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

Although the story likes to play with cliches and tropes. I still found it interesting enough to follow to not skip the dialogue. Sometimes exposition gets a bit long, but compared with most RPGs or visual novels, it really is manageable. And if you only care about the parts one can jerk to, dialogue is skippable.

Gameplay-wise Subverse mixes turn-based combat with space invaders and a bit of the galaxy exploration from Mass Effect. Not as exciting as FPS elements perhaps, but certainly more engaging than most mini-games found in comparable titles.

Visually the game is appealing, graphics are pretty good for a game that centers around porn. The animations are detailed and smooth and easily rival those of Fallen Doll: Operation Lovecraft for instance. The actual porn segments are a bit more tame than OP Lovecraft, but still far from boring or lacking inspiration. The only thing that I would criticize in that regards is a lack of anal scenes - though I am sure that they will show up plenty enough further down the line.

Considering that the game is available on Steam as early access and that so far quite a few people have purchased it, I do have quite high hopes that this game will get finished. Judging from what is available so far, I expect the finished version would be quite a milestone in 3D porn-games and perhaps would help to get them a bit more mainstream.

I've downloaded the game here to be able to check it out before committing to a 25$ purchase, but from what I have seen so far I am certainly willing to pay the developers for their work.

Now I played farther and the only thing I can do is to recite my old account:
(Sry for that)
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.

It's a good early access, they fixed most of the bugs with the recent update so i don't really have a problem with it gameplay wise anymore, it's a fun, short game, i really had fun playing the space and ground battles though there's a lack of incentive to keep playing but then again, that's what early access is for. to make sure the game runs well and showcasing it's potential later on to draw in people.

Just kinda wish they integrate the porn part with the rest of the game, the game does have a lack of porn content for now but then again, it's still on early access

The space combat is ok, there are other games for cheaper that do it better.
The ground combat is bad, there are other games that do it much better.
The general quality of the sex scenes is ok, they are only short loops and many without a "happy ending".
The way you unlock most of the scenes is very bad, which is basically a gallery.
They story is ok-ish, gets boring if you have to deal with it for the entire game.
The women are not really "waifus" you dont have a romantic relationship with any of them.
Studio Fow should stick to making movies.

For a game in development for what like 2 years and a budget of 2 million dollars its a bit disappointing, not bad but not good ether. a lot of useless monologing as well

I hope there will be more content soon so far there is around 4-6 hours of content i think

So there are definitely good things about this game:

+Amazing voice acting.
+Great model and texture work.*
+ Backgrounds and areas of the ship look highly detailed.
+ Characters that are written with, well their own character.
+ Ground missions with simplified XCOM-style combat, no miss chance.
+ SHMUP space combat challenging enough to be enjoyable.
+ Animation for the sex scenes is very smooth.
+ Transitioning the speed of the "Premium" ^ scenes works really well. This is at a very high level and works with the sounds as well so worth mentioning separately.


* In terms of achieving the look they were going for. That's not always a good thing though.
^ Despite being called "Premium" they are unlocked with the same in-game points earned from combat as everything else, which is a plus.

There are a few minor issues:
- Space combat a little too simple.
- Ground combat missing important elements like cover or enemies spawning at a distance/out of LoS.
- Talking to a character who is stood in an area of the ship you're in means going through a loading screen. Why?
- Main character an idiot who gets bossed around by women.
- Main character is just unfunny Australian Deadpool with no powers.

Major, unforgivable flaws:
--- Half the female characters so far have fucking octopus tentacles instead of hair, textured to look as slimy as possible. Who thought this would ever be anything other than nauseating?
--- Half the female characters are insane violent ultra-psychopaths, including a couple of the squidheads.
--- There's one female character who canonically spends her spare time fucking mindless alien genetically-engineered combat beasts.
--- The only female not a total bitch (or spending her time fucking dog-monsters and tentacles) is made of plastic, so fucking her is about as exciting as putting your dick in Lego.
--- The Pandora system means there is no romance or affection system, just unlockable sex scenes.
--- This is the only porn game I've ever played where I've looked at over half the sex scene previews and been glad they weren't unlocked. Seriously. There's way too much tentacle/bestiality crap there.

Why not just play for the adequate if simple ground and space combat, and ignore the sex scenes? Well you'll be constantly interrupted by cutscenes that continually remind you that the character designer had such a broken soul that they cannot where the line is between sexy and nightmarish.

