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

To say this game was disappointing would be a vast understatement. Studio FOW are pretty legendary in the adult CG short film world and have incredible amounts of experience creating and editing high quality erotic CG video. Somehow though that translated terribly into making a game. This was the very first and only game I personally ever requested a refund for on Steam.
The main problem is that the erotic scenes have nothing at all to do with the plot of the game or dialogue with the characters. Instead they are added in like an arcade game gallery of unlockable extras. There is no narrative to your sexual exploits with the characters you meet. Instead you simply pay a certain amount of points and watch a quick animation in a gallery of some action. This isn't to say these animations are not of the highest quality, which they are, only making this mistake that much more dissatisfying.
The term "make it make sense" comes to mind. Why are you suddenly watching a clip of a crewmate getting "attacked" by a tentacle monster? Why are you watching a clip of the ship's robot getting plowed by an alien? There is no reason or story to it to give any meaning.
Meanwhile the graphics are beautiful, the voice acting well done and the base game itself ambitiously put together. It means nothing though if the creators miss the point. We don't want a video game with a random adult gallery tacked on. We want a narrative and story with characters in adult scenes that have purpose in the plot, otherwise you're better off watching random clips on any adult megasite. This game totally missed the mark.

Subverse is a twin-stick bullethell/ grid based XCOM clone/ H-game developed by Studio FOW who have made such illustrious titles as "Bioshag: Trinity" and "2B: Final ASSembly" and you kids know the rule : "If it has 2B in it, its erotica." and Studio FOW does not disappoint. The main gameplay loop of Subversively distracted us from the fact that FOW have not made another movie for so long is that you complete missions and explore new places to unlock new Waifus and PP (Yes that is the game's official ingame currency). While Doom Eternal is a pie eating contest where the reward is more pie, Subverse is a bland sandwich eating contest where the reward is the most exorbitant and delicious cake you can think of. Or atleast that was the intention. As of writing this ( Where Subverse is still technically in early access) the loop feels more like a bland sandwich eating contest where the reward are small, yummy pastries that that have practically no connection to each other and seem to have been selected at random. So, yes, P.A.N.D.O.R.A is a good idea in concept but the execution has been done terribly. I understand the reason why there is a cost to starting H-scenes, its to motivate the player to actually play the game and explore new areas instead of just doing the h-scenes. However I think that finding and recruiting new waifus should be the driving force to the players actions instead of grinding levels for PP and then doing an H-scene instead of actually progressing the story. There should be a PP system, no doubt about that, but the player should be given way more PP and just give the player a cheat code you have to enter or a button you can press for infinite PP so that those who really are content with the starting Waifus can just have that instead of forcing the player to eat bland sandwiches in order to get the the good pastries. Additionally I am somewhat concerned with the quality of P.A.N.D.O.R.A. As it is, it feels more like a few good looped gifs rather than a single, cohesieve experience.
Sure the speed slider is good but I know Studiofow can do better. Like way better. And I know im not the only one who thinks this way. The current system feels disjointed and incomplete as compared to the rest of the game which has had a stunning amount of care and love put into it. (Glad to see those 1.6 mil kickstarter dollarydoos aren't being put to waste but we would have preferred that that money be put towards P.A.N.D.O.R.A and the animations) Ok, onto the animations themselves. They are all spectacularly animated and look (and feel) great. However I feel like what we were expecting a half-length FOW movie with every P.A.N.D.O.R.A session rather than the collection of jumbled gifs it is right now. FOW said that they wanted to make a "game" and we respect that however amidst all the excellent writing, good combat and excellent talking animations, I feel like the core of the game was lost or not worked on enough. Moving on the other elements of the game,
The space/SHMUP sections are well designed but require both a mouse and KB which is bad for obvious reasons however the grid combat sections do not require a keyboard. They are fun to play and serve well as the main gameplay of the game. They are both surprisingly well polished since in most H-games, there is only "gameplay" and "story" and its refreshing to see something like this.I only have one complaint about it that combat should not be the main focus of a game like this (IK its FOW's game and they can do whatever they want with it but I, and most people were really expecting P.A.N.D.O.R.A if it was good and some fun gameplay and story to go along however it seems like that ratio has been completely switched. In conclusion, Subverse is a good game that is held back by P.A.N.D.O.R.A and a huge dissonance between what Studio FOW wants, what we (fans) want and what the actual game currently is. A complete rework of P.A.N.D.O.R.A and the ratio of gameplay vs "gameplay" is required however it can be fixed due to the game's "Early Access" status.
6.5/10
-BossPhase

So many renderings of characters and their cinematics are more than beautiful, it is a diamond in the rough I have bought it on steam and I do not regret it, its minigames are entertaining and you can unlock erotic parts

