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

Almost all of the new scenes are terrible quality. Clothes and penises clipping through, weird looking penetrations, skin texture looking like they forgot the word texture while rendering, blurry views so you probably can't tell the quality is shit, joints and body parts are extremely jarring once you pay attention to them

It's very clear that this is a cash grab and that they're just doing it so they can finally complete the game.

This game is like a river that is a mile wide but only an inch deep.

There is a lot of content here, but none of it feels fully fleshed out and well designed.

Everyone reading this knows what this company is known for. The problem is, rather than staying in their wheelhouse and doing something that probably would have been awesome for their fans, they tried to make something for everybody, and in doing so, you can't really tell who this game is for.

During the Kickstarter they did an excellent job of baiting Mass Effect fanboys like myself into thinking this would be a game for us. To keep us happy, they ended up putting all the monster stuff they're actually good at in the Pandora system, which is awful on pretty much every level. This decision pissed off their normal fans who like that stuff, because it's all disconnected from the storyline and not implemented well.

The Devotion Quest scenes are awesome, but they are the only scenes in the entire game that are. The scenes in the Pandora system are at best mid.

Gameplay-wise, this game is a massive grind. They would have been better off picking one of the two game systems, focusing entirely on it and discarding the other one. Having two completely independent game systems within this game is a really weird choice.

This game is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with AAA games today.

I highly recommend you just wait for somebody to rip all of the animations and just watch those. This game sucks.

This is a weird game that's almost reflective of how unready we are (despite knowing about this for YEARS) to score these games. The first self-proclaimed AAA porn game.

The story is good. It's not the best I've seen on this site. But it's good enough to make me want to keep playing.

The production levels are ASTOUNDING.

The girls are...fine? I think halfway through making this game, someone told FOW that, for better or worse, people play games like this to form the emotional connection with who they're banging. Anal is hot. Strong girls being weak to anal is hotter. That confident tanned tomboy childhood friend being weak to anal? Yeah that's the good stuff. I can see any ass get plowed by a dick. We've become so degenerate that we want to get to know them first. Truly disgusting.

Unironically; as this game just nails the porn part, I find myself wondering if they're doing enough of a good job with the hand-holding part.

And then I'm like "ok, yeah, but how many objectively worse HS/Koikatsu games have you given a 4 or 5 to?" and yeah fair enough; 5 it is.

I didn't like the game's first release. Nobody did. That's why the score is so low. So we're also unprepared for games like this when we score them on this website.

I'm just going to leave the 5 here and hope that this game is considered mid 5 years from now when better high budget western porn games start cropping up.

It is actually really hard to fairly rate this one, because this is the closest we've *ever* come to a full length, 3-D epic-styled hentai game. That in itself is pioneering and there is a fully fledged out story with cinematics throughout the game. For that, I give the highest praise to StudioFow. This review will be based on the game itself.

Full disclosure- I played the entirety up 0.9. I did not finish the game, but I used a full save to see the rest. I backed on kickstarter years ago and got to see it through development. I am not going to include the devotion cinematics in this review. I watched Fortune's, and it was fine enough, but I dont think i'll come back to it.

Art: I'm distinguishing art from h-scenes here. The animators did a fantastic job and the game looks amazing. For the length of the game, there seems to be very little frayed ends in terms of the quality from what I can tell. This is definitely the game's high point and I would give it a 5/5 if I was only judging the art.

Hentai: This part doesn't include art whatsoever, its more about the context of the hentai. A large amount of the h-scenes in this game is tied into what's called "pandora" scenes, which is basically a scene viewer that you need to use a special type of points to unlock which you can string together to make somewhat of a movie (but not really). Only a few of these scenes feature cumshots, and the "manticores", genetically modified beasts, are featured in a lot. I thought this style on the whole was a bit of a wasted opportunity. I'm biased because I dont particularly like the monster fetish, but most of the scenes just lack any real energy to it. There's no real roleplay, no power dynamic, it's just loops of 3d banging that you can find on the internet. The characters all have big personalities in the story, but they're absent from pandora. Something like a quick lead up context to some pandora scenes would help this tremendously, like MC beating Fortune in cards and booty was the bet or Demi (edit not Demi, the tiny blue chick) jumping on MC like a spider monkey when she is wasted. This may be fleshed out in devotion, I donno, but Pandera, specifically, is a let down. 2/5.