The devs have no idea whatsoever how to make a female character attractive, but don't worry, that's not the only problem. One of the male characters you pick up to join your crew looks horrifically malproportioned even in normal conversation and also spends the whole time with his dick out, and you can find him masturbating in a locker. With dialog and ship/station designs full of messy innuendo, this game' overall atmosphere is like licking a truckstop floor.

tl;dr: Free is too expensive. Don't sacrifice your remaining sanity.

While I respect their initiative to try something different, right now it's one of those games that tries to do too many things and ends up doing none of them well. For the ground combat, most of the difficulty comes from a wave spawning in a spot you werent ready for.

In the space combat there is a ton of downtime resulting in long periods of waiting for shit to appear. The only real threat is from the smaller enemies that approach while shooting and suicide on contact. The bigger enemies are easy to dodge and just take forever to die. Mindless tanky enemies.

The porn is ok, pandora could be interesting if they polish it more. It looks like it's supposed to be a "create your own scene" mechanic where you can unlock different parts, load them into pandora, and progress through them all. Gold scenes completely return you to the scene hub though which makes me question the relevance of the "after" poses.

Im not gonna knock it too hard for being horribly unoptimized since it's early access. My PC has a Ryzen 3700X and M.2 NVMe SSD, a 2070Super, and 32GB of 3600mhz RAM. This game currently has longer load screen's than I ever got playing Cyberpunk, and there's a lot of them. Transition from the Bridge to the Laboratory? Load screen. Talk to the science girl(her name escapes me) in the lab? Load screen. Stop talking to her? Load screen.

As far as exploration, it's a bit annoying that the game can't retain your last location like Mass Effect 2, which they are very clearly trying to emulate in this portion of the game. Back then you'd go to a cluster, and you could back out in the Normandy and the game would still know where you are when you go back to the map. In this game if you go back into the Mary Celeste to do something like buy an upgrade, and then back to the map, you have to pick the cluster, then the system, then go to the planet you want. IT sounds trivial, but it's two screen's and some time spent in a game that already has as many load screens as Sonic 06.

I went into it without expectations and I was thrilled! I loved the concept, it felt like playing a good porn parody of a mass effect game.
The characters are greatly designed and they show a lot of potential.
The hate that this game gets is so stupid! It's due to nothing but unrealistic expectations. Subverse is the best porn game ever !It has the best gameplay, animations and voice acting!

Pros:

* Absolutely excellent texture and animation quality.
* Voice acting is a 10/10, absolutely excellent.
* The speed adjustments during the key sex scenes are pretty good, generally changing the voice acting, which properly responds to the animation changes (for example as you go faster humping the girls, they breathe heavier and will start moaning much more aggressively).
* Love Demi and Lily's cleavage in all the dialogue scenes, the various animations and differences in appearance and facial / expression changes is really well done. If they could add some lip movement to sync with the audio that would be a good improvement as well.
* Excellent music selections throughout.
* The girls are very well-designed in terms of their appearances, just excellent rendering, sexy as fuck.
* The Boss Battle with Huntress was really well-done - excellent music selection for the battle, and the fight itself was very enjoyable, it felt like a dance amongst the stars.
* So far I have really enjoyed the narrative - I have seen some folks complain about there being too much dialogue, but I enjoy it as so far the story is sensible and easy to follow, and I find myself engaging with it and caring about what happens to the characters in it, so keep it coming.
* v0.6 Update - I will say the recruitment sex scene with Fortune is a lot more in the direction of what I want out of the game - more affectionate, romantic sex between the Captain (who I look at as my character in the game, and I get the feeling many other players do as well) and the girl(s).

