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

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.

Nothing in that game can stand on its own.
For the gameplay there are 2 boring mini games: poor man's Star Control clone and a halfassed, tedious X-Com clon.
For porn there are just a few short porn loops rendered in game's engine with no context to the game's story whatsoever...fucking why?
If I was a kikestarter backer i would be pissed now. 2 Mils for that kind of crap?

To be fair:
The soundrack is the only good thing about this game. Whoever made the music did a great job.


Saw this coming though. I knew the game would suck anyway the moment they decided to sell the game on steam, since valve has the retarded policies like consensual sex between 3D characters and only allows glamour sex crap with barely any fetishes.

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Huh.. I'm actually writing a review for once, I'm new at this so it's probably going to suck! O.O I guess on the off chance someone actually reads this I'll make this as objective as I can.. And I won't mention other games although I'm tempted to make some comparisons..

(This whole review is only my opinion which is probs wrong plz don't eat me!)

TLDR!

I'm a picky bitch and didn't love this game. My real problem is the gameplay feels lackluster and the amount of time and effort they would need to put into making it any better would be much better spent on improving the sex scenes with variations of poses etc. Giving the player more options in the settings menu (things like individual character voice volumes etc.)


The Good
The porn videos are actually quite good! StudioFOW has great animations and this game has a slidebar thingy you can change to tweak what happens during them! Neat <-- That's points in my book!

The ship looks good and you get to see characters you've unlocked idling in different rooms, mousing over them causes them to look at you and they look gooood so overall it's a nice addition! <-- More points from me!

The Bad

Ok... I need to be honest I don't actually like the gameplay.. I'll mention the humor in the next section (No big deal just not my thing) but the gameplay... Here we go.
I don't know who thought that the players who like turn based tactical games would also want to play (more like grind) fast paced plane-shooter games in order to unlock the scenes in this game. It feels almost like a mobile game 0.0 I feel like there should be an option to at least choose one type of minigame to grind.. (As I'm writing this it's like 6am and I haven't slept so I'm just going to say right now both space and ground combat feel MEH for their respective genres.. There's lots of room for improvement) The real part that upsets me (and why my rating is so low) is that it seems like the sex scenes were held back somehow? The longer you play the more they start to feel very shoehorned in between grindfests. Between the two forms of combat gameplay, the galactic map, the mission system, the interactive ship interior and finally unlock system for sex scenes it feels like the sex system is an afterthought :^( which sucks I really like studioFOW

I gotta go 2 beeeed! -_- Just know that I hope one day this gets SO much better!

The Ugly?

The way the slidebar changes the animation as well as the sound is neat but compare this to lets say other hentai games with a similar amount of dev time and it starts to fall flat.. It would be an Illusion if I told you there weren't hentai games out there with more to do option/position wise. (^;

To boil it down a little...Also to sleep soon..

Honestly if StudioFOW were to take the ship interior and the "Pandora system" (I think that's the name?) and just make the whole game focus on that IE the sex scenes and make the game elements optional/remove the grinding I think the game would be really good! StudioFOW has a strength and I think they should lean into it more in their games C^: (The real reason that years ago I ended up giving them money in the first place was THOSE SEX ANIMATIONS bay bee!)

Wow that was alot of typing for my first review ever O.O I wonder if anyone even looks at these? (I hope this won't post to the discussion forum..) Well whatever I followed the rules so now I get to give it a rating Wooo! Time for bed.

The game is in alpha so of course it's not perfect and maybe will never be, but it's good.
It has a story wich some may not find appealing but is well written and i personally find the cheesiness quite funny.
It has two different type of combat that may be also challenging at times which is a good variation in a smut game, since the gameplay/combat factor is almost always lacking.
I LIKE that the smut is not incorporated in the story apart from some scenes.. if i want to play i can play freely, if i want a quick fap i can unlock various sex scenes by winning and look at them whenever i want.
sorry for my english

Overall Score 5/10

Visuals(7/10):

The visuals and style is good. The game has a polished indie-feel. However, they used some postprecessing that makes scenes a bit blurry.

Story (4/10):

The plot is nothing special. It is a simple call to adventure story where the mc gets entagled in a scheme to fight against a tyranical power.

The simplicity of the plot isn´t the problem though but the writing and its pacing. The game trys to be "satirical" which beeing a porngame isn´t a bad move in itself, however the humor isn´t clever but in the best case silly and in the worst case adolescent and obnoxious. Even a satire needs interessting characters and Subverse fails to deliver in that end (especially the MC), even for a porn game.