Story & Script: Like many hentai games, the story seems to lack real direction and identity. This is (obviously) a sci-fi game that parodies, at least in part, titles like Mass Effect. There is a massive amount of humour (attempts) and some real effort to world build.

This is the problem: a lot of humour is all sex puns and references to pop culture. It's dumb, very juvenile, and sometimes just too much. None of the jokes have lead up or thought, they are all like "that ship looks like a dick!" or "this silly character looks like a celebrity". Har har. It's annoying, especially because almost every dialogue contains a dick joke, but that in itself is not the issue.

The other side of this coin is that the story itself tries to be serious, so you have dick jokes and then all of a sudden they're talking about genocide, revenge, and political corruption. It's jarring, and there are exposition bombs all over the place that go from sex bots to attempts at legitimate world building. The writer should have either tried to make a fun, goofy story, or make a serious, less-dick-joke-esque drama. There's ways you can do both, but the writers failed pretty badly at it. 2/5.

Gameplay: For this one, I'm going to be charitable. Frankly, I didn't like it. BUT, large amount of effort was put into it, the space UIs look beautiful, and the SCHMUPs has a degree of fun to it. The tactics mode was broken in terms of balance, but since there were updates to it that I didnt play, I'm not going to speak to that. It was a grind, but, granted, I did put like 20 hours into the game grinding, so it can't be that awful. Similar to the story, I feel like they should of either put all their eggs in one basket by making either tactics or SCHMUPs fleshed out and interesting, or creating more variation in the gameplay, but it is what it is. Like I said, being charitable, i'll give it 3/5.

In conclusion, I want to reiterate that my 3/5 is a review of the game itself, and not what the game represents. Hats off to this studio for such an ambitious attempt and those that are interested should pick it up on Steam and judge for yourself. I do hope they add more content in the future.

Really hope that they have an overarching post-release strategy where they will use the sales (with a price bump) of 1.0 to fund a decent amount of expanded content because as it stands, this initial release screams of massive resource mismanagement internally. I don't care about the stylistic elements people are taking issue with (fetishes catered to, dialogue/story structure, pandora narrative integration) but purely from a content design standpoint what we've gotten doesn't make much sense considering the time and funding allocated.

Yes, this is an indie game that only took one round of KS funding, it was never going to look AAA either in the presentation or gameplay departments and they do manage to get decent mileage out of strong cutscene direction and repurposed assets (some of the enemy models are originally from Paragon lol) but recognising their clear resource limitations they should have reigned in their ambitions extremely early. What they had as a foundation was a captive audience from their prior work, really strong character designs (and decently well defined personalities for said characters from a writing perspective) and a pair of shallow but serviceable gameplay systems (space and ground combat). The logical thing to do is pump the majority of your time and money into the good parts of that foundation (porn for the characters everyone likes in your porn game) and not waste it trying to implement awkward progression systems and feature bloat in all the wrong areas. Why does the DBZ power-up mechanic get set up in the main story only to be shunted down to the back quarter of every girl's progression and why does it even exist to begin with when ultimately the ground combat is so simplistic (as it should be), all that time and money spent on a mechanic that is utterly superfluous.

The progression itself is a mess, its scaled to fit the decent amount of (again very shallow) side content that all rely on you spending time with gameplay systems that aren't deep enough to warrant it but absolutely took serious time and money to develop. I don't understand that development goals here, any and all involved would absolutely be aware that the gameplay systems were not where the core appeal was and must have raised this internally, but at least judging by dev diaries, the messaging within the studio was to double and triple down on trying to flesh out the gameplay instead of playing to the actual strengths of the game (more porn, more character interaction). This whole project reeks of a disconnect between the leads and the people actually building the systems (surprisingly common at small studios), couple that with a really strange marketing and community engagement strategy that seemed to rubber-band from the initial "you know who we are and now we're doing mass effect with porn for our first ever game" bravado and then just flat nothing after the initial early access release, then a community focused regular approach with the dev diaries and social media presence and now back to the big trailers and "look its like mass effect" tone. Some of that is basic marketing logic (push the game hard when it comes out of EA to maximise first time sales) but the overall strategy, or rather strategies from the look of it, the past 4 years comes off as confused and muddled just like the actual game we've gotten here.