Cons:

* (This one is a dealbreaker) - The narrative story has canonized xeno content with Lily (and even Ela now mentions the monster cocks looking appealing in some dialogue) meaning the xeno content isn't truly optional. You don't have to watch it, but it is acknowledged as happening in the story whether the player wants that type of fringe content in their game or not. The Codex in the game acknowledges this as well - this is a major negative in my book and will affect the review score significantly. While this doesn't qualify as NTR in my book, I know some folks will consider it such so be advised so you know what you're getting into. As long as this kind of content is canonized in the game, I don't think I'll ever get my wallet out for it as this stuff should have been optional and I feel like if I were to buy this, it would be sending a message to the developer that I want more of this type of thing, which I do not.
* Not a huge fan of how they make the Captain out to be a bit of a loser - he acts kinda weak and feminine at times early in the game, not to mention like a moron - seems to know very little about the technicalities of his own ship - UPDATE - now that we're into v0.6 and over halfway through the game, there has been even more of this stuff where the Captain is incompetent and has to be saved by the women in certain situations - just pathetic. For a developer that would generally be more anti-woke, this feels like a 'woke' narrative angle here full of feminist nonsense.
* No Captain on the Grid combat missions - would make more sense to have him on those missions being a bad ass and earning his girls' affections, and I'd even add the grid missions are not very enjoyable at all - very tedious and boring.
* The sex scenes, which aren't even really scenes, they are just clips of looping GIFs... are way too short - even the premium scenes only include one camera angle and speed adjustment to progress it and the smaller scenes are literally just very brief animations - the shorter scenes are only like ~3 second looping GIFs and the bigger scenes might be ~10 second looping GIFs. Very disappointing.
* Building on the above point, outside of the Recruitment scenes, the sex scenes just kind of happen when you choose them to - they don't flow with the narrative at all which is very disappointing, making them feel very disconnected from the story. This sex system that you use to manage the scenes is called Pandora - you access it from the Captain's Quarters and it's pretty terrible to this point. You should be able to unlock certain things and then have them happen more naturally via a ship-interaction with a better lead up and lead out to the scene(s), and then have them be re-accessible via dialogue with the girl.
* So far there is very little romance or relationships in the game making the girls not really waifus...this is a game with basically just open / casual relationships and very little emotional attachment involved between the characters, which really isn't my type of thing when it comes to sex stuff, I enjoy relationship development in more than just the physical realm. I think this game would have been a lot better had it followed a more traditional Visual Novel type of story-telling system where the player makes legit choices in the game that affects relationships and how the romance options feel toward your character as well as affecting other characters in the game as well (jealousy, maybe cutting off some options based on your choices, etc. which would give good replay value as well), and in this game (at least so far) it's basically just a bunch of girls with absolutely zero inhibitions having sex with everything that moves. And no offense intended toward folks who are looking for that, but it's just not for me. The game and narrative to this point is simply devoid of much in the way of romance / eroticism.
* The date system in the bar - all you do is give the girls gifts, there isn't really a date that occurs. Definitely one of the biggest disappointments with this game is how it seems so impersonal between the Captain and the girls. And this sort of piggybacks on top of the previous bullet - without any romance or emotional involvement given the nature of the open relationship nature between the characters in the game, the date system just makes no narrative sense.
* The biggest problem with this game is that Studio FOW simply tried to do too much with it. You can't have canonized xeno content in the game where it's being discussed via dialogue and in the codex and then also try to appeal to normies by saying it's optional when it clearly isn't. There is just a lot of contradiction in the game systems with regard to this. Studio FOW should have picked their audience and then made the game for that audience, not tried to do a little bit of everything for everyone as it just doesn't work - the tastes are too different, here, without a proper option system to tweak dialogue and codex entries depending on choices made by the player, and all you end up doing is pissing people off.
* The tone of the narrative is more on the comedic side with 4th-wall breaking dialogues at times that are pretty cringey. Game would have been far better if it had had a more serious tone to the writing.

Game Length: 10-20 hours if you take the time to do all the individual star system combat encounters, etc.

Current Rating based on v0.6 release: 3/10 - Not recommended - due to certain designs of the game that I noted in the Cons section the game really isn't worthy of a purchase at this point in time. I'd still be open to buying the game down the road if specific changes were made - the canonized xeno content would have to be fully moved behind an option system which would need to include tweaks to the codex entries and dialogue system to fully decanonize it and I strongly doubt that the developer would ever make these changes, so this will likely just remain a game that I do not ever purchase. Would have paid AAA pricing for this game if it hadn't tried to force this content down the player's throat, but oh well.

Furthermore if the Developer ever reads reviews here and happens upon mine, I would make this pledge to you in good faith - you implement the changes I've requested here , and I'll buy a copy of the game for myself as well as a copy for someone else on Steam.

