Unreal Engine - Completed - Subverse [v1.1.0] [Studio Fow]

Smut game with actual gameplay. You can actually explore the universe and progress through it instead of visiting the same 5 places over and over to try and unlock new "scenes". The voice acting is amazing and these are waifus you could actually classify as waifus.

I'mma gonna say it. I like this game a lot, but MAN did the story suck dick worse than any of the porn scenes in the game. For transparency I was a backer and played almost every version of the game as it was coming out up to Sova part 2 (save structure got changed and I really couldn't be bothered to replay it at the time).

The Visuals and the audio - bundled together because there is nothing to say about it besides it looks and sounds stellar. They nailed the look and sound they wanted for this game and I greatly enjoyed both.

Overall World Building and Lore - I enjoyed it more than the story and gameplay. Why I say that I will continue in later segements. But suffice to say that it it vibrant, interesting and fleshes out the galaxy very well.

The Jokes - some land and some don't. And some are the planet "Fuck That". NGL that one got me.

Gameplay - Space combat is great full stop. Ground combat is kinda ass. It got a LOT better over the years of updates, but its really monotonous and boring. I legit didn't need to use any mantics besides the first 3 you unlock even when swapping girls for the exp.

Devotion - Fuck me sideways. Felt like I was grinding PoE again. And for what you might ask? Close to nada. Sure you get an outfit for Pandora and one long scene and pinup photos... which kinda just exist in a seperate system that is kinda arbitrary overall. Also by maxing the characters you will have damn near double the amount of PP needed to unlock every scene in Pandora making that even more useless.

The Dialogue - I kinda started speed reading halfway though because a) there is much more of it than necessary to get the point across especially in the sidequests, b) its garbage. Don't get me wrong there are standout scenes and the VAs killed it. But you can only pretty up garbage only so much before people start to smell the odor of it again.

The Story - they were cooking something in the early parts and then someone must have lit a fire under their asses and it went from a decently paced story to a breakneck clusterfuck. No spoilers on this one. That comes later and hoooooooo boy do I have something to say about that.

The Empress - now we get into spoilers.
Its really unfortunate since this game could have had more, deserved more in terms of story telling and got a Road Runner ending. Funnily enough I remember them making fun of Mass Effect 3 and that game's ending, and then pulled an Andromeda. Hope we get some DLC to fix it down the line, because it was heavily underwhelming

A lot of fun. Voice acting, character design and great voice acting are what carry this game. Love the Devotion Quests too, I only wish the game had more content like that. Solid writing too, I love the outfit system, it adds a lot of replay value to the gallery and Pandora.

It was disappointing. It wasn't truly awful or anything, just disappointing. Have some bullet points:

• The dialogue was terrible, it was essentially veilguard level of bad. It was bad even by the standards of porn.
• The gameplay was meh, it was sorta just in the way, the whole point of this was supposed to be a real game with porn in it, but what it turned out to be was porn with a mediocre game as filler material to drag out the playtime. It wasn't bad, it was just meh.
• The characters were all meh, some of them had good aesthetic design, none of them had good personality, probably because of the cringe dialogue first and foremost, and the uninspired story.
• The sex scenes are fairly abundant, the animations are good, the base models are good...
• But the overall quality is really bad because the textures on the models seem to be super low res (like 256-512px wouldn't surprise me, that's how lq it is) and certain details, like pubic hair, are just part of that low res texture; which is such an absolute minimum effort kind of thing, it was ultimately just undetailed models.
• Despite the sex scenes being animated realtime 3D scenes, you cannot meaningfully move the camera around to view it from different angles... Basically the whole realtime 3D scene thing was a wasted effort, might as well have just been a cinematic replayer, it would probably have been higher quality since they could make it pre-rendered...

Basically, the only thing of value in this game is the sex scenes, but even then they were disappointing because of the minimum effort the developer put into them (besides the actual animations themselves, those are still good). If you're interested in this game, try it, but be ready to just download a complete save file and watch the sex scenes from there to save yourself the trouble of playing through this unsatisfying game.

If you were at any point a fan of studio fow before they made this game, you might be surprised at how bland all the sex scenes are. They used to make hardcore monster rape vids and such. but the vast majority of the sexual content on offer here is just vanilla stuff, besides the 100% consensual and relatively softcore xeno sex scenes. Again, it's not truly bad, it's just... Generic is how I'd describe it.