Gamplay (6/10)

The gameplay is divided into two parts : Shoot ´em up Space fights and turn-based ground combat.

The space combat actually is fun albeit a bit bare bones at the moment. It plays well and feels difficult without beeing punishing. Especially the boss missions surpirsed me in a good way. It gets repetitive due to not having much content tho.

The ground combat on the other hand is kinda there and dissapointing. I see that XCOM gets thrown around alot as comparison, but this couldn´t be further from the truth. It is more akin to a hallow Heroes of Might and Magic. You position your commander and your generic mutant units on a small map and the burst the enemy down before they do and you have to be fast as new enemies will spawn in waves. Again due to repetition it gets tedious very fast as those missions exels at having not tactical depth whatssoever.

The porn (3/10):

This was the most dissapointing thing for me.
To be upfront, I am not into monstersex, so if you are you might get more out of it then I did.
First of the scenes apart from the recruitment scene aren´t integrated into the story at all. Instead you unlock them with currency you get for leveling up your waifus. The scenes are very short loopes and for the most part not interactive. They aren´t pre-rendered but as there is no camera control or even different viewpoints they might as well be.
Apart from bestiallity there just aren´t may scenes per character.

Try to be adequate, so let's score 0 to 5 - gameplay, graphics, plot, sound, and considering it porn game, need to compare sex scene - customization, interactivity, manipulation, animation, physics.

gameplay / plot - 2
sound - 3
graphics - 4
animation / physics - 0 (WTF - it tottaly shit, just change angle of view and you will see, how dick go through the body or even miss)
interactivity / manipulation / customization - 0

2+3+4+0+0/5=
Total score is 1.8

Pros:

• Fun gameplay. Didn't expect an actual game, but it's appreciated.
• Very talented voice acting.
• Deadpool style dialogue (which i like and think fits)
• Great animations.
• Overall very polished. Only managed to find 1 glitch in the entire game. Even AAA games aren't this polished.

Cons:

• Sex scenes are a little short and lack functionality. It's more of a slideshow really.
• If you were looking for a straight up Porn Game, you might be disappointed. This is an Actual Game that you have to progress in order to unlock sex scenes.

Normally i don't talk trash about other reviewers but most of them are just angry because it's not PornHub the Game.
And clearly they don't understand the meaning of a First Release. This isn't the full game, it's a first draft. A lot of things will change, things will be added or removed.
This is why a lot of QA workers advise developers against releasing Alphas. First impressions matter and the majority of people have no clue in hell what Alpha means.

First off: I bought this game on Steam after it came out and I didn't support it on Kickstarter, so you know where I'm coming from. I'm reviewing the first release, which for once actually seems reasonably representative of what the game will look like.

Rather than my usual summary, I'ma pros and cons this game, because...well...I prefer not to lead with the negatives on a game that I ultimately think is bad.

Pros:
Gameplay - it's okay. Not amazing, not groundbreaking, and weirdly non-sexual for a game that's supposed to be an overt porn game, but it's fine. I think if the game wasn't so badly designed or self-indulgent I'd think more highly of this part, but some fun can be had here. Fortunately, I actually like Asteroids and X-Com, so this wasn't as much of a chore as it seems to be for some players.

Graphics - Pretty decent. I've definitely seen better, but it's absolutely good enough in my opinion. The boobs look a bit more fake than I'm used to, but that's probably an engine problem (or they just leaned into everybody having falsies, which at least fits in with the story).

Worldbuilding - not great, but on a basic level I'm glad it's there. The biggest problem here is that it's a 'parody story,' where they just kinda smashed together a few video game backstories and occasionally added sex ideas to things. It's not very deep, not very thoughtful, very generic, but it's fine. Note that worldbuilding is different from story or cutscenes, which do NOT belong on the 'pros' list.

Sci-fi - Yeah, I know. Not everybody's cup of tea. But I actually really like sci-fi, so I'm down for them having made a big Mass Effect-esque sci-fi porn game.

That's kinda all I've got for the pros list.

Cons:
Boring - Absolutely this game's worst problem. What's funny is that the main selling points of this game, its porn scenes and the gameplay, are both fine. But the porn part is barely any of your playtime (what, 15 seconds per scene?), the mediocre gameplay is more of the game than that, and the AWFUL cutscenes and dialogues are at least half of the Goddamn game. Fuck. Every. Dialogue. Oh, and don't worry: nobody (at least, not that I've seen) gets naked in cutscenes or dialogue so far. So as a porn game, most of the game is a complete waste of time. I'm suspicious they did this to make the game more streamable, but this is a boring fucking game for some pornphobic sci-fi fan to try streaming. Worst of both worlds. Seriously, who is the intended audience here?