I don't think anything typifies the issues with Subverse and especially this 1.0 release better than the last act of the game. Last set of missions feature an infiltration sequence that (I'm not being hyperbolic) a first or second year game design student could whip up in a week or two, likely less. The "metal gear if it was a board game for children with learning difficulties" sequence is genuinely baffling and is immediately followed by two extremely boring boss fights that highlight exactly how little there is going on with the ground combat here (which anyone playing figures out much earlier in the game, so why emphasise it!) bookended by a series of final cutscenes that are some of the best directed in the whole game (but feature absolutely 0 porn in a porn game lmfao), it is such a remarkable feat of design whiplash that I actually might be sincerely impressed. Also Devotion quests unlock in the final act and they are for the most part a mix of the same shallow gameplay with admirable attempts to throw wrinkles into the formula (that struggle to overcome the sheer limitations of the core systems at play), bookended by short 'movies' ranging from 3-5 minutes in length. These are bound to be divisive, as they are by and large much more vanilla than what the core FOW fanbase probably wants/expects and they are some of the few times that the porn is actually attached to the narrative (not something that matters to me personally but I think open to valid criticism). It is more than a little damning that I came away from the DQs thinking "wow some of the best parts of this game are the non-interactive movies", none of them feature anything from their respective girl's progression systems either besides the actual investment to unlock them (no outfits, hair etc) since they are prerendered. This prompts the inevitable question of "would Subverse have been better if it was something like 70% FOW animation, and 30% gameplay?". A question I'm sure everyone involves doesn't want to be the primary take away for their audience here lol.

It's a shame because clearly a lot of talent and hard-work has gone into this project over a meaningful period of time, and there is such a good foundation here in terms of characters and atmosphere. I want to be clear that I don't think this is some irredeemable pile of shit or anything like that; FOW set out to do something ambitious (far too ambitious) and considering the strength of the initial ideas here (characters, world etc) its not hard to see why they would, however it is readily apparent that they quickly got themselves into a difficult position project management wise and that lead to crippling constraints on the end product. There's a general rule in creative fields that with a large scale project, you need to have the hard conversations early, clear restraints need to be set down so the project can be scaled (and costed lol) appropriately and the teams can know what they are working towards, and their managers can push them toward those *realistic* goals with clear messaging. This especially needs to be done before a public marketing push. Clearly, FOW (as an inexperienced team in this field) struggled with these fundamental principles and to be honest, its impressive that they were able to produce anything at all let alone something this decent. I hope they make enough to do further things with the Subverse IP, hopefully things that lean into their creative strengths.

1.0 out so i can put out a proper review after playing the game in the beta.

The fact that this game is around a 3star rating is a shame and why it's hard to trust the rating on this website.

U will find some walk collect sex scene rpg maker game with a 5type rating but they will put a 2star rating for this game.

Lets be honest, the work behind this game is BIG, it's not a cheap reusing the same image for 3 different scene, cheap 2d animation. If u just want a quick rub download the game, get a full save and go for the gallery.

If people don't enjoy gameplay i can get it, u can enjoy hentai game just for being able to tell a story in a different way. But you can also have hentai game with some gameplay and all. if it's not your thing, don't bother.

All the girl are really hot and you have a lot of different type, it's hard to not have at least one that will make you horny for her.
The story is not the best selling point but it's lot of joke reference and breaking the 4wall kind.

All the game is really well done animated, with really good job of voice acting and pretty good sound effect. Nothing cheap there.

I wouldnt call it the best hentai game, it's not for everyone, but it's really well done and it's hard to put low star when the game have so many good quality

The game has much better performance and runs well, the animations are what they are, my main issue was with performance which seems to have gotten much better than before so the game is good, not the best yet, maybe after dlc releases in future it would be but not yet

This game has alot of potential to be the greatest porn game western has made but they put a "immersive" gameplay,i rather play an actualy strategy game.lets be honest people play porn game to get some action but with a simple gameplay, not time consuming and not mental consuming.nice graphic and character tho.so just grab some full save somewhere and enjoy the "action" instead the "gameplay".

Review of v0.9...

I've only played a few hours, but I wanted to get my thoughts out there since I'm not sure if I will keep playing.