Overall it's not terrible, just underwhelming, they spent how many years making this? And the best they could come up with was low quality everything except animations?

I don't understand why this gets so much hate. I really enjoyed it.
The combat becomes repetitive and maybe they should've cut back on it a bit.
The story is a parody of 300 other games and media, MC is a deadpool knockoff.

Story 2/5
Art and Animation 10/5
Gameplay 4/5
Amount of content 4/5

This game is heavily carried by it's animations. StudioFOW used to be on top of the NSFW animation scene but as of now their stuff is outdated both in quality and originality. Still, they're one of the best in the current Adult game landscape imo.

Give it a try.

The AAA of erotic games. Excellent technical realization, long and fun plot. Over 20 hours of total gameplay. Basically it is an arcade that winks at the old R-Type, Salamander, Galaga, with the addition of a turn-based strategy section. These two points are the best and worst aspects of Subverse: better because they are very well done, worse because they are excessively repetitive. What is missing is the interaction with the characters, multiple choice dialogues and different endings would have helped to make the product more complete. Overall however it is excellent.

Funniest thing is that I remember playing/watching/interacting with FOW's Ahri Huntress of Soul first. Taron resembles very much her, besides the furry paws and other stuff. After some time (back in march of2019) I found out about Subverse through wallpaper engine... That's right ehh... Then I waited for early access to come to the Steam so I could finally play it (yup I bought it). The fuck scenes are OK, not the best in the industry and not the worst, but what disappointed me was gameplay overall. Guys at FOW said that they're gonna remake it a bit when 1.0 releases, but for me it felt the same when I bought it through early access and played it. Some parts of the story were funny, some were sad, some were shitty (few of side-quest characters stories were good). I expected more from guys that had biggest financial support from kickstarter campaign *sigh*.

Nice mix of mini games with pretty good gameplay, story is funny and very good animations, lacking in some customizations but there are enough.
Music during gameplay is also pretty good.
Can be a bit repetetive afther some time but not too much.

I played this game a year and a half ago in about version 0.8.

Now version 1.0 is out, do you think anything has changed? Almost nothing.

They added an ending to the story, but it was as sudden as if they ran out of budget. They added pretty lame customisation and personally in my opinion none of the costumes are hotter than the vanilla ones, the credit for vanilla outfits goes to the outsourcers.

Also added devotion quests, some person in the reviews below wrote that for the sake of them worth enduring the whole game, I believed and thought they added the same interactive animations for all the characters that we were shown with taron on the ship when you flew out of the fortress in version 0.8. And it would have been a great opportunity to add these interactive scenes and fit them into the game but they fucked even that up. Not only that but they cut out single interactive animation. Devotion quests in terms of content is only a pre-rendered cut-scene with pretty bad angles which i dont find hot.


Let's talk about pros and cons:
Pros:


+++ Great memorable character design, professionally made by some Indonesian or korean outsourcers(probably) according to the credits

+++ Kinda professional voice acting


Cons:


--- Repetitive gameplay and missions. Although the game design is neat and i like it, it lacks variety and is not intended for game this long

--- If there was an award for the cringiest humour in games, this game would win it.

--- A lot of grind for devotion quests and customisation.

--- If im not mistaken, in version 0.8 there was a button to quickly skip enemy moves in turn-based mode, I don't understand why they cut it out.

--- They advertise this game as having 239 scenes. 90% of those scenes are purely animation loops, I don't see what the point of those animations having no ending. So if you only consider animations with orgasm progression, there are like 20 of them which is quite low.

--- Scenes are stuffed into a pandora system where you have to pick 5 pieces of animations and run them, I don't understand this either, why not let us run any animation without this pandora system which does nothing but make us press more buttons??

