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

I bought Subverse on Steam, driven in large part by the preview images. Playing the game has been an exercise in cringing tedium for the most part.

The Good
Excellent visuals.
Solid worldbuilding, though sometimes exhausting in its detail (much of which makes no difference to the story being told in the slightest).
Animations are very well done.

The Bad
H scenes are almost exclusively part of the gallery, and not part of the story at all. They are all animated, and really well-done, but also disappointing in their lack of interaction.
Bullet hell begins to get boring after a while, and the ground combat system is about as bare-bones as it gets.
The only choices to be made in this game are which planet's flavor text you'll be ignoring next.
The "pooter points" (ugh) system for the gallery is poorly implemented, making many of the scenes in the gallery inaccessible unless you've planned well in advance how to best take advantage of the system.

The Ugly
The writing here is atrocious. It is some of the worst, most puerile, edgelord crap imaginable. The devs mock everything that wanders into their adolescent minds with equal fervor. There is no subtlety. The humor slips past childish into outright stupid over and over again. You will find yourself rolling your eyes frequently, unless you happen to be in the same mindset as the devs, which would require you to either not be old enough to play an adult game, or have suffered a debilitating head injury at some point.

If you can plod through the game's "story" you might find yourself enjoying the H scenes, but those will grow stale quickly. I keep expecting more of this game than I should, because it looks like something that should be excellent, even if it falls far short of that mark in nearly aspect. I play every new update, and each time I am disappointed in the lack of anything that feels fresh or engaging.

Subverse is a good game but with lights and shadows. The story is not bad in the non-sexual side of it, a bit cliche as of a war against a bad empire and rebellion and all that. But sexually the story is horrible: all girls are full on "dumb sluts" and there is not much real work in giving them any real personality or any build up to the scenes with them. If we add that the overall tone of the game is a wanna-be Deadpool but not as well written, the whole story falls apart and becomes uninteresting quickly. Gameplay wise it has two sides to it: a twin stick shooter space battler which is quite quick and fun; and a turn-based combat which is a bit less fun but does it thing as long as you're not expecting a deep strategy game like XCOM. So, all in all it is a fun game to play, as long as you can manage to ignore the story.

Graphically the game is gorgeous as this genre goes, with lots of animations (not only for sex), great character models (even though it has too many non-humans in it) and lots of graphical little details you don't usually find in erotic games. Sound is also on a very high level for the genre, with voice acting for the girls, sound effects that do their job and a soundtrack that works very well and has quite some interesting tracks in it. So, as far as the technical aspect goes, Studio FOW has done an amazing job with the game.

So, it ends up being an unconfortable balance between fun but shallow gameplay, non-sensical story and great visuals. I'd say it's worth to play it, even if you don't like it a lot, just to see where more or less the limits of the genre technically are currently sitting, because this game shares that throne with few others.

My 1st review.
I'm so mad at them for destroyed my hopes on could be one of the best H Games of the year.
It was funny on 0.1 but starting on 0.2 it's just a cringe game.
And the most dissapointing things, the H scenes are just 2s Loop GIF with no cumshot.

Version: [v0.5]

Sex scenes: 2/5
My main gripe with this game is the sex scenes especially premium ones have poor choice of angles. Would definitely be better if they enabled free camera provided that they polished them to avoid clipping and other weird movements during a scene.

Story & Dialogue: 3/5
Story is pretty cohesive and the dialogue is great; not too dry nor overdone/forced.

Gameplay: 4/5
If this were just another space shoot 'em up and turn-based game minus the adult theme, it'd be a good one.

Sound & Music: 5/5
Sound and music fits well with whatever is happening on screen. Nothing that's blatantly out of place or warrants having the volume on mute.

All in all, it's a good space shoot 'em up and turn-based strategy game with a cohesive story and good dialogue but the main point is this was made by an NSFW animation studio with an adult theme in mind yet I just can't get why some premium/climax scenes have poor angles with no option for alternate or free-camera mode.

I own this on Steam and have played enough to give a bit of a review. StudioFOW has been in this game a long time and it shows. This is in the top 5 games that I have played on F95. Is it a great game? No. Are the scenes the best out there? No. Is the story better than a cake? No.
Regardless, 95% of the games available via F95 are incomplete, copycats, or just plain crap. This is not one of those.
Well worth the play, with very little "grind" and enough fun to keep a guy interested.

Has potential, but needs more focus on the porn content rather than just talk about porn and make unnecessary gameplay add-ons that put more work into the game in all the wrong places.