This game would have been so much better if StudioFOW took is seriously and tried to make a legit space drama porn game, but instead they clowned it up like Deadpool himself is making the game ramming in as much forth wall breaking and edgy humor and dialogue as they can. If they had made a legit serious game they would be taken more seriously as a development studio, but I guess they couldn't help themselves.

The character animations are good, but the cinematics are great. The voice acting is also very good.

The actual gameplay itself though is pretty dull. Grinding fight after fight for resources to upgrade your fighter or make new monsters for your army. The gameplay would be more manageable if the game had controller support, but it doesn't.

I didn't respond to much of the humor. The characters just sound like the try hards on 4chan. The one thing that did get a legit LOL out of me was when I came across their take down of Tim Pool. A lobster character wearing a beanie mocking Tim Pool reeing about not being able to use the Subverse name. I did really like that. Tim Pool is a clown.

The game isn't bad, but it could have been so much better. I'm not sure if I'll go back to it, but if I do and my opinion changes I'll return and edit my review accordingly.

StudioFOW has some of the highest quality content out there. And just like most who make porn games, they're output is slow. Having to trudge through some of the most awkward dialogue, jokes, and voice acting for the occasional sex scene is not great, but the few sex scenes there are are super solid.

Rating: 10/10

It's been about a 1.5 years since I touched this game(waiting on full release to replay the entirety) however I bought it on Steam after about a day of playing it.

It's easily in the top 3 porn games of all time.

This game does a great job of drawing you in with the story and getting your mind and hands ready with the battles.

The XCOM-like and Asteroids-like combats are amazing and challenging. I feel like I'm playing an actual game for once. I really enjoyed the combat and I feel that the game would hold up even if it weren't a porn game.

The sex scenes are amazing with fantastic visuals and amazing voice acting. The character designs are very unique and one of a kind.

I feel like the price tag on the game is a good deal and appropriate for the amount of content and gameplay. It still isn't finished yet with more to come in the near future.

If I were to recommend any 2 porn games they would be Subverse and Karryn's Prison.

I wasted an hour of my existence downloading this game.
It was very disappointing...the 'Deadpool' style MC character, was instantly annoying and unrelatable...the narrative was wet, moldy and uninspired.

The combat was of a 'Galaxian' style, which I love...however, the battles were fake and manufactured...everything was tied to a stretcher before being wheeled out.
Imagination was missing, creativity went AWOL...it was simply a disappointment.

Don't let corporations ruin our games.

If you love engaging gameplay, funny jokes, and an easy scene selector, this game is right up your alley.

The jokes are spot on, the characters are full of life, and the humor is great. The gameplay is fun and keeps you interested way beyond the intro missions, with waves that offer a good mix of variety and challenge.

The scenes are awesome. Each character’s intro scene is well done and opens smoothly in the game. Unlocking more scenes by playing missions feels rewarding, and the scenes themselves are cool and actually add to the story. They fit perfectly with everything else in the game.

The modeling, design, and animation are excellent. The game is well put together, providing a smooth and enjoyable experience from start to finish.

I love FOW!

I think the game sets a new standart to Adult games in regards of 3D Modeling quality, Cinematics, Voice overs, which almost no other games have. The Gameplay is very lazy and repetitive, i totally agree but the idea of even HAVING gameplay is sooo nice to me. The Maps are all the same so are the enemies, on ground combat you oneshot everything and it rarely has any strategy in it. But like i said even just having that instead of Clicking through 10000000 lines of dialouge is a crazy step forward.

It feels like the Graphics Team is 10/10 but the gameplay team is 4/10.

But anyway - Are there any other Games qualitywise as Subverse?

I've played all 3 NLT games which are similar in the sense that you can actually do something gameplay wise and i LOVED them. I also played Carnal Instinct which was great.

Do you have any other suggestions?
3D/Gameplay/Free roaming(?)

Story 2/5
Well thought i would try this one even with the reviews being quite poor but got to give credits to those reviews they arent lieing when they say this is just way to cringy and funny enough in H-scenes there arent any dialogs thats the one time it might be ok to be cringy but theres nothing...

