Full disclosure - I didn't back this game and didn't follow the hype train at all.
Yeah Subverse is pretty decent. But it kinda feels like everything good about it has some sort of drawback in the same area. Like somebody made a wish on the monkey's paw.
Take the CGs - they're great quality, Studio FOW does it again. But the majority of them are accessed through "Pandora" which is essentially a scene viewer.
You get one recruitment scene per girl in the game, which is contextualised as the girl now being officially part of the crew so you rock the kazbah. Great. But everything else attached to them in Pandora just exists in this nebulous vacuum. Here's Lily getting fucked by tentacles - how did the tentacles get here you ask? Doesn't matter, they're here now. Enjoy.
I'm still kinda torn on this - it facilitates the player to only view content they want (which I appreciate) but by removing any narrative context to why it's happening it kinda dilutes the impact. Yeah we're fucking the sexbot upside down now, tubular bro, but if there was no setup to it what's the point?
Then there's the actual gameplay. I laud a western adult game maker for putting more traditional gameplay in, so that's a plus. But the actual gameplay is really shallow and repetitive, so that's the monkey's paw.
Gameplay is broken down into two sections - Space Combat and Ground Combat.
Space combat is a top down asteroids-esque shmup, it can be fun for a while and they try to keep it fresh with various enemy ship factions which all have different units, shots and flight patterns. But it wears thin pretty fast. Even with the gameplay loop of getting resources to upgrade the ship to do more combat it feels pretty bland right now.
Ground combat is a complete slog by comparison - there's more going on compared to the space combat (different enemy classes, status effects, ranges of attacks, supers - the whole megillah) but god it's so slow and they just throw dinky enemies at you endlessly. At least the space combat is in and out bland, ground combat is just tiresome.
The writing/story has it's own foibles - to clarify, right now theres about 3 hours or so of worldbuilding and maybe 15-20 minutes of character building/sex build up. Not super keen on that ratio, but they're setting up a sci fi universe so it's not a deal breaker. Nothing about the story is really original, stuff you've seen/read/played before but it's competently put together so it doesn't really feel hackneyed (it dances around with this idea that humans are perceived as an invasive species to the galaxy, which is neat, but then forgets about it soon after).
Moreover the characters, whilst a little cliche here and there, are genuinely pretty charming - heroes and villains alike (we'll come back to the villains later) and I did want to keep playing to see their antics.
The actual line to line dialog is another story. Do you like old memes and 2013 style Reddit/4chan shitpost humour? If not, then saddle in buckaroo because this will be a trip to the groan zone. For every 1 joke that lands about 6 crash and burn like the Challenger. Obviously mileage on this will vary - some people really like that style (more power to them) but it's not really my bag anymore. Like, seeing a space alien called "Sandy Glitchford" make jokes about squirt porn and 'Colonial Troopers' nearly made me check my clock to see we hadn't gone back in time a few years. I appreciated the Hawaiian shirt though - nice touch
So those villains. They're cool. It introduces several enemy factions and characters, many of whom working at sinister machinations unbeknownst to others and it's definitely enjoyable to see it all unfold. But here's the rub - this is a porn game, the threat of death for any of our characters (particularly the player characters and all the H-content ladies) is negligible. Generally in a porn game the threat of failure is a losing CG or a bad end or something.
I won't lie, as mentioned above I had no real knowledge of this game or its content going in. I assumed because it was Studio FOW there'd be all sorts of gangbangs/rape losing scenes/interracial cuckold blackmails/women getting fucked by animals etc.
But nope, there's none of that. This thing is as vanilla as a soft serve - like if you're thinking of playing this game but saw the NTR tag - don't be put off, there's no "real" NTR here (a few Pandora scenes of the girls getting worked over by some of the aliens consensually is as close as it gets)
So what's the problem? So it's vanilla, who cares? Who doesn't like vanilla? Well, if I want to take the threat of killer robot sex-droids seriously I'm kinda going to need to be sold on the idea that they might violently rape my Cockney Space Devil Pirate girl if she loses in ground combat to them. Because there's no actual suspense or worry about a bad end it makes everything in this game, from combat to the actions of the villains, seem kind of impotent.
Example - there's a weird space pirate frog guy in the early game, and the game sets up that you stole his sexbot from him. Great. He wants to fuck his sexbot that you cucked from him. Great. There is absolutely no way he can ever do that in the game - lose to him in a boss fight, you gotta redo the boss fight. No NTR. No bad ends. Which, considering FOWs repertoire, is a shame in my eyes.
As a final point - game's also a bit technically ropey. There's loading screens out the ying yang. None of them too long, but it gets tiresome seeing the 3 rotating background images over and over. Also the game crashed fatally during an H-scene once and softlocked during a couple of space battles (wouldn't progress even though all the enemies were dead). But it's early access, these things might get swept away in future releases etc.
Sorry for the 2000 word essay. Game's pretty good but has problems. If you like good vanilla CGs (with or without context) and can sit through a real mixed bag of dialog and repetitive gameplay then you'll have a good time. If you don't ? Then you're not really missing much.
