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

As a hybrid of shmup games and X-Com (god, what a mess of a combination), it is iffy. As an adult title, its a mess. The design team wanted to make an honest to god game, but the face of the game is its adult elements. If you were to pick this game up at a sale, you wouldn't know what you're in for at a glance.

The elements of its adult nature and its two opposing genres, all clash.

The writing thinks its funny; the decent voice acting only serves to highlight how painfully embarrassing that fact is.

The world already has Geometry Wars, X-Com, and the vast landscape of adult titles. Pick one; attempting to crash them into one another has led to this extremely polished turd.

I actually supported this game on kickstarter, as I was all about getting a high quality porn game with decent gameplay. This game delivered on a lot of things, but failed on the most important thing; The actual porn. The porn is a afterthought almost despite being the number one reason I bought this game lol. The scenes are all animated at least but there's barely any interactivity with sex scenes if at all. And the writing... At first it was silly but funny. But the self-awareness got annoying. Not to mention the jokes just didn't land or got repeated in slightly different ways.

The actual gameplay is is decent. Not stellar but serviceable. The voice acting and graphics are top notch though. The girls are hot as well so no issues there. But all of that overshadows the actual sex scenes and to be frank that is way you are here. The major saving grace is that this game isn't finished, so this can be fixed.

Absolutely hyped, absolutely lacking. My understanding of porngames comes from whats available from F95zone - maybe Maids Mansion and True Love before that, this though... Its a spaceshooter with a... lackluster story and plot, with very wierd constructed sex scenes. If you like the ancient spaceshooters of the 1980is this ones for you, of you're looking for anything that would give you a story, a feeling or a boner - then look away, this game is.... Not what you're looking for.

Do you like turn-based tactic games than you should play xcom
Do you like multidirectional shooter than play geometry wars
Do you like porn games with story play summer gone
Do you like cringe than play subverse.

The gameplay is fine, like Asteroid and any turn based tactical game basically, in a simple way. And the space navigation part from Mass Effect, which i loved in that, but extremely quickly felt like a chore in this.

But it is a porn game, and i was expecting interactive hardcore stuff. It's StudioFOW, and they've spent their time on this instead of making their awesome videos.
... It's basically just a tame seamless gif, with juts some of them having 3 speed settings,
and a finale.

Oh, and it loads more often than GTA Online! (How is that even possible?!?)

Gameplay Ok.
Graphics pretty good.
Porn is boring.

3/5 is generous, but it is pretty well made for what it is.

The game is pretty OK in the current state. I like most are dissapointed in the H-scenes being glorified gifs but as I see it they are going in the right direction. Hopefully they will listen to the community.

This is not a good game. As a porn game, this is just a glorified gif player. As a regular game, it's incredible boring. The battle section are a really dumbed down bullet hell, the ground combat is just a dumbed down RTS. There is no deep, nothing, just a way to make the game bigger.

The most important part of a porn game is well... the porn. StudioFOW made a name for themselves off movies and all they made after 2 years and 2 million dollars was less than 6 minutes of no dialogue loops. There are countless indie creators that do significantly more without demanding your money first.

Overhyped game, that known a lot much wieer than f 95. Poor gameplay, below average animations with wierd angles of camera. This game don`t deserve this attention, but this is great, that in future we can see games with sexual content, not only vn

Overally, the game is pretty okay.

But this is a porn game. And the porn part is problematic. I fully expected to get some natural transitions between story/gameplay and porn part. And that happens, three times, on "introduction" of the character into our group.

Apart from that, every scene is accessed through "PANDORA" system, which is to say the least, not very exciting. Scenes don't happen naturally, interactions with characters not in the story are also not natural.

Scenes are rather basic. There are two types of scenes, most of them are "basic", which are just simple loops. In the more advanced scenes you can also control speed of fucking, and decide to cum. That's it. Even though it's a 3d game, you can't even control camera. You have similar control as in flash games from 2010s, just with better graphics.

And this is the most disappoint part of the Subverse. If you've expected to play groundbreaking porn game, go play something else, from 2018 or even earlier.