Characters - Who the fuck are these people? Yes, I get it in a general sense: they're loose parodies of characters from other games or genres of media. But there's no seduction, no build-up of anything, and the game spends so much time saying how they're basically just generic ladies to fuck that I never felt any connection with them whatsoever. Hell, there don't even seem to be any dialogue choices (even aesthetic ones where whatever you say the story keeps moving), so you're just watching some Australian asshole have girls hurled at him because the genre of game requires it. At this point, I'm not demanding that they be the main character's sisters or ex-teachers or whatever, just that they have some kind of relationship whatsoever beyond co-worker/person-main-character-fucks. But yes, obviously, it would indeed be better if some of them were the main character's blood relatives.

The story - Blah blah blah blah blah. Maybe it's all some extended Hideo Kojima joke or something that we have what feels like years of cutscenes about this or that faction doing some nonsense, but this is just some terribly dull writing. And it's not even particularly wacky! The best they could think of as far as recurring jokes was putting an umlaut over the 'u' in Nu Vegas and saying that as often as possible. I get it, people liked Fallout: New Vegas (I'm more of a Fallout 4 fan, myself), but this game has, so far, absolutely no relationship with that game. That's not always a bad thing, since this game isn't afraid of heterosexual relationships unlike F:NV, but it's just pointless and irritating like most of this game's story.

Tone - Maybe this criticism won't land for everybody, but Subverse feels absolutely full of itself. It's so self-indulgent, takes so long to get through anything, and is so proud of everything it's done, that I have a distinct impression that it's going to take them a WHILE to be able to accept any criticism that's clearly about to get leveled in their direction.

Overall, this game is a fucking MESS. It's a pretty mess, and it has some decent ideas in it (I may be alone in this, but I actually think Asteroids is a perfectly reasonable way to do space combat for a game like this), but this game just does not understand how to put its best foot forward. Lead with the porn, gameplay's about the right amount, stick the plot on the backburner. And for fuck's sake, don't give us a long cutscene involving a character until we've gone on a few missions with that character and have actually learned to give a shit about them. Oh, and get their fucking tits out for some dialogues and cutscenes! This is a porn game, Goddamn it!

There's definitely still time to save it (my gut says they'll get good sales numbers for now, which should drive further development), but they have to acknowledge that for right now, they done fucked up, if they want to right this ship.

Overall score: 2.5 stars (I rounded up to 3 in the perhaps benightedly optimistic hope that this gets better with later updates that are a little less infodump-heavy). It works, it looks decent, but it's just fucking hard to imagine recommending this to anybody in its current state. And for once, that has nothing to do with the game being unfinished. There's actually a decent amount of content here! It's just currently boring as hell.

People are not giving a fair rating, this game is not an one star or even a two.. maybe a three but its come down to preference. for me, I loved the story with is really good, and read about the lore with not lots of adult game have.

there is a massive story and lots of different and unique characters which you probably will like, and the writing is both really hot, and super funny!

and then there is the mini games, the grown battle and the ship battles witch I truly like becsause it gives another gameplay ascpet and other stuff to do! and the music, boyyy its really good! how the hell can people even give a low rating?? seriolsy

Bottom line: No miracle happened. This is a typical eroge with a gameplay appendage, of which there are thousands on specialized sites. And many of these projects deserve much more attention than this raspy piece of code.

Wow WTF is this...
For the amount they pulled from crowdfunding, this adult "game" is a total joke on what it delivers, EA or otherwise.

Didn't want this to be the Star citizen of porn games but now that
I can see it, I can say that this is only pure hype and some pretty visuals with next to zero gameplay value due to how they have set up the gameplay loops (disjointed pandora BS).

The echo chamber of circle jerker yesmen aren't doing this thing a favour either. This game is a mess and lots of things need to get sorted out for it to be worth the steam price, leave alone justify the funding they received for this (mostly) crap effort.

This game is a real mixed bag, mostly bad though. You play as the Captain (thats his name) of the ship (Mary something...). He seems to be heavily based on Deadpool from the 2013 game, not the more recent movies. You start with EDI (Sorry, she's DEMI) and you get the rest of the crew through the natural progression of the game. The mechanics of the game work well enough and I only got stuck forcing me to restart once.