I like it. Subverse is a good game, with actual good combat mechanics. Both Space and Ground Combat feel good.
The girls got nice personalities, the ones you can't date yet look promising too.
Definitely a big story, this gonna be a big one, I'm fully on board.

2 million dollars
2 years of development
Early access 0.1

Even pirating this scam is a waste of time.
The people who defend it are equally impressive, just as the riveting steam reviews that range from "BOOBA" to "ARE YA WINNING SON?!" truly a new break in the videogame porn industry.

I really like and endorse the depth of the game, as it is separated in different mini-games itself: There is the space combat: Realtime, WASD, isometric space shooter action; and there is round-based, grid based combat and there is the story progression. Each of its own could have been released as a standalone game- Impressive!
The dialoges are COMPLETELY synched by professional speakers, the render quality is superb AND quite generous with hardware requirements. Each character has a "soul", his own motivations and background- amazing.

Coming to the "Cons" of the game:
The actual lewd section is...bad. While the animations are all perfectly fluid and have an enjoyable camera angle, the content of these scenes is rather irritating: 3/4 of the (unlockable) sceens are dealing with bestiality - a subject that has ALWAYS stuck with Studio Fow, disappointingly.
If you just skipped that, the "Pandora mode" is just very empty and boring.

And because I'm here to fap and have fun, I was just able to enjoy the gameplay content alone.

Mission failed, even though it had good graphics.

Based on the (as yet) unfinished early access v0.1.

Ostensibly this review will be relatively similar to all my other reviews on f95. However, I feel it is worth noting that I actually will be holding Subverse to a MUCH higher standard. Not only is this a fully-fledged actual proper game in its own right (and not just some RenPy/Honey Select renders strung together with text) but it had a budget which probably blows everything else on here out of the water. So always remember that.

Also let me briefly say I am biased in this review in that I actually funded this game on Kickstarter and so I genuinely and seriously hope it does well. Even if only as proof that a porn game can achieve these heights.


Pros

• Early access - let’s get one thing quickly out of the way. I’ve seen a few reviews on here and Reddit complaining about the lack of content. This is ONLY v0.1 More is coming. Let’s at least be fair about that.
• Visuals – Easily the best visuals I’ve ever seen in any porn game. Bar none. Unsurprising really, given that they had the budget for it. Instead of one person spending ages bashing out renders in RenPy they actually have full Unity sexy stuff and the girls and aesthetic is all amazing. Again, it’s not really fair to compare Subverse with the other stuff on here due to the difference in budget, but at the same time, it would a HUGE black mark if it didn’t look great.
• Fully voiced – Doesn’t need much more to be said about it. Nothing like fully voiced dialogue to really draw you in and make the waifus come to life.

Mehs

• Gameplay – There are 2 forms of gameplay. A spaceship SHMUP (think a modern-day Asteroids) and a grid-based turn-based strategy game. Both are, frankly, fine. They tick all the boxes of being functional, visually clear, easy to understand and play, etc etc. They also are unimaginative and have absolutely zero depth. If this were a gameplay-focused game, it would be considered to be absolute shit, but because both of these aspects are there to compliment the porn, it gets a bit of a pass. I SINCERELY hope they improve though, because at present you have to play them both a LOT to earn points with the waifus. And while “fine” is acceptable in the background, when you have to play it a lot, it becomes extremely boring.
• Humour – The humour and tone of this game is extremely reminiscent of the Deadpool films (including 4th wall breaks). If you liked that, you’ll love this. For me it was VEEERY hit and miss. Sometimes I chuckled, sometimes absolutely nothing, but I appreciate the light and fun tone at least. It doesn’t take itself seriously (as it shouldn’t).
• UI – The UI during dialogue is a bit… Weird… I was expecting/hoping a dialogue system reminiscent of Mass Effect but instead it’s actually more like a visual novel. An overcomplicated visual novel too. There does not need to be that many buttons on the UI.