Strategy gameplay is alright. Certain units lack utility and level up system is a drawback for the amount of one time fights you can go into.

Bullet hell shooter is simple and fun.

Porn aspect is still lacking and is more of a sex simulator selector with no connection to story. Illusion or other games atleast try to connect a scene with a porn scene, however Subverse wants to tell a story about porn, but never write a scene with the cast engage in a porn scene.

Controversial to a degree, this is one of the few true AAA efforts right now that is successful. Full voice acted, high quality 3dCG sex, 2 gameplay modes (space combat and ground combat), long-form story, and hours and will everntually be a AAA game in length - this is the future of adult gaming and something to be excited over. No extreme fetishes, which I feel is part of why this community is shitting on it - unfairly.

Mixture of MaXXX effect and X-CUM series, and retro shooting game.
Provides multispecies harem girls, MILF, Pseudo-furry, shortstack, tentacle, Big Ailen Ccck.
Requires grinding to see SXX scene and unlock the gallery.

I personally love this. Sure some scenes aren't for me, but I love what theyre doing , fun and sexy with great voice acting. Writing can be cringey at times and gameplay can be better. but this is not final version

Great game. Tactics, space, arcade similar to old games.Animation and graphics chic, very beautiful ladies, different fetishes everyone will find something for themselves, there are filters if something does not like. A good story, a lot of humor. Much better than the corny visual novels, of which there are so many now and they are boring.

ONEPIECE... GREAT ANIMATON ALWAYS EVOLVING TRY THEIR BEST

LETS WATCH THEM RISE UPON THE BEST TRIED TONS OF GAMES AND THES ONE IS REMARKABLE ..
THEY NEED TO UPDATE FASTER THOU.
+ VOICE ACTING SO COOL ALMOST 0 BUGS AND GREAT GAMEPLAY

Subverse has the same issues as many other games that never actually bothered thinking about how to implement their main selling point.

On the steam page there is a line from the team describing what they consider "PREMIUM" sex scenes.

in these "PREMIUM" sex scenes you can :
- control the speed of the animation
- choose the moment of climax

This tells you two important things about studiofow's vision of game content :

- the most basic shit you may find in any "crappy hentai game" can be considered premium content
- Subverse "basic" content is less than that, so that means zero interactions, zero implications of the player in these sex scenes, also the sex scenes are linked to literally nothing, you could almost forget they exist and the game would be the same.

People are probably going to give the game an overall good rating because of what it does next to the NSFW content, but i think that is unfair

Imagine you are rating a Driving Simulator, and you give it 4stars because the garages are nice, the music is fine, and the UI is good...
Sure, the driving sucks, but the rest makes up for it, right?

NO!!

You wanna make a porn game? Actually make a freaking porn game...
you got the money, the team, the time, the technology, the 3d models, the animators...

Why is it soooooooo damn hard for you to actually make the porn interesting in porn games?
And why does it feel, every single time, that the only reason it sucks, is because the team don't want to even bother trying?

People have complained recent Illusion games have a tendancy to focus entirely on customisation of females, and put zero effort on the gameplay.
Well, subverse put zero effort on the overall thing, and wastes most of it on stuff people never actually wanted... (SHMUP and turn based combat)

The studio had an ambitious vision for this game and certainly the mini games are enjoyable and provide a nice challenge for me.

I would say though that it is not without its issues. I feel the studio should have given the rough story outline to a script writer who may have avoided some of the oddities in the writing and known better than to break the 4th wall.

The script doesn't take itself seriously 95% of the time but in an abrasive way which I persoanlly think is a shame because the world they built and the basic pillars for the world, characters and general setting are good enough to warrant a more serious approach that would blend better with the decent character and fleshed out characters they have created.

|The integration of the nsfw content is not well thought out, its implemented as unlokable rewards as mentioned in other reviews here. In subsequent chapters they have started to integrate the nsfw content into the game's story and cutscenes which works well.

I believe given SFOW's previous work many expected sex woven into the story well with plenty of it and long lasting howver so far the sex that has been integrated is very short.

Thankfully the devs are listening and I believe this game will be great once finished and I do hope they make another title of similar scope afterwards, the lessons they have already learned and are still to learn would make the next game a truly excellent one.