--- Also all these scenes have a fixed camera angle probably because of the rather flat animation style as animators do not animate those body parts that are not visible in the frame, so even if you install the plugin on a free camera, any other angle than the set one will look bad. Which in my opinion is also quite a strange decision, you make a 3d game why not animate in all angles? With the same success they could have stupidly done it with pre-rendered cutscenes

--- They foreshadowed intercourse with celestina the whole game, but they never added scenes with her. It's very rude to add sexy characters and never do scenes with them. And it looks like they do not plan to, although there is one empty slot for the character left, but it looks like it is for some fow-chan

--- I saw they promised in steam devlogs to add scenes for Taron and bring her scene count up to the level of the rest of the characters. 2 fucking scenes with progression... As I mentioned earlier they also cut out her interactive scene. Whereas for Sova they made highest number of scenes with progression, but I don't believe most people like shortstack women more. The author probably just does scenes with what he likes best and doesn't listen what community wants. They had to set a standard for the number of scenes and stick to it evenly for each character.



I don't recommend wasting your time on this game because it's a disappointment no matter from which way you look at it. If you're interested in H content, to be honest, you don't even need to download it. Just watch all the scenes in the form of video somewhere on the Internet, these scenes have fixed camera angle anyway.

All that money just for the sex scenes to be from pandora. how fucking lazy is that. Seems like they wanted to be deadpool 2.0 but realized that they have to make a porn game in the middle of development and just slapped pandora in. Hopefully they go back to making animations since this is not it.

Solid game. Fun, good dialog, good acting, great scenes. The gameplay does get rather repetitive, but overall it's excellent.

Doesn't push any bounds graphically during actual gameplay, and there's very little if any interactivity during scenes, but it's very well done.

After downloading the full save (I had done enough grinding during pre-release) I am pretty disappointed that the additional "outfits" and "hair" are trash. They're basically just one skin tight jumpsuit, which is stupid, and different (worse) colors for hair. Considered knocking off a star, but it's still a really good game. I maintain hope that hair and outfits may become more than a gimmick.

Here is my review for the game.

No spoilers here; you can read safely.

TL;DR

• Would I recommend this game if you speak fluent English? Yes, I would. Despite its shortcomings, it is still a high-budget game with relatively good lore, even though the storytelling can be somewhat naive. The vocabulary used is quite sophisticated, and the voice acting is excellent.
• 
  
• Would I recommend this game if you struggle with English? No, I would not. It would be similar to playing The Witcher 3 in English; a vocabulary that is highly sought after can also be very obscure for non-English speakers.
• 
  
• Is this game good? I'll give it 5/5 as a hentai game on this one, even though it may not necessarily be good fapping material, as I don't even feel horny 99% of the time playing this game even during H scenes. The main reason for 5/5 is not because it is amazing but because there isn't any comp (comparable game) out there. This is "one of a kind".

The Positives:

1. The devotion scene after completing the devotion quest (for each character) is extremely good (No kidding, extremely good, but you would not be able to unlock the devotion quest until ACT 5, so no matter how much you dislike the plot between ACT 1 to 4, please just believe me, the devotion quest at Act 5 is all worth it.)【I have a save file called "perfect End of Act 4 save for 1.0", where you could start from ACT 5 and experience the devotion quest yourself without sitting through the boring Act 1 to 4, you can find it here https://f95zone.to/goto/post?id=15474661
2. There are an abundance of scenes (seriously, a lot!)
3. The Art and the 3d model are really good for this woke day and age, it is a porn game after all
4. The game is fully voiced, and the voice acting is exceptional, maybe better than 90% of the typical anime dubs.
5. The animations are really good (high budget) for the genre.

The Bad:

1. As many have pointed out, this game feels "like a river wide, but only an inch deep." While it features an expansive lore, everything just feels too shallow. You can easily sense that each act was written at a different time (the game was in EA for many years), resulting in a lack of coherence between Acts and occasional contradictions with the in-game codex. Additionally, all the side quests are just sarcasm/complaints of the real-life from the dev team, completely disconnected from the main story, most of the side quests do not stay true to the game’s lore.
2. The combat is highly repetitive (especially the space fights) and it involves a considerable amount of grinding (a lot of grinding!). This issue is exacerbated by the fact that none of the previous saves from the Early Access version are compatible with the 1.0 release, forcing players to start over and endure the grinding all over again.【Hence I made a save file that has all side quests and space battles completed and ready for you to start ACT 5 with no worries, you can find it here https://f95zone.to/goto/post?id=15474661
3. Contains A LOT of sex scenes, but the camera angle is fixed. Even though the 3d animation is rendered on the go on your PC, as you should be able to switch angles, but you CAN'T for fk sake.
4. (There's supposed to be a free camera mod on Steam where you can unlock the camera angle but I am not sure if it still works on the 1.0 build)
5. sex scenes are detached from the storyline and feel meaningless.
6. Except for the devotion quest, which is still detached from the storyline, but at least the movie itself is extremely good.

