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

Player has no agency in game. Gameplay is just a filler to time gate porn content, as few as it is.

While not having investment in gameplay it is really annoying and repetitive, you cant fail or you will not progresses only drive to make you preform better is getting what exactly? PP?

Porn itself is just gloryfired gallery with disconected sceens that you buy for PP. Scenes itself are just video loops with slider just like flash loops, where flash loops require more effort to make than renders.

As for story, I would explore it more but boring gameplay prevents that.

In short it is linear VN with no playerr decision and non interactable short porn scenes.

I gotta give it 4 stars since the visuals and dialogs are polished! The plot is terrible, don't get me wrong: You're thrown right into battle action, no build-up while this game hopes to keep your attention span with witty dialogs, excellent voice acting and a few systems. Unfortunately, it doesn't hold up for long no matter how well some aspects are crafted. The problem is the plot, huge mistake to jump all over the place demanding too much player attention.
Imagine what they could have done if they carefully used their skills to cause emotional care in the right moments and thus true engagement. Humor alone doesn't justify walls of writing. And this is really all this game wants to be: A funny, erotically themed space adventure with diverse characters.

Although I can't say much about the game length, you can feel some money was poured in it. Does the money make you care for this game, though? Unlikely. But compared to the endless sea of shitty RPG maker & gobbo games that placed a prickle in my heart, this game leaves a little tear in my eye. It can be done, we're getting closer to what erotism could be.

This game is getting unfairly railroaded on here and it's a shame, because it's actually pretty enjoyable. It's not perfect, but there's fun to be had. I think the real problem is with the hype. People bought into the hype train, set they're expectations high and feel burned that it didn't live up to it.
There also seems to be some confusion that this is a full release and everything in the game is final. It is not. Even in its unfinished state though, it's still a hell of a lot better than most games on here. It's not the AAA quality it promises, but it's way better than the standard F grade games on here, probably at least a AA experience . And personally, I never expected it to change the face of porn games or be better or even on the level of the games it takes its inspiration from. It was never going to be as good as Mass Effect or X-Com. It was never going to have the best shmup combat. It was only ever going to be passable in those categories.
People talk like it's a big budget game and should be held to those standards. I'll give you two reasons why it absolutely shouldn't: budget and staff. This game had a budget of about $2 million, the average AAA game has a budget generally no less than $50 million and in many cases in the hundreds of millions. Big studios generally employ around 50-100 staff members, while a small studio like StudioFOW probably employs around 10-15 at most, though I’m not 100% sure how many people they personally employ. Video game development is incredibly costly, time consuming, and labor intensive. Some games can spend up to 15 years in development.
Also no one takes into account the relative inexperience of the team. This is their first game and they made animated shorts before this, which is actually a bigger leap than people seem to think. For a first attempt this is actually really good and shows a lot of passion and creativity.
And the amount of content? Pornographic content? It's by far the most I’ve seen in the first update of a game. It's mostly only loops and only the first scene with each girl has any context, but I’m fine with that. I actually think the no context sex kind of fits with the theme of the game. I’ve seen it called a regular game, but with a porn stash and that actually describes it pretty perfectly. I can see why this would make people a little upset, but I personally really dig it because it reminds me of Mafia 2. You play the game and as a result, you are rewarded with porn. And the story feels more natural because of it. Theres no awkwardly trying to work sex into a scene, no out of character spontanious group sex. It's nice.
And the quality of the porn? Superb actually. Some of the smoothest animation I’ve seen, in or out of porn games and I think their rather short length actually works to their benefit in that regard. And the fixed camera angles may sound like a curse, but to me it's what makes the scenes come alive. To me they feel a lot more curated, intimate, and lifelike than most free moving camera games I’ve played.
Lastly, the NTR complaint. You do NOT get cucked. Since almost none of the scenes have any context and the beings doing the “cucking” have no character or character development or even canonical sentience and in general no malice in the act, I’d call it distinctly not being cucked. Also the captain and the girls maintain a strong aversion to commitment of any kind throughout the story. Maybe it's still too NTR for some, but it's definitely not going to be NTR enough for people who are into that.
In conclusion, just lower your expectations, don't listen to the bullshit all the cynical, horny nerds are saying and give it a try for yourself and form your own opinion. It's free on here and if you happen to like it, pick it up on a steam sale and throw the boys over at FOW some support. They really did put a lot of love into this game.