Lastly I firmly believe this game has a bad rating on this site for two reasons:

1. Jealousy of the Studio for their success and their resources
2. expectations were way too high (reason being the budget they had but I'd counter this by saying there are many many adult games funded on patreon that have good ratings here that have done far far less with significantly more)

:v another scam on kickstarter. It's really a surprise people keep falling for scam like this. The sex scenes aren't even "canon" :v it's like a bunch of vids and pics with no context or build up or anything, it's just there, this game is a worse version of something combining some free porn and X-com . For a game whose dev claimed that it's gonna change the erotic game scene, it clearly won't ever be doing that anytime soon.
It's simple, u gave them the money, they now have the money, they don't have reasons or motivation to make a proper game. There's a review on steam that compare this game to cyberpunk2077 which I think got the point. Both game promises too many things and didn't live up to the hype. That's what subverse is, "oversell and under deliver".

TL;DR: H scenes are short and lacking, the rest is wasted fluff. If you're playing Subverse for the sex, then it's not worth the price, nor the damn 30GB OF DISK SPACE.

The animations are well done and expressive. The story keeps me interested and isn't boring at all and voice-acting is well done enough so that I don't skip the dialogues, don't get me wrong... but the problem comes from the H scene and the gameplay aspects.

You can clearly see that the H scenes are, despite their quality, too short and feel incomplete. These are nothing but short looped animations with no interaction besides the occasional cum button and speed slider.

The tactical shooter breaks the pace with the story to me and is extra fluff to me, diluted effort that should have been used for the H scenes.

The dialogues between the characters are great and I enjoyed watching them speak: they felt like real humans to me, but the pisscumball deadpool humour ruins any chance of the story from being taken seriously.

You can feel that there is a lot of effort and skill put into the game, the problem is that all this effort is wasted on the shooter/RPG aspect of the game which is extra fluff... They have done it to the detriment of the real thing that should be top priority: Sex

I'm not here for the turn-based combat or that space shooter.

"Tired of crappy, low effort hentai games? Then enter the Subverse – an old school PC gaming experience developed from the ground up for the discerning adult by a team of filthy apex perverts. "

This is the first description of Subverse on both Steam and GoG. A bold promise from Studio FOW that if you pay them 30 bucks, they will give you a premium quality gaming experience interlaced with the hardcore smut you can expect from the team of degenerates who once made a movie about NieR: Automata's 2B getting sodomized by a giant robot dog with an industrial power drill for a dick. Well after playing the latest update at the time of writing this review (v0.4.0), I can testify to you all that Studio FOW has yet to deliver on their promise.

Subverse is not an enjoyable game. Hell, it’s not even a particularly enjoyable porn game. It's a haphazard Frankenstein of various mechanics that struggles to harmonize into a satisfying gameplay loop at every turn, hitched to a poorly executed campaign narrative that’s heavily reliant on juvenile cringe comedy and drawn-out exposition dumps. So allow me to offer a rebuttal to each of FOW's marketing points.


1.) "Throw down in either SHMUP-style space missions dripping with retro nostalgia or take the thinking man’s approach and duke it out on the ground with dynamic turn-based combat. Mastering both modes will lead to glorious booty so you can upgrade your ship and troops. "

While the SHMUP style space combat is serviceable, it's no Ikaruga, and quickly becomes monotonous thanks to both the lack of enemy variety combined with static asteroid environments copy and pasted across every side mission. As for the so-called dynamic turn-based combat? I've seen a lot of comparisons to X-COM, but this is more like the worst parts of the crusade battles in Pathfinder: WotR where the only worthwhile way to win is to blitz the enemy with ranged units and pray for the best. But since a majority of your mantic units are melee based, that isn't even a viable option. So expect to see a lot of party wipes unless you cheat with a trainer.


2.) "The Mary Celeste not only holds the record for fastest sub-light delivery of weed in the galaxy but she’s also your base of operations. Visit your various stations like Engineering, the Hangar and the Locker room to upgrade your forces, or relax in leisure spots like the Bar and your Quarters."

By virtue of still being in early access, many of your ship's features are inaccessible. But the features that are present feel tacked on and not fully thought out. Like how the locker room is just a glorified waifu stat checker which should honestly just be a tab in the pause menu for the sake of convenience. Or how the bar area is primarily a joint where you can increase a waifu's devotion level by showering her in gifts Dragon Age Origin style, which is pointless since you consistently gain way more devotion by grinding side missions. There's also a photo mode in the bar if you're into that sort of thing. But for me, the novelty wore out fast.


