3 and that game's ending, and then pulled an Andromeda. Hope we get some DLC to fix it down the line, because it was heavily underwhelming

A lot of fun. Voice acting, character design and great voice acting are what carry this game. Love the Devotion Quests too, I only wish the game had more content like that. Solid writing too, I love the outfit system, it adds a lot of replay value to the gallery and Pandora.

It was disappointing. It wasn't truly awful or anything, just disappointing. Have some bullet points:

• The dialogue was terrible, it was essentially veilguard level of bad. It was bad even by the standards of porn.
• The gameplay was meh, it was sorta just in the way, the whole point of this was supposed to be a real game with porn in it, but what it turned out to be was porn with a mediocre game as filler material to drag out the playtime. It wasn't bad, it was just meh.
• The characters were all meh, some of them had good aesthetic design, none of them had good personality, probably because of the cringe dialogue first and foremost, and the uninspired story.
• The sex scenes are fairly abundant, the animations are good, the base models are good...
• But the overall quality is really bad because the textures on the models seem to be super low res (like 256-512px wouldn't surprise me, that's how lq it is) and certain details, like pubic hair, are just part of that low res texture; which is such an absolute minimum effort kind of thing, it was ultimately just undetailed models.
• Despite the sex scenes being animated realtime 3D scenes, you cannot meaningfully move the camera around to view it from different angles... Basically the whole realtime 3D scene thing was a wasted effort, might as well have just been a cinematic replayer, it would probably have been higher quality since they could make it pre-rendered...

Basically, the only thing of value in this game is the sex scenes, but even then they were disappointing because of the minimum effort the developer put into them (besides the actual animations themselves, those are still good). If you're interested in this game, try it, but be ready to just download a complete save file and watch the sex scenes from there to save yourself the trouble of playing through this unsatisfying game.

If you were at any point a fan of studio fow before they made this game, you might be surprised at how bland all the sex scenes are. They used to make hardcore monster rape vids and such. but the vast majority of the sexual content on offer here is just vanilla stuff, besides the 100% consensual and relatively softcore xeno sex scenes. Again, it's not truly bad, it's just... Generic is how I'd describe it.

Overall it's not terrible, just underwhelming, they spent how many years making this? And the best they could come up with was low quality everything except animations?

I don't understand why this gets so much hate. I really enjoyed it.
The combat becomes repetitive and maybe they should've cut back on it a bit.
The story is a parody of 300 other games and media, MC is a deadpool knockoff.

Story 2/5
Art and Animation 10/5
Gameplay 4/5
Amount of content 4/5

This game is heavily carried by it's animations. StudioFOW used to be on top of the NSFW animation scene but as of now their stuff is outdated both in quality and originality. Still, they're one of the best in the current Adult game landscape imo.

Give it a try.

The AAA of erotic games. Excellent technical realization, long and fun plot. Over 20 hours of total gameplay. Basically it is an arcade that winks at the old R-Type, Salamander, Galaga, with the addition of a turn-based strategy section. These two points are the best and worst aspects of Subverse: better because they are very well done, worse because they are excessively repetitive. What is missing is the interaction with the characters, multiple choice dialogues and different endings would have helped to make the product more complete. Overall however it is excellent.

Funniest thing is that I remember playing/watching/interacting with FOW's Ahri Huntress of Soul first. Taron resembles very much her, besides the furry paws and other stuff. After some time (back in march of2019) I found out about Subverse through wallpaper engine... That's right ehh... Then I waited for early access to come to the Steam so I could finally play it (yup I bought it). The fuck scenes are OK, not the best in the industry and not the worst, but what disappointed me was gameplay overall. Guys at FOW said that they're gonna remake it a bit when 1.0 releases, but for me it felt the same when I bought it through early access and played it. Some parts of the story were funny, some were sad, some were shitty (few of side-quest characters stories were good). I expected more from guys that had biggest financial support from kickstarter campaign *sigh*.

Nice mix of mini games with pretty good gameplay, story is funny and very good animations, lacking in some customizations but there are enough.
Music during gameplay is also pretty good.
Can be a bit repetetive afther some time but not too much.

I played this game a year and a half ago in about version 0.8.

Now version 1.0 is out, do you think anything has changed? Almost nothing.

They added an ending to the story, but it was as sudden as if they ran out of budget. They added pretty lame customisation and personally in my opinion none of the costumes are hotter than the vanilla ones, the credit for vanilla outfits goes to the outsourcers.