The MC whos a wannabe deathpool type character just fails to be funny, hes to childish and to cringy, meaning dialogs alone can make game unplayable which is quite something.....MC is also the standard caveman thinking big tits and milfs is the best thing in the world which always feels idiotic to me, since im not into that shit my self.

And that creates another issue that game is a big turn-off when every girl is forced on you even those you hate and arent into like whores for one or fetishes/kinks you hate, i will never understand why devs dont put in a no option for sex scenes.
Its pretty much just a mindless fuckfest meaning theres 0 romance 0 build-up, you just meet and fuck whoever making it feel empty and pointless and without ever having any kind of emotions for anyone at all

Yet another thing that is absolutly fucked up is most sex scenes like 95% arent even part of the game, they are just in a gallery where you can pay points to open a scene so you can see it? i simply just dont understand why so many scenes are just left out of the story it makes no sense and makes them feel just as pointless as the game......
And alot of those gallery sex scenes would be considered as NTR since its not MC that does the fucking but other men or aliens or who knows what, also in most noone cums in them either so it really is pointless random animations.
As for in game sex scenes theres like 1 maybe 2 scenes in total for each girl and considering how big this game is its not worth playing for the adult stuff.

It does have a very good voice acting and hole game is voiced and animated, which are the best parts of the game really but it dosent help much when everything else is bad.

Its to bad game has no choices or romances and barely any sex scenes doing the game and yes i dont count a gallery scenes since its not part of story or game.
There is even a dating option on the ship but if you think you will romance or talk with them then think again, you just hand them items they say thanks and you get 0-75 points with the girl thats it nothing else.

With all the work put into this making it like a AAA game it could have been the best AVN of all times really, but when it has a shit story that are childish and cringy and without choices its worse then even a b-porn movie, just without the sex since there arent much of that doing normal game.

Also game just gets nothing right well story wise, even MCs nemesis the huntress is allowed to join hes crew even though she tried to kill him and the hole crew and kidnapped the mainframe girl and ofc MC will also fuck her, i get the story is absolutly shit but its like they are really trying to make it as shitty as possible, oh and on a side not the huntress was even killed by Fortune but like magic she dident die but ran away after getting killed....fuck its awfull.

Girls 2/5
Its pretty clear that its yet another bimbo focused game and theres very little diversity in builds.

Animations 4/5
Best part of the game but animations alone just cant carry a full game and since the H-scenes arent really part of the game at all or atleast 90% arent then you might as well just watch them on a porn site since its the same thing as watching them inside the game.....

Choices 0/5
You dont have any choices and it really should have kinetic tag since thats all it is, cant controle any aspect of main story or who MC fucks since he just fucks everything, so huge fail on not being choice driven in any way.

Music 4/5
Pretty average background stuff, nothing special and nothing with lyrics, but still giving it a 4 due to the voice acting.

What i dont get is why they even made this an adult game, if it was made with normal dialogs with a real story and dident have to waste time on all the animations that arent even part of the game anyway and those in game which are so few that its barely even an adult game anyway, so without them it would have been done alot faster and it would be playable for millions more people insted of the few who plays AVNs.

After playing this game again and again to the next update. I will write a review.

And I am extremely disappointed in this game.

pros:

+ The characters (I really like the characters design and the personalities from the different characters)
+ animations (The sex scenes animations are great)
+ voice acting (moaning sounds during the H scene

Neutral

o The plot (the plot is not interesting but also not bad)

cons:

- The writing from this game, this includes the main story, side story and interaction with the characters. (It is so badly written, that I also “cringe” towards the writing. It is so over the top that I started to skip all dialogs.)
- no dialogue during H scene (This is definitely missing in the H scenes)
- The humor is with the writing so bad (That I started to skip all of the dialog)
- uninteresting combat combat (The combat missions are all repetitive and boring. At least the main story missions are different)
- They casted a SFW actress for Kasidora and made her un-lewdable (It was a stupid decision from the start of the devs. And I am surprised how out of touch they are. It was clear from the beginning, that there are people that will lewd Kasidora. But it is now impossible, to lewd her in game.)
- H-content mostly not integrated in the story and dumped in a Gallery system (This is my main critic point)
- The game forces you grind as much as possible to earn points to unlock the Gallery


1/5 stars in conclusion. For me it’s a bad porn game and a bad game.