Apologies for my english, in advance.
I would like to start with the fact that I did not expect much, but it turned out that the gameplay and technical aspects of the game turned out to be good, and brought a lot of positive emotions. It's fun to play. Even apart from its NSFW content, it, in turn, is technically well done in this version (I emphasize the 0.1 release version).
This is not a Steam review, is it? Therefore, at the moment the project is on fire, we are waiting for the continuation, of course.

TL;DR Has potential, but needs to stay in the oven for a little longer

To put it bluntly, my expectations of everything on here is tempered by knowing these are predominantly games to jerk off to. But if you're going to advertise this as a proper game first that also happens to have porn, then it's only fair that I judge this with the same standards as a normal game.

And that's where this falls short.

Gameplay
As a normal Shmup/tactics game, it feels clunky/lightweight. Despite shmups being a 40 year old game genre, this feels like it was made in a vacuum without any of the basic features that even the older games had. While every stage largely consisting of flying backwards in a large circle holding down the fire button is true for basically any game in the genre, the lack of enemy variety and weapon patterns means you can get away without having to think about dodging. There's also no change in your primary fire besides a percentage damage increase and a slight fire pattern spread. There's no temporary weapon pickups or support fighters and stage hazards are just a bunch of asteroids scattered around with no variety. There's plenty of potential to introduce things like space mines or static enemies to vary the stages, but the current game feels like you're just playing the same level over and over again with no increase in difficulty.

The tactics aspect isn't much better either. Since hits are guaranteed and there's no damage modifiers for flanking or cover, you're heavily incentivized to just bumrush the enemy. This would be less of a problem if you knew where the next wave of enemies would spawn, but they just warp in from nowhere, and often in the middle of your team as well, meaning the lack of a cover/defensive system means you just get destroyed with bad spawns. And for some reason everytime you restart the level, the terrain changes slightly, which I wouldn't otherwise have a problem with, but since they serve no purpose other than to restrict movement, why bother implementing it in the first place? Other minor gripes like having melee attacks that restrict movement on AI that just prioritizes the closest target just highlight an inexperience with making games like this. And the fact that each planet just uses the same level asset makes the whole thing feel cheap.

Story
For a game that places as much emphasis on the story as it does, it falls short by the standards of both professional Japanese and Western indie releases. Even if the character isn't some sort of self-insert, and the story is linear, there should still be choices for the player to make, either to unlock scenes or develop different relationships with characters. Go play Rance instead if you want a good plot and better rpg mechanics. The voice acting is nice and well-done by Western standards, but Japan's been doing it for years, so while I give it credit, it's to be expected when you have the money to pay for VA's when every other Western indie dev only has a fraction of the budget. As for the plot itself, it's not nukige levels of porn-convenient/lazy, but not exactly literary award levels of writing either. It's cookie cutter and serviceable, which isn't something I hold against it necessarily, but at this rate it just feels like a poor man's Mass Effect, and that says a lot given how that trilogy ended up. The humor is the really obvious self-aware "haha, you're playing a porn game" kind of style, which some people might enjoy, but a lot of them didn't really land for me.

Porn
Maybe the jokes would be funnier for someone who had just experienced post-nut clarity. I wouldn't know, because the porn itself is so detached from the plot that by the time I'm done I don't have an incentive to resume the story. I'm surprised that Studio FOW didn't just subcontract the gameplay to another studio so they could focus on what they were good at. And by a porn game's standards, the porn on offering is pretty poor. I guess since they thought that if they made the porn completely detached from the plot, it would justify them adding the kind of scenes that they were known for with the tentacles/monster shit without overtly compromising on the plot. But what we get instead is just a reason to wait for all the video rips to be uploaded instead of having to download a 17 gig file and sit through a few hours of tedium to unlock. I guess I expected more than a few relatively tame 3 second loops and a variable speed slider, given their previous work. Most of the enjoyment of the porn comes down to the settings anyway, otherwise why have a game at all if you could just charge us to download the videos and save all that time making the rest of the game. And since I'm griping anyway, there's something about the blur and post-processing making it look like everything's covered in radioactive Vaseline that just rubs me the wrong way.