Cons

• Pandora system – ALL of the porn in the game is separated from the rest of it in the “Pandora system”. In that system you access it through your cabin in the spaceship and then you get to see scenes with your waifus. The scenes are unlocked with points from the mini-games and you can select a few of them to watch one after the other. However, the absolute vast majority of them are nothing more than looping 5 second gifs. There’s some moaning in them, but no dialogue or dirty talking. There’s also only occasionally a TINY amount of interaction where there is a speed of fucking slider and a “cum” button. And that’s your lot. It absolutely fucking sucks.
• Choices – There are none. At all. The dialogue so far is like a visual novel, but it’s also like the absolute worst visual novels because you have literally 0 interaction and influence over events. I know it’s not even remotely got the same level of funding as a Bioware game, so a branching plot is perhaps too much to hope for, but SURELY they ought to be able to do dialogue trees. I mean, if fucking DrPinkCake can do it, why not a company funded to the tune of £1.6 million? The same is true during the sexy stuff (as mentioned) where you only choose what to see and then have no choice over what actually happens within the sex.
• No kink tags – If this were a normal game company making their first porn game, I could forgive this, but it isn’t and I can’t. EVERYONE on f95 knows: “if you can, you give people the option to include/exclude kinks” especially the very controversial ones like bestiality/NTR/tentacles. Well, Subverse doesn’t give you that option. It makes it very, very clear that some of your waifus are off getting fucking pounded by demon monsters when you’re not fucking them. And for me, that just ruins the immersion. I don’t want that in my harems and they need to fucking add some sort of tag system.

I think Subverse currently has committed 2 extremely egregious sins, which both are more less extensions of the same thing: it has totally separated the porn from the rest of the game and there are no story or even dialogue choices. Both of these are part of the same problem: there is NO interaction in the game.

Honestly, I feel like someone needs to sit FOW Interactive down and explain to them exactly what they are making and why it has the potential to be so good.

Why are porn games better than porn? Because we can self-insert more. We get to actually interact with the girls on the receiving end of our depravity. We actually get to imagine what it would be like to have a harem of alien waifus (as opposed to just watching it or reading about it). Games provide a level of interactivity that you don’t get with video or books and that means the potential for immersion is so much higher.

And I SHOULD NOT need to explain that.

And yet, the actual level of interaction is so godawful and non-existent. If it were any other game and it were a VN I’d downloaded from here, I would have rated it a 1 and told you to not bother with it as a waste of both your time and money.

Add to this the myriad of other issues: the fact that the mini-games are both kinda boring, but you have to grind them to unlock Pandora scenes is just a total chore. The fact that there’s literally no dialogue or sexy talk during the sexy scenes is absolutely mind-blowing. And the fact that the porn is totally separated from the actual game, as if you are literally alt-tabbing between a strategy game and PornHub, is just one of the outright biggest blunders I’ve ever imagined.

I will say this right now: in its current state, DO NOT BUY Subverse. I won’t advocate playing it for free, but right now it’s not worth the money paying for it. Not even close.

However, I genuinely hope things improve. It’s only early access and the devs seem to have very close relations with their fans and take a lot of the criticism on board. The most recent development blog post addresses a lot of things I’ve mentioned, so hopefully things will improve on that score.

Unfortunately, for those of us who were hoping for Mass Effect But With Lots of Tits, I do have my doubts about it’s ability to redeem itself and we might be waiting a good while longer.

Game looks great but it has very few content I was expecting much more, considering the devs got over 1M in donations from patreon and they had over 2 years to work on it... maybe it will change and the devs will add more stuff, but right now its not worthy, super disappointed

This game is awesome and its crucial step for nextgen adult games.
Not only the adult content is great, I also love the turn based combat, which is fun and fast and easy to control, also the space fights brink nice arcade nostalgia and space.
Bought the Steam version, as everyone should....

So, at this stage, so far "good", but no more. For the sound, music tracks - excellent! Everything else, well, I would like to "a little better" The main character is spelled out as, just a stupid nerd schoolboy, who is given because he is one "such a captain-hero", the rest is complete crap (except for sex scenes and piu piu in space , it's fun)
As a result, 7/10, but since there is still little content.

OK this "average" rate is subject to change, but for now 0.1 is average bordering poor, why?

1. sex scenes are just a loop lacking any of the characteristics of a studio FOW video. they said this will be different with the development of the ingame mechanic "PANDORA" later down the line, but right now its just bad.
2. Gameplay; its not bad its just mediocre, it may be because 0.1 is the early game, but it feels bad, the "danmaku" fights are really easy and the turn based grid combat just feels barebones, it has what it needs to be called a turn grid combat, nothing more.
3. Voice acting and characters; this is the only point holding the game together, amazing voice actors, nicely written characters, hell its on par with jap developers in this aspect, it has some really "cringie" parts but the game knows it and uses it in the joke, its a very good surprise to find this quality, it may have failed to impress with the sexscenes but the dialog will keep you into the game if you are into this kind of humor.

