Unreal Engine - Completed - Subverse [v1.02] [Studio Fow]

The most important part of a porn game is well... the porn. StudioFOW made a name for themselves off movies and all they made after 2 years and 2 million dollars was less than 6 minutes of no dialogue loops. There are countless indie creators that do significantly more without demanding your money first.

Overhyped game, that known a lot much wieer than f 95. Poor gameplay, below average animations with wierd angles of camera. This game don`t deserve this attention, but this is great, that in future we can see games with sexual content, not only vn

Overally, the game is pretty okay.

But this is a porn game. And the porn part is problematic. I fully expected to get some natural transitions between story/gameplay and porn part. And that happens, three times, on "introduction" of the character into our group.

Apart from that, every scene is accessed through "PANDORA" system, which is to say the least, not very exciting. Scenes don't happen naturally, interactions with characters not in the story are also not natural.

Scenes are rather basic. There are two types of scenes, most of them are "basic", which are just simple loops. In the more advanced scenes you can also control speed of fucking, and decide to cum. That's it. Even though it's a 3d game, you can't even control camera. You have similar control as in flash games from 2010s, just with better graphics.

And this is the most disappoint part of the Subverse. If you've expected to play groundbreaking porn game, go play something else, from 2018 or even earlier.

But the technical side, apart from long and often loading screens the game is pretty good. The main problem is just, if the game "just" gets expanded with new scenes, it's not gonna stop being average.

===UPDATE AS OF 2021-04-03===

I was thinking about changing my review score to 2 stars from the current 3 stars; however, Subverse creators have addressed some of the issues in their latest post. I believe, that if that happens, or I'll see some improvements I will change the grade to 5 stars!

3.9/5 Stars
Gameplay: 6/10. Decent for what it is, basic turn-based combat/space shooter games. Not horrible.
Sexual Content: 5/10. The sexual content is decent, but very lacking. The world has a lot of lewd references and dialogue, but then the actual sex is relegated to an unlock gallery of scenes. Dissapointing, but I can say with more content it would be okay.
World/Overall Game: 7/10. Yeah the other two categories are a bit lacking, but the game is a 0.1 build, and theres obviously room a lot more content. As a cohesive game I think the game is quite successful, it just fails to deliver on either: Very good, engaging gameplay OR Very good, well done sexual content. Its a middling mix of them both, which is expected.

Definitely a game to watch, if it doesn't sit in development hell it could become quite good.

The Early Access release is only currently at around 10-15% of the planned content and even in its present state it's better than 99% of the content on this site. The low reviews here are pretty questionable in this context, but it is hard to judge everything on the same scale, when Subverse is clearly in another league (like the voice acting) and is competing with bigger titles. From a porn game perspective, the only major problem so far is the general disconnect between the porn scenes and the narrative. Only a couple of scenes were integrated into the story. Hopefully this will be improved.

There is too little content for something that took 2 years and 2 million to make. Don't get me wrong, what is already in the game has a LOT of polish for a NSFW game but its terribly limited.

The gameplay and porn does not mesh together at ALL. They might as well have released a game and then released all the porn loops on their website. It feels like they really wanted to make a game but couldnt decide on how to combine the gameplay and the porn, and what we have here is a messy grind to get gallery unlocks. In the current state of the game, that's basically it. Its a shooter + xcom game with a gallery with half decent porn loops.

The only saving graces in this game arethe voice acting, character models and character designs. The dialogue is awful, the porn is subpar, the game is subpar and repetitive, the story is better than average.

Verdict? Dont play the game for now, it might get better but for now just wait for someone to upload the loops on pornhub or something and jack off lol. The gameplay is not worth the porn.

If you know Paralogue, Paralogue basically has a stacked porn with no game. Subverse has a game with a mediocre porn. Lol. At least this is a step towards AAA porn games.

-Dialogue is ok.
-Voice acting is good.
-The flying gameplay is actually fun.
-The turn based combat is exactly what you'd expect and if it's not your thing your going to hate it just as much as i do.
-The sex scenes are great, really good job on the physics and animations. It lacks some basic functions found in similar games such as being able to change camera angles.