Verdict
Unfortunately, Subverse falls short by both the standards of a standard game and as a porn game, at least in its current state. *If* most of the money went to the VA's, it makes you wonder where all that time went since there's not actually much here at all in the first place. I'd respect it more if there was an option at the start that just let you skip all the game parts and go straight to the porn. Without it, it just feels like they're trying to pad out the game with busywork like a stressed out university student under the word count. Honestly at this point you'd be better off reading a space fantasy book for 5 minutes, playing Ikaruga and XCOM for an hour and then just looking up porn on the internet.

Neither the game nor the porn is worth the 17 gig download, at least at this point. Maybe it'll get better in a year or so, I'm just glad I didn't spend money on it this early.

You know it's not a particularly good game when the 4-5 star reviews are short and say basically nothing while the 1-2 star reviews are the constructive ones.
People waited years and after the early access version got delayed once or twice all you get is some mediocre shoot-em-up gameplay and very short 2 second-loops for sex scenes, but then again it's not the first time Studio FOW ends up disappointing people...

Honestly, don't bother. For all the money and time they got to make this game with, it's just a huge disappointment. Constant delays and dumb excuses just to get some shitty gameplay and 2 second sex loops. Meh
It probably won't be much better even after it gets out of Early Access after a million years of "development".

17Gb for basically nothing? Nah, stay away. All the scenes are uploaded on other sites already anyway. Don't waste your internet bandwidth on this.

I really liked this game. Models and music are great! Dialogs are voiced and it is very helpful and refreshing for English adult game. Story was quite entertaining. Combat is a bit too hard but it is possible to beast this first act.

bruh this hella dogshit lmao
how this game got so much money for production is an actual crime, so many white knights defending this absolute crap of a game in this thread, renders are dogshit, looks pixelated
ppl called this the new pinnacle of adult games, get out of here, this game doesnt even waft a fart compared to BADIK or any other ACTUAL top game
1/10 dogshit story sucks, renders are ANCIENT
theres ZERO content, for 17gigs, took so long to come out, cost so much money, absolute robbery, gotta hand it to the devs, they got a nice payday for this cus they havent invested a single dime on making a good game.

Not sure what everyone is crying about, but for a first version release, this game far exceeds what most adult games on this site accomplish. The cutscenes clip (for me) and admittedly it was hard to care about the story, so I skipped a quarter of it, but again, this is the first release.


Even if the story wasn't for me, the dialogue was funny and every character had their own voice. Also, every character was voiced. Loved the voice acting.


As far as audio goes, the sound effects, music, and voice acting mix/mastering job was good, which is amazing when most adult games don't know how to at least keep gain levels around the same, so that there aren't dips or spikes on volume. I've mixed and mastered many projects and while the mix in this game didn't blow my mind, I'm telling you, it's far beyond what most adult games offer. The music and ambience was nice and fit well in the background. The different effects on voices for robotic characters and the perfect amount of reverb did not go unnoticed.

As far as menu and navigation, I did notice a lot of loading screens, but they were short lived and will likely improve in the future, along with some of the bugs I've run into. All in all, it's great to see a good menu with a ton of options. Not once did the game's navigation feel clunky; flying through space from planet to planet was simple and straight to the point. Love it.


Some people that make adult games forget to ask themselves about the game loop and play patterns. I can't count how many games I've played where the gameplay is me CTRL skipping through boring and unnecessarily lengthy text. Either that, or I'm clicking "kitchen", "room", or "other room" and finding repeated dialogue until I trigger an event. These aren't gameplay loops and they aren't fun. The ground and space combat was fun for me, though. Not overly complex and straight to the point coupled with fluid movement and animation is a big + for me.