Overall it has potential, the sex was a disappointment in 0.1 but dialogs were a pleasant surprise...

It was like being with a shitty but interesting prostitute; the sex was shitty, disgusting even, but the after sex, the talk was what made you pay and call her again...

Test based on v0.1:

So far, so good. I always hate when the game won't let me save, but the gameplay and overall presentation are pretty damn good. This is a game that is actually fun to play.

I agree with the other critics, that the xxx-scenes appear to be mostly disconnected from the game. However, I'd like to remind everyone that this *is* a first demo, the way I understand it. Also, since the game is fun to play, I don't mind waiting for the adult content.

I do have some complaints, though. While I do understand that the writing in a porn game doesn't have to be Shakespearean and while my pain threshold is relatively high for juvenile humor and 4th wall breaking, it kind of undermines character building if a majority of characters talk the same way.

Also, there are some bad effects (the one with the glowing green eyes, where the ex-empress hypnotizes her general is just ... terrible) and the female faces all look kind of same-y.

As of v0.1

Gameplay - 1/5
The "bullet hell" style space combat is actually pretty fun, but the same can't be said for the grid-based combat. It's really fuckin' boring and slow-paced. Hopefully the devs can add a "fast mode" to alleviate the shite pacing of the grid-based combat because if you're expecting XCOM w/ hot girls, you will be thoroughly disappointed.

Scenes - 2/5
If you're a REAL studiofow fan (a.k.a. a degenerate who likes seeing hot bitches getting fucked by fug ugly monsters), then you'll probably be disappointed with the current amount of monster scenes. Afaik, these are the only notable scenes involving aliens: one tentacle scene with the Lily the sniper (w/ cumshot), 1 mantic scene with Demi the robot (w/o any cumshot), and 1 alien doggystyle scene with the red-skinned devilgirl (w/ cumshot). It's irritating tbh because even the vanilla scenes are pretty lackluster since most of them are just animation loops w/o any real happy ending/creampie/cumshot (rn, only 3 vanilla scenes have a happy ending)

Story - 0/5
They spent waaaayyyy too much time making "cool-looking," cyberpunk-esque cutscenes that nobody fucking cares about. I would've appreciated it if the fucking cutscenes actually had sex in them (say, for instance, the blythe antagonist cowgirling and fucking the shit out of her enemies after beating them up). Nobody gives a shit about shiny visuals if it's only there to tell a cookie-cutter, generic, sci-fi story that's trying waaayyyy too hard to mimic the wacky, over-the-top vibe of Borderlands. That just ain't it chief. Tell your cutscene animators to make something that'll ACTUALLY interest us coomers.

RECOMMENDATION:
get a full save from the thread, go to the "captain's quarters" then click the bed to "enter pandora," which is basically the game's gallery

TL;DR: shite gameplay, boring story, shite cutscenes, get a full save to watch half-decent loops and anims.

Update as of v. 0.3.0
Even after all this time, the game really hasn't changed at all. The sex is STILL NOT incorporated/integrated into the gameplay (thus, there's very little context to most of the scenes other than "oh, i feel like fucking right now"), but there IS one cinematic cutscene with the new character involving sex, so that's good I guess? They still have a long way to go, however, and for 23 gb, the porn side really isn't worth it. You might as well watch all of the scenes (including the newly added ones) on xvideos/spankbang, or download something with higher quality porn (e.g., WildLife, Paralogue, AQE, Honey Select, Illusion games), or way more story (e.g., any good VN from this site). Otherwise, if you enjoy crappy grid combat, repetitive jokes, forgettable characters, and crappy allusions to zoomer culture and funny maymays, then go ahead and waste your time, I guess.

the game is completely disconnected from the scenes that, for the most part, are pretty good. There are only two scenes that you get from ingame events/progression, the rest of them are totally unrelated and you have to spend points to unlock them in a gallery. I fucking hate that system, there is no context whatsoever and the gameplay feels hollow for an adult game because you know you're not getting any action on defeat, mission success, etc etc