Overall: Well polished game, but it's just criminally boring.

Currently (v0.01) the gamehas stuttering issues in cutscenes which i expect will get fixed.

PROS
Visuals: The game looks great; the character models and graphics overall look pretty nice.
VA Performances: It seems a lot of effort was put into the voice acting; and it shows. Each character has their own distinct personalities which are all performed superbly.
Gameplay: While a bit difficult at first, at least for the turn based sections, I soon found myself having fun playing it. A sort of "come for the porn, stay for the gameplay" sort of thing.

CONS
Adult Content: Weirdly considering Studio FOW made this, this is the weakest part of the game. Not for the lack of it per se, there is a generous amount in the game, but for how it's implemented. Firstly; scenes are pre-rendered and as such, at a fixed angle; a cutscene more or less. Considering how good the rest of the game looks, it's baffling as to why they wouldn't just render these scenes in game with all the extra freedom and fidelity that would bring as they're clearly able to. Secondly; only a slice of these scenes are incorporated into the actual game, with the remaining majority only accessible/unlockable via the in game gallery, with these scenes being much shorter/simpler than ones encountered in game.
Writing: Cringly self aware does not begin to describe this game's writing. Despite the quality of the voice acting, it feels almost betrayed by the fact these characters will not waste any time reminding you that this IS a generic space game with sex and boobs and how funny that is. It's a shame, as Studio FOW put a lot of effort into crafting this world with it's own identity, where it succeeds, yet insists on poking fun at itself as being a by-the-numbers space game at every turn, so unrelenting that it very quickly becomes exhaustingly distracting.

In summary, I liked this game. It's not great, not terrible, and normally I'd say that, as an early access game, these issues could be rectified eventually. However, if we assume that what we have here is the foundation for what a more complete Subverse will be; Mass Effect with a sprinkle of porn, then that will become a big, big problem very quickly; as I assume that the vast majority of backers wanted it other way around.

TLDR: It's exactly what you'd expect from an early 2000s flash game with 1.6 million dumped into it.

So to be clear, I don't normally post anything here, but I'm going to de-lurk for this since I believe a lot of people were looking forward to this one and put a lot of money into it. Accordingly, it is a very high production value game, the animations are well done, as are the visuals. Money, however, cannot buy a good game, apparently and it shows. The gameplay is, for lack of a better way to put it boring, alternating between an entirely passable but in no way well-done space shooter, and a literal, mobile game tier asset flip of a tactical RPG (and no, being self-aware doesn't excuse it). Given the sheer amount of marketing that FOW put into describing this as an adult game with "good gameplay" rather than just porn, I expected something at least universally passable but I guess I expected too much.

Of course, since this is a porn game created by a fairly well-regarded adult animation studio, one would expect that the porn would at least be good, and while it is again very high production value, with well-animated models and well-blended animations, the actual content can be pretty much described as a very high-quality looping gif. Worse than that, however, it's uninspired, with most of the scenes being single, fairly mundane actions at best. They couldn't even be bothered to make the scenes story relevant for the most part, with scenes by in large just being unlocked via loyalty points, and while I appreciate the effort in at least making the scenes a reward for succeeding rather than the normal counter-intuitive approach of making them gained on loss as many games tend to do, making them almost literal gifs that are unlocked for gaining XP is a bit too far in the other direction.

I could keep going, but if Studio FOW couldn't be bothered to release their game in a complete state then I can't be either.

Gameplay wise its really fun both Space fights and ground fights actually fun to play.
Characters are funny there is plenty of jokes everywhere but for now girl body types are kinda similiar i hope it changes in future.
Game is actually have a story and its pretty exciting for now i'm excited about whats gonna happen.
Sex scenes are just 10 second loops and low at the moment.
Kinda short i was actually expecting more content.

I dont know what was people waiting for but for me its a pretty good game.

What a letdown. So much money in crowdfunding, plus the huge delay of the game and this is the result?`I realise that its early accses.. but still.

I mean sure the animations are nice and all, but not that spectacular, seems like people can do similar scenes in HS 2 studio with multiple POVs at that. Though the character design is pretty damn good. The best part for me is probably the music. Yeah.. the music.. in an "adult" game is the best part.