But the technical side, apart from long and often loading screens the game is pretty good. The main problem is just, if the game "just" gets expanded with new scenes, it's not gonna stop being average.

===UPDATE AS OF 2021-04-03===

I was thinking about changing my review score to 2 stars from the current 3 stars; however, Subverse creators have addressed some of the issues in their latest post. I believe, that if that happens, or I'll see some improvements I will change the grade to 5 stars!

3.9/5 Stars
Gameplay: 6/10. Decent for what it is, basic turn-based combat/space shooter games. Not horrible.
Sexual Content: 5/10. The sexual content is decent, but very lacking. The world has a lot of lewd references and dialogue, but then the actual sex is relegated to an unlock gallery of scenes. Dissapointing, but I can say with more content it would be okay.
World/Overall Game: 7/10. Yeah the other two categories are a bit lacking, but the game is a 0.1 build, and theres obviously room a lot more content. As a cohesive game I think the game is quite successful, it just fails to deliver on either: Very good, engaging gameplay OR Very good, well done sexual content. Its a middling mix of them both, which is expected.

Definitely a game to watch, if it doesn't sit in development hell it could become quite good.

The Early Access release is only currently at around 10-15% of the planned content and even in its present state it's better than 99% of the content on this site. The low reviews here are pretty questionable in this context, but it is hard to judge everything on the same scale, when Subverse is clearly in another league (like the voice acting) and is competing with bigger titles. From a porn game perspective, the only major problem so far is the general disconnect between the porn scenes and the narrative. Only a couple of scenes were integrated into the story. Hopefully this will be improved.

There is too little content for something that took 2 years and 2 million to make. Don't get me wrong, what is already in the game has a LOT of polish for a NSFW game but its terribly limited.

The gameplay and porn does not mesh together at ALL. They might as well have released a game and then released all the porn loops on their website. It feels like they really wanted to make a game but couldnt decide on how to combine the gameplay and the porn, and what we have here is a messy grind to get gallery unlocks. In the current state of the game, that's basically it. Its a shooter + xcom game with a gallery with half decent porn loops.

The only saving graces in this game arethe voice acting, character models and character designs. The dialogue is awful, the porn is subpar, the game is subpar and repetitive, the story is better than average.

Verdict? Dont play the game for now, it might get better but for now just wait for someone to upload the loops on pornhub or something and jack off lol. The gameplay is not worth the porn.

If you know Paralogue, Paralogue basically has a stacked porn with no game. Subverse has a game with a mediocre porn. Lol. At least this is a step towards AAA porn games.

-Dialogue is ok.
-Voice acting is good.
-The flying gameplay is actually fun.
-The turn based combat is exactly what you'd expect and if it's not your thing your going to hate it just as much as i do.
-The sex scenes are great, really good job on the physics and animations. It lacks some basic functions found in similar games such as being able to change camera angles.

Overall: Well polished game, but it's just criminally boring.

Currently (v0.01) the gamehas stuttering issues in cutscenes which i expect will get fixed.

PROS
Visuals: The game looks great; the character models and graphics overall look pretty nice.
VA Performances: It seems a lot of effort was put into the voice acting; and it shows. Each character has their own distinct personalities which are all performed superbly.
Gameplay: While a bit difficult at first, at least for the turn based sections, I soon found myself having fun playing it. A sort of "come for the porn, stay for the gameplay" sort of thing.

CONS
Adult Content: Weirdly considering Studio FOW made this, this is the weakest part of the game. Not for the lack of it per se, there is a generous amount in the game, but for how it's implemented. Firstly; scenes are pre-rendered and as such, at a fixed angle; a cutscene more or less. Considering how good the rest of the game looks, it's baffling as to why they wouldn't just render these scenes in game with all the extra freedom and fidelity that would bring as they're clearly able to. Secondly; only a slice of these scenes are incorporated into the actual game, with the remaining majority only accessible/unlockable via the in game gallery, with these scenes being much shorter/simpler than ones encountered in game.
Writing: Cringly self aware does not begin to describe this game's writing. Despite the quality of the voice acting, it feels almost betrayed by the fact these characters will not waste any time reminding you that this IS a generic space game with sex and boobs and how funny that is. It's a shame, as Studio FOW put a lot of effort into crafting this world with it's own identity, where it succeeds, yet insists on poking fun at itself as being a by-the-numbers space game at every turn, so unrelenting that it very quickly becomes exhaustingly distracting.