I will say that the erotic scenes, in comparison to the clear effort in everything else, felt like an afterthought, but only for there being so little of it. The scenes themselves were hot and the animations... I don't have words for how hot the animations + sound effects + voice acting came together for great scenes.

While there aren't many erotic scenes, I'm excited to see more introduced. I will say, though, that I was hoping to find NTR in this game and didn't find any. The girls getting fucked by other creatures when MC doesn't even care isn't NTR. Still, I enjoyed the hell out of this game. The scenes were hot, the gameplay was fun, and while I didn't care much for the story, I liked the characters and found myself laughing from the funny dialogue.

I think people missed what this game is.. it's a game with pron elements.. It's meant to be an adult comedy with some seriousness sprinkled in places.. This game isn't a visual novel.. People who talk smack about steam reviews are full of shit.. People like what they like. If you don't like it, it doesn't mean it's bad. Imo the game looks good, needs some improvements, but that might come later on since it's still EARLY ACCESS..

Note this is a [Early Acess] Review and will be edited to the final.
This game is an Easter Egg game (means it is just filled with joke references).
This game has great visuals and nice voice acting, but the more you play the less you will get interested in it.
From the weird jumps in the story line that makes you wonder if they put the storyboard in a wood chipper or that they are doing this as an excuse to show nice pointless cut scenes.
The dialogue of consent sex jokes, 4th wall breaking, or Easter eggs just makes you think that the so called story is just to pad out the game time and makes anything 'serious' pointless.
Exaple: "I am using mind control powers to make you commit genocide... now show me your dick."
Or the actual game play missions is put on repeat over and over with no creative differences in anything, to where it gets really boring, fast.
I want to like this game, I admit it, but its hard to take this game serous when its obvious the development team isn't.
Quick edit: also its a porn game made by a well know porn making studio... with little porn in it right now...

WHAT A SCAM!
you got your answer.
The game has one of the shittier mechanics I ever saw.
It is supposed to be an adult game with over 1.6M$ capital but what it actually has is only 9 scenes of a few seconds that doesn't exceed 200Mb in total.
Not recommended to play for now until the full release of the game.

Original backer here. I knew what to expect with regards to the SHMUP and grid combat gameplay and honestly, those expectations were met. The gameplay is decent, the music is amazing and the dialogue can be quite witty and nerdy...but that's not really what everyone came (hah) here for, is it?

As far as the actual sex scenes are concerned, it's shocking how basic they are. The adult "portion" of the game is literally just a gallery of 5-10 second loops which are almost completely detached from the actual game and story. You can unlock them in whatever order you like, whenever you like, with no context attached to any of them. There are literally dozens of free flash games (and even RPG Maker games) from 10+ years ago that do a better job overall with the hentai, even if they don't feature fancy 3D graphics from the Unreal engine.

As a whole, I understand that Subverse is still in early access, but unless some relatively major changes are made to the existing structure and flow of the story/game, I don't see how the devs can salvage literally the most important aspect of their game. I sure hope I'll be proven wrong and be able to recommend this game in the future.

Low amount of content compared to the enormous download size. Only the first act is playable and the content that is present seems somewhat unpolished.

Space battles involve fighting wave after wave against enemies with a pitiful peashooter and special attacks that recharge too slowly. Player has a large hitbox which makes dodging bullets annoying, especially since most enemy attack patterns are effectively area denial because you can not pass between them. Common enemies have tiny hitboxes and seem to follow the player's movements so usual shoot 'em up tactics like strafe aiming works poorly. Bigger enemies are incredibly bullet spongy and take a long time to destroy without special attacks, even though they are easy to hit. The ship upgrades are boring percentage upgrades. There is no way to swap out the primary weapon and there are only two options for secondary (which must be pre-picked without knowledge of what kind of enemies you will face), with third one forced in certain missions only. Despite this, the space battles are not difficult, only annoying. Perhaps the devs should have assigned the space battle portion of the game to someone who actually plays and enjoys twin stick shooters and knows what makes them click.