The issue with Subverse for me is that I want a porn game. This feels like they've focused way more on everything else, and left the actual porn as an afterthought. The scenes themselves and the way you unlock them are entirely underwhelming. There's less sex content in this entire game right now than a single one of FOW's old videos. Sure the game looks great, the presentation is fantastic, voice acting, cinematics, all of that. But I came here for the quality porn you'd expect from FOW and there's not much of it. I appreciate the team's ambition, and it is an impressive feat, but it's just not what I wanted or expected from this project.

Why would i bother writing a real review when a tourist does not need to write one to give it a 1 star? Everything about the game that's not the porn is excellent, 5 stars, no precedent in WEG. The porn is underwelming mostly because there is not nearly enough of it and the way it is presented in disjointed snippets of scenes that seam to have their previous and following snipets missing acording to the names. If they adress this and the game get's a lot more porn content in proper form it will easily be the best porn game released. If not it will be a 4 star game with 3 star porn. There, there's your 200 characters

Well,I really wanted to like this game and buy it to support them, but I feel kind of disappointed to be honest, there are a lot of things I feel like they are missing. If at least the loops had an interactive camera I would buy it, but it is just a gif.

Pretty good graphics as expected from StudioFOW, especially the ones build upon Western stories/games are lovely. But most around Asian games like their biggest movie project Kunoichi is just one big clusterfuck that misses a good movie editor or something...

Subverse is suffering from the same problem. The story is jumping and it feels extremely drawn out or to slowdown in places where it shouldn't. Like a animation of a empty building for like 5 minutes or a poor clunky action animation with a long focus of the girl just staring into the distance between a bunch of enemies.

Hopefully they make a Snyder cut or something of this game

This game has a lot of potential but at the moment it's incredibly lacking. The animations and voice acting are great and get a 4/5. The porn though, 2/5. Basically at the moment there's no much of it at all. Right now the game is 4-5 hours of mind numbing gameplay for like 2 mins worth of porn.

Considering this is studio FOW, i must say this game was quite bad. The artworks and voice acting are amazing as always, but everything else feels a bit lacking. No story leading to the sex scene, just a few second long loops you can unlock with points. Maybe i have my expectation too high because FOW was amazing with their movies before. Will try again after a few more updates.

Expected more

This game falls victim to its own hype and the expectations people had of it since it's been in development for so long.

1. Too much grind very little reward for your efforts.

2. World building is mediocre.

3. The adult scenes are played in a gallery mode and they are about 10 seconds of looped animation of which it's mostly just teasing and idle animations rather than actual sex .

Gameplay: Clunky
Sex scenes: pointless / detached
Protagonist: annoying
Story: I came up with better stuff when I was 8

I'm from germany, so torrenting was the only option for me to get this game and BOI am I glad that I didn't buy it, that saved me the effort of filing a refund request just 5 minutes into the game...

Wow... the amount of "hate" and "disappointment this game has already garnered in the last 48 hours is absolutely baffling, seriously, if you just wanted to watch porn and jerk off there are plenty of other options available for you out there, namely one of the many porn sites *wink wink*

You might have to work for it and yeah at the beginning you might be thinking "Wtf, i thought i could handle my d*ck in one hand while going through the game and just c*m constantly" Yeah.... no, this game has alot of content that isnt just w*nk off material created for the people that have supported it, there are plenty of jokes to go around, plenty of customization and PLENTY of choices of which kind of scenes you want to get your jollies off to and plenty of ACTUAL GAMEPLAY that is mostly missing from most of the other VN type of games, if you can even categorize this as such.

The reason for most of the low rated reviews seem to be because their computers can't handle the Unreal engine, well tough fucking luck, the developers wanted to create something that you could just not get your jollies off to but something that you could enjoy while playing and have fun with, its absolutely disgusting to read some of the reviews on this site critizing this game because they themselves can't run it.

After 6 hours, i can say its worth it to buy on steam on whatever other platform you wish, sure the jokes can be sort of hit-and-miss and there other issues such as not being able to do missions again at times but for the amount of content that has been released currently it is definately worth it.