The only good thing about this game are the voice actors, however the lines themselves are kind of cringe, it tries to be some sort of Deadpool 4th wall breaker which can be a hit or miss for some.
Story isn't very good to be honest, the player doesn't make a single choice so it feels like a side project visual novel. About the waifus, they aren't really waifus, you don't develop any relationship with them, not much more to say about this...
The gameplay is pretty mediocre at best, both the grid combat and the shooter arcade game become boring after a few hours.
What about the porn? Well, you would expect to be good right? Too bad, cause it's actually the worst part of the game, it has absolutely no connection to the story, and even worse, it's just a 5 sec loop that you can't interact with, there is also no camera positioning and not a single fucking line of dialogue.

va - 5/5
story - 0/5
gameplay - 1/5
porn - fucking negative / 5

First thing i wanna say considering it's FOW Studio's game it is suprisingly tame. Imagine my suprise when science lady came aboard protagonist's ship with her "pets" and those lacked proper anatomy during scene. To the point: Absulutelly no sexual content in plot animated scenes (even droid have blue nipple covers ffs) makes this game not very appealing/fappable. It's like 9,5% of story cutscenes (done decent if that wasn't porn game, lips movement could be a thing thou), 45% space fighting game (not my thing but i assume there's plenty better games of this genre), 45% ground combat (X-Com did this 1000% better in like 1996, there is even porn game of that genre - PoP that does that tons better. Aaaand 0.5% of actual porn which is absolutelly amazingly animated but short and without any interactivity (camera rotation would be nice). I dig characters design and story is not that bad but like i said it's tame.

The story is "great" as in it is in line with what you should expect from this game: turns you on even though you're not doing it on the ship. The voice acting helps a LOT along with the dialogue animations.

Even the gameplay is cool, I enjoyed it, but the game is overall reaaaaally short and it's mostly dialogue. Not that the dialogue isn't fun, it really is.

The lewdness is one of the best as well. The game has mostly crap scenes in my opinion, but it's worth playing for the 5-6 scenes that are actually amazing.

got it on steam as soon as it came out i knew it wasnt going to be a "complete game" they said it the 29.99 is going to the next chapters released, as far as quality goes 5 story 5 acting 5 MC 3 i find him annoying and they have the physics like you would not believe, so is it worth 29.99 at EA probably since once its completed it'll be re-released at 60 then we can have the conversation if its worth that much

Subverse (V0.5)
DO NOT SUPPORT STUDIO FLOW

It sucks that I really can't recommend this game, after 4 content patches, but each update has generally left me feeling more and more disillusioned with the whole project. The latest update hit, it crashed before I got to any sex scenes and I was too bored to load it back up to get further.

PROS

• Voice acting is superb, Celestina and Erark are a joy to see pop up.
  
  
• The waifus are interesting in both design and personality
  
  
• The writing is for the most part is so bad, its like a hilariously bad movie
  
  
• The game is very pretty in places.

DISLIKES/HATES

• The action gameplay is incredibly samey, often times I'm more dissapointed that yet another wave is coming than I am excited for more combat.
  
  
• The sex scenes vary wildly in quality and are far too disconnected from the rest of the game, you will never play it with your dick in your hand or even sporting a semi, and can make the combat sections seem even more tedious when you're also here for the porn in the porn game.
  
  
• The universe lore itself is so disconnected from the game, often you'll have two pages of lore to read on a planet before a mission telling you how noone has ever been there or the whole planet is quarrentined or a friggin god lives theres and noone can survive and then you're just in a ground combat mission, fighting unrelated enemies who have as much purpose being there as you, in a background that doesn't represent anything to do with the lore dump you might as well have not read.
  
  
• The secondary systems feel pointless and not engaging, the previous update bought new upgrades for your ship that we're affordable immediately after two patches of nothing to spend on and felt completely unnoticable once bought. The new rhythm minigame is the most basic rhythm section I have ever seen in a game, a tutorial for babys first rhythm game and STILL doesn't feel synced to the exact same never changing 4 beat pattern, the dating is ridiculously barebones right now, just a resource dump, the ability to replay old missions doesn't excite me when the thought of playing the new ones doesn't excite me and the gallery poser tool is so basic that only the most ehtusiastic of screenshot enthusiasts will find more than a couple minutes one time look around in.
  
  
• Lots of loading screens

H-Scenes
I wanted to mostly discuss the sex seperately, chances are if you backed their project or are interested in doing so, you already know the general quality of studioFOW animations and that general visual and audio quality remains in whats on display here, albeit it mostly in six second loops. Taste itself is subjective though, and the style of interaction they've used for the few scenes that do involve interaction isn't one I'm fond of, the common flash game "3 speed and fuck" setting. With the exclusion of perhaps two scenes, none of the sex shown so far wouldn't make it past the pre game warm up of my intended use for it, and the likelihood of me opening this game for lewd purposes are next to zero.

