Disclamer: This review is from the point of view of someone who did not hear anything about the game until a month before launch and whose opinion is based solely on the game itself, not the politics around it.
In it's current state, the game is more than a little disappointing. It has high production value and great presentation, which leads you to believe you're in for a jolly grand time of a raunchy Mass Effect fuck-orgy.
Well, you're not. Instead, you get blasted with expositionary dialogue at every turn that'll bore your brain out, intersected by passable, but wholly unnoteworthy Shmup and Turn-Based combat sessions, and more exposition sequences maybe sometimes spiced up by actually interesting dialogue that doesn't serve the sole purpose of explaining the game-world to you.
But nobody gives a shit about that, right? It's a porn game, if we can play shitty MTLs and Russian crackhead games that make no sense as long as the porn is good, we don't care, right? Well, that's where, to me, the most disappointing part of Subverse comes in.
The sex scenes amount to little more than a few second looped videos, some premium scenes have a speed slider with a cum animation. The animation is top notch, the waifu models are hot, and the voice acting even hotter. Sounds good so far, but they are completely ripped out of the game and utterly without context. You unlock additional scenes for each character in a Gallery called "Pandora", with PP points that you gain while raising affection with that character. And then, you just watch the loop. That's it. There is no story progression towards these scenes, no dialogue before, during or after. They are completely weightless and devoid of any eroticism, and frankly have no justification of being part of a game. You could upload these online (which people have already done) and they would lose nothing, so what's the point of building a game around them, then? Even their own flash games and movies had more context.
As it stands right now, the game is passable, but leaves a bad taste in your mouth considering the budget and vision behind it. Games like Paralogue and Wildlife have similar quality of animation that are completely 3D and with customizable characters, and about the same context to them as of right now. Especially when it comes to the Xeno-scenes, I find the lack of context actually detracts so much, because without the context of a woman going on all fours to let herself get fucked by an animal, it's completely weightless.
One can only hope that this wasn't their first idea, and they just ran out of time and money, and made mistakes along the way that caused this lackluster implementation of literally the most important part of a porn game. We get it, game development is hard, no hard feelings. The game has a lot of potential, but only if StudioFOW takes the criticism to heart and works to at least add some more dialogue to the sex scenes, in an ideal world they'd rework the whole system to accomodate more pre- and post-sex dialogue and add some story element to these scenes.
TL;DR: The rest of the game is passable if at least the sex is good. Right now, it isn't.