Also added devotion quests, some person in the reviews below wrote that for the sake of them worth enduring the whole game, I believed and thought they added the same interactive animations for all the characters that we were shown with taron on the ship when you flew out of the fortress in version 0.8. And it would have been a great opportunity to add these interactive scenes and fit them into the game but they fucked even that up. Not only that but they cut out single interactive animation. Devotion quests in terms of content is only a pre-rendered cut-scene with pretty bad angles which i dont find hot.


Let's talk about pros and cons:
Pros:


+++ Great memorable character design, professionally made by some Indonesian or korean outsourcers(probably) according to the credits

+++ Kinda professional voice acting


Cons:


--- Repetitive gameplay and missions. Although the game design is neat and i like it, it lacks variety and is not intended for game this long

--- If there was an award for the cringiest humour in games, this game would win it.

--- A lot of grind for devotion quests and customisation.

--- If im not mistaken, in version 0.8 there was a button to quickly skip enemy moves in turn-based mode, I don't understand why they cut it out.

--- They advertise this game as having 239 scenes. 90% of those scenes are purely animation loops, I don't see what the point of those animations having no ending. So if you only consider animations with orgasm progression, there are like 20 of them which is quite low.

--- Scenes are stuffed into a pandora system where you have to pick 5 pieces of animations and run them, I don't understand this either, why not let us run any animation without this pandora system which does nothing but make us press more buttons??

--- Also all these scenes have a fixed camera angle probably because of the rather flat animation style as animators do not animate those body parts that are not visible in the frame, so even if you install the plugin on a free camera, any other angle than the set one will look bad. Which in my opinion is also quite a strange decision, you make a 3d game why not animate in all angles? With the same success they could have stupidly done it with pre-rendered cutscenes

--- They foreshadowed intercourse with celestina the whole game, but they never added scenes with her. It's very rude to add sexy characters and never do scenes with them. And it looks like they do not plan to, although there is one empty slot for the character left, but it looks like it is for some fow-chan

--- I saw they promised in steam devlogs to add scenes for Taron and bring her scene count up to the level of the rest of the characters. 2 fucking scenes with progression... As I mentioned earlier they also cut out her interactive scene. Whereas for Sova they made highest number of scenes with progression, but I don't believe most people like shortstack women more. The author probably just does scenes with what he likes best and doesn't listen what community wants. They had to set a standard for the number of scenes and stick to it evenly for each character.



I don't recommend wasting your time on this game because it's a disappointment no matter from which way you look at it. If you're interested in H content, to be honest, you don't even need to download it. Just watch all the scenes in the form of video somewhere on the Internet, these scenes have fixed camera angle anyway.

All that money just for the sex scenes to be from pandora. how fucking lazy is that. Seems like they wanted to be deadpool 2.0 but realized that they have to make a porn game in the middle of development and just slapped pandora in. Hopefully they go back to making animations since this is not it.

Solid game. Fun, good dialog, good acting, great scenes. The gameplay does get rather repetitive, but overall it's excellent.

Doesn't push any bounds graphically during actual gameplay, and there's very little if any interactivity during scenes, but it's very well done.

After downloading the full save (I had done enough grinding during pre-release) I am pretty disappointed that the additional "outfits" and "hair" are trash. They're basically just one skin tight jumpsuit, which is stupid, and different (worse) colors for hair. Considered knocking off a star, but it's still a really good game. I maintain hope that hair and outfits may become more than a gimmick.

Here is my review for the game.

No spoilers here; you can read safely.

TL;DR

• Would I recommend this game if you speak fluent English? Yes, I would. Despite its shortcomings, it is still a high-budget game with relatively good lore, even though the storytelling can be somewhat naive. The vocabulary used is quite sophisticated, and the voice acting is excellent.
• 
  
• Would I recommend this game if you struggle with English? No, I would not. It would be similar to playing The Witcher 3 in English; a vocabulary that is highly sought after can also be very obscure for non-English speakers.
• 
  
• Is this game good? I'll give it 5/5 as a hentai game on this one, even though it may not necessarily be good fapping material, as I don't even feel horny 99% of the time playing this game even during H scenes. The main reason for 5/5 is not because it is amazing but because there isn't any comp (comparable game) out there. This is "one of a kind".