Gotta say, I had pretty high hopes for this, since it's Studio FOW. But, as another comment here put it, it looks like they have a way to go as (porn) game developers.

The porn content (which is the only thing people are playing for) is totally disjointed from the rest of the gameplay. You walk into a specific room of the ship, choose your characters, and choose the scene you want to watch. The rest of the gameplay outside of this is pretty boring, honestly.

And even the porn scenese aren't THAT amazing. Certainly not as good as you'd expect from Studio FOW. I'm going to wait a few years for them to really polish this up before trying it again.

I give it 5 stars because:

- It's early access, so 1 star to motivate the developers
- Bought it already so 1 star without a real reason
- The girls are damn funny and the humor is cringy enough to make me lol
- The combat mechanics are rudimentary but proven true and working
- Voice acting is amazing <3

Support that rag-tag team of developers and show them love by buying their game when it is fully released or like me, buy it now and give them extra ressources to invest more hours into this great piece of work.

Its not really a porn but more like a space game with porn in it, but the story is engaging and animations are good.
The actual scenes are easy to unlock, but needs to be more of them and they need to be longer, not just 5/10 second loops. Maybe also additional camera angles.
Promising for alpha release.

I was very harsh with this game, because it barely had any scenes on its release.

After a while, there is now a lot more content and story to be seen. This allowed me to immerse myself in the game better and i think i can give it a rating it deserves now.

GAMEPLAY
My biggest gripe with the gameplay was that it did not involve any erotic content at all, and the game really needed it. But for what it is, it's not bad. It seemed repetitive, but eventually you unlock more characters and they bring variety to the gameplay. Sometimes i actually had to sweat, and...Don't tell the devs...But playing thegame on 2x speed made it way better for me.

STORY
Another major gripe i had was both the story and the dialogue. It seemed as if the developers tried way too much to be "funny" and unserious, which only made the characters obnoxious and very hard to get invested in. But strangely enough, after a while their strange ways grew on me. At first it is annoying, but with time the writers were able to paint an image of a world where all of these characters feel organic, and their obnoxious, hedonistic nature fits thematically into the battle against an oppressive, moralist regime. Over time, their vulgarity and dr*g penis vagina jokes did not feel like cheap attempts at le self-aware comedy, but instead like characters expressing themselves in the most genuine ways, although the dialogue quality still isn't the best. And shockingly for myself, i found the story to be quite engaging. It's obvious they pulled a lot of ideas from other media but the aforementioned concept works great for a porn game. I am actually looking forward to how it will develop.

PORN(sex(with penis, in pussy))
Not much to say, most sex scenes are seen at the gallery which is a completely separate mode from the entire game. You do get some scenes throughout story, one for each character except Ely or what was her name, you bone her mid-battle which was pretty fun, wish there was more of that. I mean, it's studio FOW, their animations are top tier and the voice actresses do an amazing job, their performances make me go feral. I only wish there was more gameplay to it. Like being able to stumble upon scenes while navigating ship or doing quests. You are given context for all sorts of crazy situations in the gallery, but they are kind of self-contained and never make it out of there. I kinda want to see how one of the heroines got jumped by an interdimensional being and THEN see it in the gallery you know? Would be pretty hot and make the game feel more full i guess. But now i'm just talking about how it could have been better, rather than if there is anything wrong with it. There isn't, but it''s just something i wish was there.

OVERALL
My introduction to Subverse has nit been the best one, simply because the game was nowhere near in the state appropriate for public release. Now that it has content, players have more time to take in the story and get familiar with the characters. Although there might have been a million ways this game could have been better, it is undoubtedly a very enjoyable experience as is and will be there to play more.

Well, its a "cool" game if you are here for the gameplay, and not for the sex. As a game, is fun, especially the space battles, while the ground battle i found pretty boring (its a niche style, so not everyone will like it).
The animations are amazing as well, but the cutscenes have a terrible optimization problem.

About the sex, its sad how the main differencial of the game is so neglected. The sex scenes are just loops with a speed cotrol. You dont have any dialogue and in 10 seconds of scenes you already seen everything.
I think is that the main problem is not the loops, but the lack of dialogues during the scenes, what is ironic because what that game have more is dialogues all the time, who sometimes are really annoying, but dont have a single line of dialogues during the sex. So you dont really have a reason to stay watching since jerk for loopings are just boring and most of people dont like that.

But let's point something: it's a game with 1 million budget and 2 years of development. I think that they should deliver much more. They also promised a complete game with no bullshit.

Tl;dr Its good as a game but it sucks as a porn game.
6/10 for the gameplay
3/10 for the sexual content.

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.