This game is a real mixed bag, mostly bad though. You play as the Captain (thats his name) of the ship (Mary something...). He seems to be heavily based on Deadpool from the 2013 game, not the more recent movies. You start with EDI (Sorry, she's DEMI) and you get the rest of the crew through the natural progression of the game. The mechanics of the game work well enough and I only got stuck forcing me to restart once.
The voice acting is superb. Its easily part of the entire game. Even though the dialog can cringy with its self referential humor and it's LONG boring lore dumps. If you like lore, there is a lot of it in Subverse. In fact, the game warns you, the player, that there is a big, incoming lore dump. The issue with these lore dumps lies in the fact that the game forgot to make sure that the player actually cared about the story before hitting me with the lore. If you're looking rub one out real quick (as the game early on refers directly to), you're probably going to be disappointed. You get access a couple of loops early on, but you can't view them again until the game gives you control (more on that later). There is about an hour of tutorials and dialog to get through before you have access to freely view H scenes, but its all a 15 or so second loop. They character models look great, but these loops take a lot gameplay to acquire. You have play, get the other characters and build up PP points to unlock the loops.
Let's talk about gameplay. It's basically two old games with a new coat of paint on and them. Asteroids and the strategic xcom type games. Think about that for 1 second. Asteroids came out in the last 1970s! Xcom's gameplay style is also decades old. The asteroids gameplay is fine, you can upgrade the ship's weapons and abilities. The xcom gameplay is OK, but it's kind of hard to see since the camera is zoomed out a bit too far. I think it's an attempt to cover up how low quality the xcom character models look, but that's just a game theory. After about an hour of tutorials, dialog, and combat, you finally get control to make decisions and do things. The game specifically tells you that. Now you can explore the Captain's ship and now you experience another big mechanic of the game: Point-and-click. That's how you explore the interior of the ship. You do this, too, for navigating the ship to other places once you get control. The game also makes sure to specifically say it's as simple as point-and-click. That self referential humor comes up, a lot.
Here's my problem with this game. Like the Deadpool game from 2013, these jokes have no replay value. You hear them once, maybe you chuckle, but if you play again, or have to restart, it's the jokes that you've already heard. The point-and-click is underwhelming based on what FOW was hyping this game up to be with its Mass Effect comparisons. The xcom gameplay is generic with confusingly outdated characters compared to the dialog character models. And the asteroids gameplay is fine, but its asteroids! This a PC only release running on my hardware designed to run MGS5 on max settings. Subverse could literally be run on an android device and it would be stable. Not to mention, the H scenes only account for about 16 minutes of this roughly 4 hour game. They're asking $30 only steam for this game and don't think it's worth it. It's in early access though so maybe they'll fix all of the problems I've just pointed out (no, they won't, but a bit more content is supposed to be coming). It would be better if Studiofow just sold the H scene loops separately and spared the world the hype of this game with awkwardly duct taped together gaming mechanics with a bit of porn on the side. This game is (so far, it's in early access :/) a complete disappointment, but Studiofow raked in the money, so they'll be fine.