3.) "There are no good girls in Subverse. Well, not until you train them, anyway. These are the baddest babes in the galaxy complete with exceptional combat potential and drop-dead gorgeous looks. Earn their loyalty and get some other exceptional benefits in the process. Like sex. "

Here it is, Subverse’s biggest selling point, and they still screw this up by locking all of it behind an arbitrary grind wall. Unlike the BioWare-esque RPGs Studio FOW was inspired by where you romance companions by engaging in well-written dialogue while progressing their respective quest lines, you unlock H-scenes in Subverse by grinding “Pooter Points” to spend in a gallery viewer accessible in your cabin. But by virtue of being looped animations with very little interactivity, these H-scenes have no story context beyond the attached thumbnail description. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of these clips are indeed hot, especially if you’ve enjoyed the myriad of monster sex that is heavily featured in Studio FOW’s previous works. But the sheer number of hoops you have to jump through just to see DEMI go down on you for five seconds just isn’t worth it. Even more so when its not even tied to the story progression of the campaign.


Do yourself a favor. Show your memory space some mercy and don't bother downloading this game. And for the love of Slaanesh, DO NOT BUY IT EITHER! It's gonna take a No Man's Sky level overhaul to make Subverse worth your time, and with the way things have been progressing since its release, I wouldn't get my hopes up.

reviewing game, not thread. Being a Mass Effect and sci-fi fan in general, I wanted to like Subverse, but I can't. It's all shine and no substance. The story is poorly told, confusing, and full of unfunny, childish humor, and the gameplay is monotonous. It looks pretty good at first, but there's no depth or complexity to any of it. I like Demi and the JAV girl, the others are pretty boring, and the catgirl has chest hair. Why would they make a female character with chest hair? It's a pity, because the voice actors are decent going on good, and the game looks great. But it just feels empty. And most importantly, I tried jerking off over it but quickly lost interest, quit and just watched porn instead. Which is the most damning inditement of a game like this. It couldn't hold my interest on any level: gameplay, story, character progression, or sex. Sure glad I didn't pay for it.

I feel as though people are unjustly harsh on this game because of its kickstarter campaign.

Is it flawed? Yes. Can the writing be cringey at times? Absolutely. But you cannot deny that the clear amout of time and effort that has been put into this game render it leaps and bounds above anything else on here.

Honestly if this popped out of nowhere by an unknown team everyone would be going nuts at how good this is.

I personally love this. Sure some scenes aren't for me, but I love what theyre doing and fully support this sort of thing being a profitable avenue for the gaming industry, as should you. It's bombastic, fun and sexy. Whats not to like?

i gave this game about 1 hour, befor i alt+f4 out of it.

the fun thing was that it was not even the gameplay that made me Quit.
the narrative is so much in your face it is ridiculers. like a 80's porn movie that just cant get enough of it self. this game literally succeed to talk me out of playing it.

and sins the narrative is as bad as a 80 porn movie, you just end up skipping it. and after some time you ask yourself way you are just not on porn hub.

my advise is.
if you have a good connection, download it, and try it yourself. so you put this one in a early grave and never look back.

Trying to get the gold medal for the stealth mission was a better experience then the sex gifs...
The missed opportunities...We are half way through, but keep getting the same boring copy pasta. How many months of development takes just for three hours of gameplay...
Basically every mission is a repeat of the tutorial. Both the space and ground combat don't change from the start.
What is the point of playing? Getting 30 devotion for few lines of text that doesn't bring anything to the table.
I could unlock unlock Lily to level 30...Gold rank on every quest...Not enough to do for the other three...
The game is completely non interactive...We can't even upgrade the waifus. Remember the first Dawn of War? Just upgrading our commanders was insanely satisfying and addicting.
What is the point of gifts and dates? You need several thousand xp for a level up. How does a 45 or 60 one time gift make a difference. What is the point of 30 point gifts? I only keep them around for future installments...
The sex gifs...my god. I don't remember any of those...Just looking at them makes me sad. You wish you could dabble with them. Film a porno, change the choreography, lingerie...anything...All you can do is just watch and be bored to death...
Again the skyrim sexlab and sims wicked minds mod comes to mind. How interactive they are.
After several months of waiting the gallery update was a slap in the face. The poses are even completely unprofessional. Most of the them are standing up positions. Buy a professional photo album of go watch how real photo shooting looks like for fashion magazines. Where is the lingerie?!
Apparently there were supposed to be scenes with mantics fucking the girls arround the ship. With dialogs and everything. Triggered steam snowflakes ruined another game...

Subverse has nothing going on for itself...And time flies...