Conclusion

• You can sense that this game aspires to be like Mass Effect with sex. It starts off very strong, but then everything falls apart as the developers realize their ambitions are too high and scale back dramatically. As a result, the storyline becomes extremely shallow, particularly toward the end.
• 
  
• Nevertheless, it still stands out as "one of a kind" and has a somewhat Venusblood-esque quality in certain aspects. So, it is worth playing as a Hentai game. But disregard the exclusivity, think of it as a Visual novel, it is only a 2/5 at best. 2/5 for combat mechanic. But putting all together, there is just not a comp so I give it 5/5.
• 
  
• As for "Is this game worth the money I paid for?" I think it is worth $29 (the price before the 1.0 release, as they jack up the price to 39 on the 1.0 release.) "Is this game worth the budget they have?" That has to be a hard NO, but you are here to download an illegal copy of it, so the PRICE does not matter. I, as a person who bought it on EA, am only happy because it at least got finished.

Great game.

Both flight and ground combats are fun and well designed and sufficiently challenging.
The story and characters were pretty good and engaging. Personally liked the quirky dialogues and comedy.
The scenes were really sexy especially devotion quest scenes and glad that there were plenty for each character.
Both the CGI and voice acting were also really good.


Now, not to sound like another pathetic little loser whining about a game for which I didn't pay a dime but small nitpicks(/or suggestions):
-The rewards for devotion feels a little lacking (compared to how much grindy it can get). Maybe add(/move) a few pandora scenes as reward.
-Could do with few more outfits. Also wish the undressed outfit could be wore all the time and not just in pandora.
-Would be pretty nice if there was also sex and not just poses in gallery.
-It would be cool if girls interacted with the mantics in background.
-Need Dallick and Celes scenes.

Anyway looking forward to what StudioFOW does next, whether future patches or a new game (a fantasy setting maybe).

Not so much sex scenes, Pandora sucks, grindfest gets really boring, and I didin't like the humor of the game. The gameplay gets stale very soon.
Nice animations, nice graphics, but nothing else.
I can't fap to this game. Too much grinding for a few sex scenes.

3+ rating overall
I do recommend the game but be aware of what it is.

All the criticisms are warranted
but i think the voice acting, animations and cutscene are to high quality to be associated with the average 1-2 star rating.

The gameplay is serviceable as well but its to simple for how long the game is. This is best played in sessions.

At its core the vision is just to compromised. This was marketed as a good product for vanilla guys like me with terms like "waifu", the Mass Effect association and the meme writing. (its not)
If you are not into "bestiality" this is quite lackluster.

When it comes to the girls themselves...
They are varied thats for sure.
Demi and Fortune are the best ones imo. Voice acting and design.
The others are a mix of grading accents like good ol br`tish, vocal fry or high pitch loli and Ok designs.
Not a huge fan but some of them have a good scene or two.

I still recommend it bcs there are some quality animation. Especially the faces have good detail and expression range.
The writing is on the "reddit" side of things but there were a few funny situation. "You have my sword, and my hammer and my bow, ...and my bong"

The devs definitely have the tools to make a great adult game but they have to mix them better and sharpen their focus.

Review as of 1.0

Great game, I would say it's one of the best indie game out there, the gameplay (I really enjoy grid turn base combat), the story, the characters etc. And with the adult elements, it could be one of the perfect big adult game out there.

But it just unfortunately (sadly and miserably) fails to be a good "adult" game... because most of the sex scenes were most behind some GIFs-playing thing called PANDORA (which offers a little interactions, dialogues or even dirty talks from the girls)???