The Positives:

1. The devotion scene after completing the devotion quest (for each character) is extremely good (No kidding, extremely good, but you would not be able to unlock the devotion quest until ACT 5, so no matter how much you dislike the plot between ACT 1 to 4, please just believe me, the devotion quest at Act 5 is all worth it.)【I have a save file called "perfect End of Act 4 save for 1.0", where you could start from ACT 5 and experience the devotion quest yourself without sitting through the boring Act 1 to 4, you can find it here https://f95zone.to/goto/post?id=15474661
2. There are an abundance of scenes (seriously, a lot!)
3. The Art and the 3d model are really good for this woke day and age, it is a porn game after all
4. The game is fully voiced, and the voice acting is exceptional, maybe better than 90% of the typical anime dubs.
5. The animations are really good (high budget) for the genre.

The Bad:

1. As many have pointed out, this game feels "like a river wide, but only an inch deep." While it features an expansive lore, everything just feels too shallow. You can easily sense that each act was written at a different time (the game was in EA for many years), resulting in a lack of coherence between Acts and occasional contradictions with the in-game codex. Additionally, all the side quests are just sarcasm/complaints of the real-life from the dev team, completely disconnected from the main story, most of the side quests do not stay true to the game’s lore.
2. The combat is highly repetitive (especially the space fights) and it involves a considerable amount of grinding (a lot of grinding!). This issue is exacerbated by the fact that none of the previous saves from the Early Access version are compatible with the 1.0 release, forcing players to start over and endure the grinding all over again.【Hence I made a save file that has all side quests and space battles completed and ready for you to start ACT 5 with no worries, you can find it here https://f95zone.to/goto/post?id=15474661
3. Contains A LOT of sex scenes, but the camera angle is fixed. Even though the 3d animation is rendered on the go on your PC, as you should be able to switch angles, but you CAN'T for fk sake.
4. (There's supposed to be a free camera mod on Steam where you can unlock the camera angle but I am not sure if it still works on the 1.0 build)
5. sex scenes are detached from the storyline and feel meaningless.
6. Except for the devotion quest, which is still detached from the storyline, but at least the movie itself is extremely good.

Conclusion

• You can sense that this game aspires to be like Mass Effect with sex. It starts off very strong, but then everything falls apart as the developers realize their ambitions are too high and scale back dramatically. As a result, the storyline becomes extremely shallow, particularly toward the end.
• 
  
• Nevertheless, it still stands out as "one of a kind" and has a somewhat Venusblood-esque quality in certain aspects. So, it is worth playing as a Hentai game. But disregard the exclusivity, think of it as a Visual novel, it is only a 2/5 at best. 2/5 for combat mechanic. But putting all together, there is just not a comp so I give it 5/5.
• 
  
• As for "Is this game worth the money I paid for?" I think it is worth $29 (the price before the 1.0 release, as they jack up the price to 39 on the 1.0 release.) "Is this game worth the budget they have?" That has to be a hard NO, but you are here to download an illegal copy of it, so the PRICE does not matter. I, as a person who bought it on EA, am only happy because it at least got finished.

Great game.

Both flight and ground combats are fun and well designed and sufficiently challenging.
The story and characters were pretty good and engaging. Personally liked the quirky dialogues and comedy.
The scenes were really sexy especially devotion quest scenes and glad that there were plenty for each character.
Both the CGI and voice acting were also really good.


Now, not to sound like another pathetic little loser whining about a game for which I didn't pay a dime but small nitpicks(/or suggestions):
-The rewards for devotion feels a little lacking (compared to how much grindy it can get). Maybe add(/move) a few pandora scenes as reward.
-Could do with few more outfits. Also wish the undressed outfit could be wore all the time and not just in pandora.
-Would be pretty nice if there was also sex and not just poses in gallery.
-It would be cool if girls interacted with the mantics in background.
-Need Dallick and Celes scenes.

Anyway looking forward to what StudioFOW does next, whether future patches or a new game (a fantasy setting maybe).

Not so much sex scenes, Pandora sucks, grindfest gets really boring, and I didin't like the humor of the game. The gameplay gets stale very soon.
Nice animations, nice graphics, but nothing else.
I can't fap to this game. Too much grinding for a few sex scenes.

I love the devotion quests and outfits. Plus the girls are awesome, they're well written and incredibly voice acted. This isn't a very objective review but rather a subjective review based on my personal enjoyment.