In summary, I liked this game. It's not great, not terrible, and normally I'd say that, as an early access game, these issues could be rectified eventually. However, if we assume that what we have here is the foundation for what a more complete Subverse will be; Mass Effect with a sprinkle of porn, then that will become a big, big problem very quickly; as I assume that the vast majority of backers wanted it other way around.

TLDR: It's exactly what you'd expect from an early 2000s flash game with 1.6 million dumped into it.

So to be clear, I don't normally post anything here, but I'm going to de-lurk for this since I believe a lot of people were looking forward to this one and put a lot of money into it. Accordingly, it is a very high production value game, the animations are well done, as are the visuals. Money, however, cannot buy a good game, apparently and it shows. The gameplay is, for lack of a better way to put it boring, alternating between an entirely passable but in no way well-done space shooter, and a literal, mobile game tier asset flip of a tactical RPG (and no, being self-aware doesn't excuse it). Given the sheer amount of marketing that FOW put into describing this as an adult game with "good gameplay" rather than just porn, I expected something at least universally passable but I guess I expected too much.

Of course, since this is a porn game created by a fairly well-regarded adult animation studio, one would expect that the porn would at least be good, and while it is again very high production value, with well-animated models and well-blended animations, the actual content can be pretty much described as a very high-quality looping gif. Worse than that, however, it's uninspired, with most of the scenes being single, fairly mundane actions at best. They couldn't even be bothered to make the scenes story relevant for the most part, with scenes by in large just being unlocked via loyalty points, and while I appreciate the effort in at least making the scenes a reward for succeeding rather than the normal counter-intuitive approach of making them gained on loss as many games tend to do, making them almost literal gifs that are unlocked for gaining XP is a bit too far in the other direction.

I could keep going, but if Studio FOW couldn't be bothered to release their game in a complete state then I can't be either.

Gameplay wise its really fun both Space fights and ground fights actually fun to play.
Characters are funny there is plenty of jokes everywhere but for now girl body types are kinda similiar i hope it changes in future.
Game is actually have a story and its pretty exciting for now i'm excited about whats gonna happen.
Sex scenes are just 10 second loops and low at the moment.
Kinda short i was actually expecting more content.

I dont know what was people waiting for but for me its a pretty good game.

What a letdown. So much money in crowdfunding, plus the huge delay of the game and this is the result?`I realise that its early accses.. but still.

I mean sure the animations are nice and all, but not that spectacular, seems like people can do similar scenes in HS 2 studio with multiple POVs at that. Though the character design is pretty damn good. The best part for me is probably the music. Yeah.. the music.. in an "adult" game is the best part.

The issue with Subverse for me is that I want a porn game. This feels like they've focused way more on everything else, and left the actual porn as an afterthought. The scenes themselves and the way you unlock them are entirely underwhelming. There's less sex content in this entire game right now than a single one of FOW's old videos. Sure the game looks great, the presentation is fantastic, voice acting, cinematics, all of that. But I came here for the quality porn you'd expect from FOW and there's not much of it. I appreciate the team's ambition, and it is an impressive feat, but it's just not what I wanted or expected from this project.

Why would i bother writing a real review when a tourist does not need to write one to give it a 1 star? Everything about the game that's not the porn is excellent, 5 stars, no precedent in WEG. The porn is underwelming mostly because there is not nearly enough of it and the way it is presented in disjointed snippets of scenes that seam to have their previous and following snipets missing acording to the names. If they adress this and the game get's a lot more porn content in proper form it will easily be the best porn game released. If not it will be a 4 star game with 3 star porn. There, there's your 200 characters