Though of course there are some scenes part of the main story (devotion quests, Ela's first cutscene) but it's just not enough compared to effort Dev given to those PANDORA stuff (I mean some scenes were hot but it's not that different from scrolling through rule34, Pornhub or other porn websites rather than playing a "ADULT GAME")

I wish more scenes were part of the actual gameplay instead (like devotion quests for each girls, that's how the adult scenes should be integrated in the game) (or better Ela's cutscene where she shoots a scene with Captain for example) (or even in an easier way, making some lead-in dialogues and lead it to existing PANDORA scene, that'd be a bit more acceptable)

Great game but the potential of being the perfect adult game is wasted

V.1.0
Pros:

• Good character designs
• Great voice acting.

Cons:

• Grind is still a nightmare, simplistic gameplay should not overstay its welcome by being mandatory to perform 30+ hours into the game for 3 minutes of content.
• Questionable gameplay design, bullets that move slower than your ships, instead of being a shmup where you gun down enemies on a fast moving ship there is a lot of waiting for your bullets to reach the enemies to damage them.
• Even decade old fire emblem knew speeding up repetitive animations and wave reinforcement was necessary in the isometric battler, but not here, you will slog through the grind with unskippable slow animations.
• Barely any character development, despite setting up introductions and plotlines, the only relevant content you get with them is... more grinding. Not exploration of their personality or sexuality, just more copy pasted battles.
• Animations are very sparse and lackluster compared to the dev's old production, in terms of both quality and quantity, made worse by the plot segregation from the scenes/loops itself.
• Of all the things to cut corners on a 20+ hour long game, I think the character plotline conclusions being a powerpoint slideshow is a mistake, its bad enough that they weren't developed, if even the grand payoff and conclusion isn't being taken seriously by the developers, how are the players suppose to feel attached or care?
• Yet another moved goalpost, game has finally left early access after years of development but promised content has been announced to come in dlcs instead of the finished game.
• H animations being locked away in Pandora, a restrictive scene viewer that doesn't let you cycle through whichever animations you want, instead of selecting whatever you want to enjoy at the moment, you have to preselect and lock in 1-5 specific animations you want to view and have to exit out every time you want to change content, which get very tedious as the majority of content in the game aren't long animations, but repetitive seconds long short loops.
• Who was the intended audience of this product? Were their backers and buyers celebrating that there are SFW restricted characters and censored-only content in the game?

1.0 Review

Got this on Steam years ago when it first came out, but what a disappointment it turned out to be.

Excellent production quality for a porn game but that's it. Subverse is unfortunately hampered by bad writing and an awful gameplay loop. Ultimately the porn scenes are locked behind an animation viewer with 0 actual interaction besides a very restrictive camera pan and zoom. Very few scenes even have a climax, just a single animation loop. You unlock scenes by leveling up your characters which forces you to play through either a space shooter and turn based grid battles, and both are tedious AF. Each girl also has a devotion quest and some alternative costumes, but they're locked behind leveling up so you're again forced to go through some very tedious gameplay.

You'll get a better story, gameplay and fap in games with a fraction of the budget of this game.

Painfully average sex game. There are much better visual novels out there. And this one fails to deliever on basically every aspect of it. Along with ludcriously frustrating and boring gameplay.

Uninteresting combat mechanics. A pisspoor story. And a setting written by what 15 year olds would consider edgy, funny, and meaningful.

If anything this is the least interesting game I've played, I've even bought the game back when it showed promise, unforunately that promise fizzled up when the combat mechanics came out. Turning away from an actual meaningful story or characters to sex jokes and poorly written characters. The entire reason people would play this is because of the characters, and they are laughably poorly written.

I am a fan of their animations but htey should've stuck to animations or gotten a game studio to make this game instead of in-house. Its very apparent this is their first game, and it shows how little understanding they have of what people want from a game.

If I am somehow more invested into a puzzle game like Huniepop and not this, it tells me the game-loop in this is poorly concieved. People do not want to work for every single scene with a character. Either decrease the amount of encounters and reduce the grind, or stick to one type of game.

There are already better games of this caliber that are hentai games that exist that do it better. This is also the problem with how poorly optimized the game is, and how lifeless the sex scenes are. What could've been a meaningful, fun time, is reduced to poorly built out, sex scenes that have nothing in them of interest.