Yeah Subverse is pretty decent. But it kinda feels like everything good about it has some sort of drawback in the same area. Like somebody made a wish on the monkey's paw.
Take the CGs - they're great quality, Studio FOW does it again. But the majority of them are accessed through "Pandora" which is essentially a scene viewer.
You get one recruitment scene per girl in the game, which is contextualised as the girl now being officially part of the crew so you rock the kazbah. Great. But everything else attached to them in Pandora just exists in this nebulous vacuum. Here's Lily getting fucked by tentacles - how did the tentacles get here you ask? Doesn't matter, they're here now. Enjoy.
I'm still kinda torn on this - it facilitates the player to only view content they want (which I appreciate) but by removing any narrative context to why it's happening it kinda dilutes the impact. Yeah we're fucking the sexbot upside down now, tubular bro, but if there was no setup to it what's the point?
Then there's the actual gameplay. I laud a western adult game maker for putting more traditional gameplay in, so that's a plus. But the actual gameplay is really shallow and repetitive, so that's the monkey's paw.
Gameplay is broken down into two sections - Space Combat and Ground Combat.
Space combat is a top down asteroids-esque shmup, it can be fun for a while and they try to keep it fresh with various enemy ship factions which all have different units, shots and flight patterns. But it wears thin pretty fast. Even with the gameplay loop of getting resources to upgrade the ship to do more combat it feels pretty bland right now.
Ground combat is a complete slog by comparison - there's more going on compared to the space combat (different enemy classes, status effects, ranges of attacks, supers - the whole megillah) but god it's so slow and they just throw dinky enemies at you endlessly. At least the space combat is in and out bland, ground combat is just tiresome.
The writing/story has it's own foibles - to clarify, right now theres about 3 hours or so of worldbuilding and maybe 15-20 minutes of character building/sex build up. Not super keen on that ratio, but they're setting up a sci fi universe so it's not a deal breaker. Nothing about the story is really original, stuff you've seen/read/played before but it's competently put together so it doesn't really feel hackneyed (it dances around with this idea that humans are perceived as an invasive species to the galaxy, which is neat, but then forgets about it soon after).
Moreover the characters, whilst a little cliche here and there, are genuinely pretty charming - heroes and villains alike (we'll come back to the villains later) and I did want to keep playing to see their antics.
The actual line to line dialog is another story. Do you like old memes and 2013 style Reddit/4chan shitpost humour? If not, then saddle in buckaroo because this will be a trip to the groan zone. For every 1 joke that lands about 6 crash and burn like the Challenger. Obviously mileage on this will vary - some people really like that style (more power to them) but it's not really my bag anymore. Like, seeing a space alien called "Sandy Glitchford" make jokes about squirt porn and 'Colonial Troopers' nearly made me check my clock to see we hadn't gone back in time a few years. I appreciated the Hawaiian shirt though - nice touch
So those villains. They're cool. It introduces several enemy factions and characters, many of whom working at sinister machinations unbeknownst to others and it's definitely enjoyable to see it all unfold. But here's the rub - this is a porn game, the threat of death for any of our characters (particularly the player characters and all the H-content ladies) is negligible. Generally in a porn game the threat of failure is a losing CG or a bad end or something.
I won't lie, as mentioned above I had no real knowledge of this game or its content going in. I assumed because it was Studio FOW there'd be all sorts of gangbangs/rape losing scenes/interracial cuckold blackmails/women getting fucked by animals etc.
But nope, there's none of that. This thing is as vanilla as a soft serve - like if you're thinking of playing this game but saw the NTR tag - don't be put off, there's no "real" NTR here (a few Pandora scenes of the girls getting worked over by some of the aliens consensually is as close as it gets)
So what's the problem? So it's vanilla, who cares? Who doesn't like vanilla? Well, if I want to take the threat of killer robot sex-droids seriously I'm kinda going to need to be sold on the idea that they might violently rape my Cockney Space Devil Pirate girl if she loses in ground combat to them. Because there's no actual suspense or worry about a bad end it makes everything in this game, from combat to the actions of the villains, seem kind of impotent.
Example - there's a weird space pirate frog guy in the early game, and the game sets up that you stole his sexbot from him. Great. He wants to fuck his sexbot that you cucked from him. Great. There is absolutely no way he can ever do that in the game - lose to him in a boss fight, you gotta redo the boss fight. No NTR. No bad ends. Which, considering FOWs repertoire, is a shame in my eyes.
As a final point - game's also a bit technically ropey. There's loading screens out the ying yang. None of them too long, but it gets tiresome seeing the 3 rotating background images over and over. Also the game crashed fatally during an H-scene once and softlocked during a couple of space battles (wouldn't progress even though all the enemies were dead). But it's early access, these things might get swept away in future releases etc.
Sorry for the 2000 word essay. Game's pretty good but has problems. If you like good vanilla CGs (with or without context) and can sit through a real mixed bag of dialog and repetitive gameplay then you'll have a good time. If you don't ? Then you're not really missing much.