EDIT 2024.11.16


I looked at the Devotion Quest.
(Subverse-v1.0-Steam-Cracked\Subverse-v1.0-Steam\Subverse\Content\Movies\VIDDQ)

Lily = 5:58
Killi = 5:09
Ela = 4:35
DEMi = 4:31
Sova = 4:29
Fortune = 4:20
Blythe = 4:19
Huntress = 4:06
Taron = 3:39

What is this length?
Not only this, there are bad, just bad.
There is a little bit of talk in the beginning, then the sex starts and then only moaning, nothing more.


The Devotion Quest are a complete disappointment.

I shouldn't have bought the game... Complete disappointment...

It is really a 1/5.

ok so before i rate this, i should say that i didn't finish and barely played few hours before i got bored

this is very hard to rate and confusing to me, on one hand i realy love the graphics, animations, voice acting, while on the other hand i hated the gameplay, the stupid mini-games, hard turn based battles etc..

i guess if you like it or not will depend on what you seek, but for me it was a disappointment for the most part.

pros:

+good graphics
+smooth animations
+hot girls
+voice acting
+plot wasn't so bad either, its convincing at least

cons:

-repetitive missions
-unnecessarly hard battles
-sucks ass gameplay
-no dialogue during H scenes (which is the biggest turn off for me, c'mon was it that hard to add some dialogues?)
-cringe dialogues in normal scenes, seriously it gets boring after 5 mins
-so called ''humor'', idk maybe some would love it but it just didn't get to me.

Fun, mass effect style 'clone' but well done. Still clearly in progress.

Story is funny. Game play is mildly repetitive (but hey so was mass effect 1 lol).

If continues to be flushed out and more p0rn then perhaps will give 5 starts, at the moment it is just 'good'.

This was a great idea, back when was annouced.
But since then the flood gates of porn games had been open, we are no longer in the times where Hunnie Pop was a surprise.

While this game has been in developement games have come and gone that are better than what Subverse is currently offering, even on going patreon games feel more promising.

IronIcally Studio FOW doesnt seem to understand their target audience, they thought that their experience doing porn videos was transferable to video games. What i mean by this that video games are a time investment and with all the trash that floats in the world of porn games, this breed of gamers tend to be very picky. They know well what they like and are willing to discard a whole game if it has a big enought quantity of something they dont like.

So who is this game for? Harem fans? well those probably dont take kindly to seing the girls getting railed by big monsters.
For fans of super hard-core sex? they might think that the games doenst go far enought and probably dont care about the more vanilla aspects.

It tries to take its story seriously but the juvenile humor kinda ruins it. I tries to be funny and juvenile but it takes itself to seriously for it to work.

The gameplay is boring so out the window go the fans who want a good game along their porn and the gameplay consumes enought time to allianate those who want to just get to the porn.

and neither of those aproaches are revolutionary since are plenty of porn games that tried both concepts and even combine decent storytelling with humor better than subverse.

The animation on the scenes is good but not exactly revolutionary, you can find plenty of games that are on the level or better in this forums and personally i think that having sex scenes without some sort of dirty talk nowadays is just unforgivable

so i ask again, for who is this game?


The only reason this doesnt get a 1 is because of the voice acting, the only people actually doing something good and something that isnt standard nowadays. Sadly despite all their work, im fully convinced that subverse will launch without much fanfare or will just crash into the abyss.

ps: im more than willing to back and change my score if it turns out great after all this time.

I liked the game concept. The actual design is pretty cool, but there is not much variety in the attack animations. As for the kinky scenes, not bad, not good. That's all I can say.

The worst thing about this game is its core gameplay. It's awful. It gives the player no breather. It goes from fight after fight and so on, and all of them are repetitive. I saw one mediocre kinky scene, and the game threw me into a terribly boring loop of fights. It was a nightmare and rather extremely frustrating than fun.

The story is cringe and boring. MC looks a bit like Deadpool, and I guess the developer wanted to make him actually like that, but it failed, in my opinion.

Overall, this game is awful in many aspects. With 50 gigabytes in size, I expected something different. After finally beating one of the more difficult fights, I was happy to see some scenes again, but guess what? I got into another fight instantly.

I couldn't keep up with that any more and pressed alt + f4, removed this trash from my hard drive, and burned my PC.