This is probably the harshest review I've ever given to a game, but other than making a whole new game, this is a travesty of just a bad game. Don't waste your money, don't waste your time, find the videos online and avoid this game. Cause thats the same experience as it is in game.

Review for v1.0

Subverse is a game I've kept track of for a long time. With the literal millions going into the budget and a team of talent putting it together, this felt like it could be the first real BIG lewd game title. Now in a sense that's true, because it's no real question that this could be considered "AAA" in the world of lewd games. Unfortunately that title, perhaps unsurprising to many these days, isn't exactly an indication of something being good.

I've been a long time advocate of writing being perhaps the most important element of a good adult game, since that's typically what grips me into wanting to actually play them in the first place. I planned on sinking many hours going through this and giving it a real in-depth review, expecting it to keep me hooked enough to do so. That plan has since fallen apart, as after experiencing the writing in this game, I asked myself why waste any more time on this and downloaded a full save for the gallery. With that being said, here's where I will put the fair disclaimer that I did NOT play though all of this, and thus haven't seen a large majority of the content. I specifically played up until the missions where you recruit the elf pornstar girl before I just couldn't do it anymore.

I've seen the comparison made a few times and I think it's apt: this is like Borderlands writing smashed together with a Mass Effect inspired space opera of sorts. This game REALLY wants you to know it's a porn game. The script is filled with never ending cheesy lines, fourth wall breaking jokes, and just an overall juvenile level of humor that's baked into almost every facet of this game. For me, that makes it incredibly hard to actually care about anything going on let alone take it serious. You could argue I'm a fool for trying to do so in the first place, but the game is half story-related cutscenes that I have to sit there and watch (or skip) to progress.

It's not as if I necessarily hate the characters, as they feel endearing enough when they aren't plagued by the umpteenth corny porn joke, but another aspect that made it hard to enjoy this was the MC. The game offers no choice, nor is the MC any form of self insert. He's a smuggler with an Australian accent that wears panties on his head. Much like everyone else, it feels like half his dialogue is porn jokes. I just feel nothing towards his character and there isn't anything changing that in what I played.

As for the actual gameplay part of the game, there's only two parts where you're actually doing something outside of clicking into different rooms on the ship. The SHMUP ship combat and the tactical unit-based grid combat. Both suffer from the same issues: being repetitive and lacking depth. To unlock most things in this game, including a large majority of the sex scenes, you have to grind XP for the girls to level them up. You get XP primarily from these combat encounters, which means you'll be doing a lot of them. It almost feels like because they decided to have these two styles of combat systems, neither of them got enough focus to make them truly engaging beyond the first few battles you do. They almost overstay their welcome more than anything.

Now obvious praise where it's due: indicative of the huge budget, the production value of this is insane for a lewd game. Fully voice-acted (and done well too), many fully animated cutscenes, lots of work put into the UI, music, sound effects, etc. etc. etc. Too many details to name, but suffice to say this does feel like a game with a ton of work going into it. Which is good, because it is. It's by no means average.

The last part of this is the sex. Again given the super high production value and the teams previous works, the scenes LOOK great and are animated very well. But the thing is, what is really separating this from being a gallery viewer you have to grind to unlock scenes for? Honestly, very little. This is because like 90% of scenes aren't actually built into the story but instead just exist to be viewed solely in the gallery. It's another thing that makes it hard to really connect with characters, but considering the games writing maybe it's a good thing the scenes don't have any dialogue either. So maybe they lack on certain qualities, but are they still satisfying to view so to speak? Yes and no. There exists what are essentially premium scenes that have a speed slider and a cum button, but those make up only like ten percent of the total scenes available. The rest exist as short loops without those things. Not to mention the extremely limited camera control, where penetration is often hidden. Edit: I took a look at some of the devotion scenes, and again while high quality, they suffer from similar issues. It's just a longer cinematic you have no control over with characters I don't really care about.

I feel like I've ranted about this more than put together a coherent review really detailing why I don't like this, but the TLDR is that while yes this is obviously not your typical porn game given the money and development that went into it, it ultimately fell short for me as a game that just couldn't keep me engaged into any of it. If there's anything I could have personally changed about the game, it would have been to take itself more seriously and ironically engrain the actual sex scenes into the story. The trend of me being let down by games I've waited a long time for unfortunately continues.