Tactic game seems overall a bit more thought out than the shooter part of the game, but there are major problems with that mode as well. Biggest problem is that enemies will spawn in waves, randomly dropping anywhere in the map. This makes any kind of tactical unit placement pointless, the only point is to plan your movement and attacks so that you can take out maximum number of enemies before they can execute their turns. There seems to be some kind of system where different units or attacks are more effective against certain enemies, but there's no clear way of knowing what does what. Low amount of units in the game limit the gameplay options.

The story advances with prerendered cutscenes and fully voiced dialog and there is fairly large amount of both. It's actually quite jarring because often the game will advance from dialog sequence to cutscene to shooter game one after other without any chance to go to menu in between.

The sex scenes are not prerendered, but instead done with realtime graphics. But the level of interactivity is minimal and you can't even change the camera angle, so they might just as well have been prerendered. They contain no gameplay whatsoever and take no advantage of being done with in-game graphics.

Overall the game is grossly unfinished and unpolished. The dev team's ambitions can be seen, but at the current state the game is at risk of becoming just another porn game where shitty gameplay serves as a bad segway from a sex scene to next. All things considered, it's hardly even worth downloading at the current state, unless you're really interested in tracking the progress. But there's a glimmer of hope that some day when the full game is released, it will actually be decent.

It's a solid polished game with generic space opera plot, but bad fap material. The mechanics are primitive but they are well thought and polished. Specially the twinstick shooter space battles. Only complain is the difficulty which is overall easy. Dialogues and voice acting are woth mentioning too, some VO actors delievery is stellar. Now for the porn part... it's nothing special really. Around 25 animations from which 4 are multistaged and the rest are 2-3 second loops.

There you have it folks, it's a solid game but bad porn.
P.S. Overall level of polish is worth mentioning, it's rare nowadays to see a game in early access, specially an adult game with almost 0 bugs.

The Subverse game mate… such a disappointment more than Cyberpunk even, they made the same mistake that I see over and over again, they try to appeal to everyone but at the end for obvious reasons only the most fuck up crowd remain.

They advertise the game as “build your harem of waifus” yeah... this ain´t it chief.

And the animations are the same short gifs or loops present in all other games and not really that much better animated than what you can find in games of some talented developers, sometimes its even worse. Really disappointing for a game with more than a million dollars in investment.

The other aspects of the game are also so generic, basic combat and basic space shooter, in the end you will be better just watching the gifs animations in the Hub.

Tragic waste of resources and manpower. I'd give it 0 stars if I could because there are zero redeeming features here. I can see why Studio FOW wanted to try their hands at making a game, they want to get filthy rich, but evidently they don't have what it takes. They should stick to what they're good at, which is making sleazy animated movies.

1.6 million dollarydoos upfront and they put out what is unironically, constructively, truthfully, an unsalvagable mess.
Any rating above a two is sunk cost and cope.

Technical Failings
The game is 17 gigs and yet everything is liverendered. The total number of CGs in this game is 27(25 actually, they're already recycling) and if you go on rule34 all of them put together as .webms don't equal 200mb.
There is no costume system, no complex loop controls, no free camera to justify the "right" way of doing it; it just makes the game run like crap and be a bloated, animation error filled mess. Honey select, let alone a AAA Hgame this is fucking not. This is a barely newgrounds flash game at 1000x the size.
Everything in game is liverendered which is why it's both resource intensive, glitchy, and has a loadcell between every button click. Every background in this game could be a prerendered loop , every CG a string of .webms, and the game would run on your smart toaster. As it sits you need a moderately decent PC and GPU to play it on Low-med. Which is a better experience than ultra by simple fact they added seisure inducing motionblur to every scene. They aren't doing anything fancy with lighting either to justify liverendering; everything is corner lightsource, and their models texture maps have typical baked in shadows. Right off the bat the game needs to be totally rebuilt from the ground up in concept and architecture to make this the ~900mb mobilegame it actually is supposed to be on technical merit.

The sprites use freeware tier assetstore animations and there is no lip sync mocap
Kills it as a fully voiced game to watch them bumble through the same 3 poses and generic reactions and For Studio FOW being a purported animation studio it's just embarrassing.

Story (narrative)
>butchered
It's a one hour pirate hunt game intercut with expositional cutscenes clearly originally meant for dozens of chapters in the future. The demon girl and the bar is clearly meant to be the first, not second companion. It introduces a creepshot mechanic (not currently in game, wew) and use for the trash items you collect all game... at the literal end of the game. It also introduces something sorely lacking , motivation for anything to happen. Why game. The demongirl's race has tragic backstory.exe preloaded and colors you against the imperium. If only you weren't on paper already fighting them. Everything is out of order and a cludgejob.
The larger metaplot has nothing to do with this builds gameplay outside of cutscenes. They drop scenes from other galaxies spoiling the entire story and potential double crosses because they didn't have shit for a build longer than an hour or two without it.

SexScenes
Surely studio FOW nailed the one thing they're good at right? The whole game can be unplayable as long as they delivered tens of minutes of high quality animated sex scenes....
>They fucked it up
Demi doesn't even have nipples.
The loops unilaterally are very low quality. Short, choppy, and not complex. Only "premium" scenes have a speed slider and cum button, the latter not even working on the 3rd girl. No camera control, no zoom, no multiple angles, no multiple part or progressive scenes. And they have zero dialogue or framing due to the ridiculously poorly thought out pandora interface.

25 loops. I kid you not, there is less than Three Minutes of unique rigged animation in this 1.6 million dollar game, and thats being generous.. There are 3 girls with 9 scenes... but note I said 25. Demongirl is already an asset flip for two of her loops. One stolen from the scientist and one for the robot. They aren't sitting on some treasure trove of rigged animation for their models just around the corner, they're already running on empty.

Summary
Not worth the bandwidth, not even for free. Just watch the loops on Rule34 and you've gotten a better experience than the game they're from.
People will write thesis length dissertations about Subverse and hold it up there with Star Citizen as examples of the death of crowdfunding and runaway scope far outstripping skill no amount of money can be burned to fix. There are a myriad of less important major bugs and failings of game design that pale in comparison to nuking your story, progression, and putting out a generally bad product underneath the quality standard past work set for them.

Well... so much for a revolutionary porn game so far. To say I didn't really enjoy it would be correct, but let me explain you why.

Pros:
The game has excellent music and voice acting. That part really immerses you in the beginning so they are getting props to that! (even though it is kind of weird to see them talk and their lips not move, but that is just something that bothers me)

The gameplay is not amazing, it would probably work in their interest to reduce the number of waves, but it is decent enough!

The story is not that great, but it is workable. The humor will not be for everyone, but I liked it and I see what they are going for.

The cutscenes are great (not the porn ones mind you, as there are none)

Art style is nice as well.

Cons:

MAJOR lack of content so far. (which will be remedied with updates, I am aware it is early access but still. that is only if they listen to the criticism and learn from it)

No proper building up of characters! They all seem generic and uninteresting to the point that you don't really care about any of them. You can't really immerse yourself in the game if all the characters are mostly just whores thrown to the MC who is an asshole! Plus there are no dialogue choices so you can't really do anything yourself, it is so linear it hurts!

The porn scenes, that you would think would be bread and butter of such a game are horrible! Even compared to some free games on here that have almost no backing! 5 seconds animations that you unlock through points and are not even integrated in the story or mentioned?!? Not dialogue during them or before, or after them as well. I am BEYOND disappointed so far. The least they could have done is somehow implemented them into the story or added some dialogue, as the way it is so far reminds of poorly made flash games!

So all in all this is just an empty shell of a potentially good game, I am hoping they turn it around, but if it remains as is I will not pick it up again and I can't in good faith recommend this game. Neither to play for free, and especially not pay for it. I am still hoping they do something good, but this just reminds me of Cyberpunk, full of promises but unable to live up to even the lowest of standards...

Pros

• character design
• voice acting
• story
• humor
• visuals and feel of space battle gameplay
• MANTIC!

Cons

• PANDORA system is basically gallery of short (~5sec) looped animations, few scenes have speed animation sliders (animation varies with speed slightly), but other than that they are not interactive, which... is not much.