The voice acting is superb. Its easily part of the entire game. Even though the dialog can cringy with its self referential humor and it's LONG boring lore dumps. If you like lore, there is a lot of it in Subverse. In fact, the game warns you, the player, that there is a big, incoming lore dump. The issue with these lore dumps lies in the fact that the game forgot to make sure that the player actually cared about the story before hitting me with the lore. If you're looking rub one out real quick (as the game early on refers directly to), you're probably going to be disappointed. You get access a couple of loops early on, but you can't view them again until the game gives you control (more on that later). There is about an hour of tutorials and dialog to get through before you have access to freely view H scenes, but its all a 15 or so second loop. They character models look great, but these loops take a lot gameplay to acquire. You have play, get the other characters and build up PP points to unlock the loops.

Let's talk about gameplay. It's basically two old games with a new coat of paint on and them. Asteroids and the strategic xcom type games. Think about that for 1 second. Asteroids came out in the last 1970s! Xcom's gameplay style is also decades old. The asteroids gameplay is fine, you can upgrade the ship's weapons and abilities. The xcom gameplay is OK, but it's kind of hard to see since the camera is zoomed out a bit too far. I think it's an attempt to cover up how low quality the xcom character models look, but that's just a game theory. After about an hour of tutorials, dialog, and combat, you finally get control to make decisions and do things. The game specifically tells you that. Now you can explore the Captain's ship and now you experience another big mechanic of the game: Point-and-click. That's how you explore the interior of the ship. You do this, too, for navigating the ship to other places once you get control. The game also makes sure to specifically say it's as simple as point-and-click. That self referential humor comes up, a lot.

Here's my problem with this game. Like the Deadpool game from 2013, these jokes have no replay value. You hear them once, maybe you chuckle, but if you play again, or have to restart, it's the jokes that you've already heard. The point-and-click is underwhelming based on what FOW was hyping this game up to be with its Mass Effect comparisons. The xcom gameplay is generic with confusingly outdated characters compared to the dialog character models. And the asteroids gameplay is fine, but its asteroids! This a PC only release running on my hardware designed to run MGS5 on max settings. Subverse could literally be run on an android device and it would be stable. Not to mention, the H scenes only account for about 16 minutes of this roughly 4 hour game. They're asking $30 only steam for this game and don't think it's worth it. It's in early access though so maybe they'll fix all of the problems I've just pointed out (no, they won't, but a bit more content is supposed to be coming). It would be better if Studiofow just sold the H scene loops separately and spared the world the hype of this game with awkwardly duct taped together gaming mechanics with a bit of porn on the side. This game is (so far, it's in early access :/) a complete disappointment, but Studiofow raked in the money, so they'll be fine.

I expected more.. This game feels like those old poker games where you get cheap porn pictures as rewards...

I though the game will be something like Mass Effect, were you can walk arround and that it would've more sex options..

Despite being an adult game, 95% of your time playing Subverse is not porn.

A complete turnaround compared to StudioFOW's videos where 25 of the 30 minutes are porn.

This game is the equivalent of watching a 30 minute school hentai where 95% of the episode is boring filler. I don't think StudioFOW realize just because you say "cock" doesn't make it an erotic situation. It's just locker room humor and there's nothing pornographic about it.

If the characters were likeable and the plot was good, I could've tolerated the parts of the story that do nothing. This sadly isn't the case, the main character is annoying and the actual funny moments are too far apart.

I'm hoping the plot gets more depraved and more sexy situations happen in the future. The character design and animations are great, they just need the context and set up to be considered a proper porn game, otherwise this is just a gallery viewer and I might as well do a faster match 3 game in between the galleries.

Note I am a big fan of StudioFOW and I love the spinoffs and artist collabs this world has created. This game isn't it however.

I for one enjoy both the ship combat and grid combat systems. not many VN type games have minigames and the ones that have any are a big plus in my book. It is still a quite fledgling as a game, but for an initial release, it is pretty good. scenes could be better, but it is in early access. There is a lot of potential for improvement. but the bones of the game is good.

Overpromised underdelivered even after stalling for so long. If you've been paying attention to Kickstarter, they promise a whopping 22 chapters that should be an indicator that the game is never going to be finished.

The game is boring, and by StudioFOW standards probably the worst in terms of animation. Stick with the StudioFOW films.

As a hybrid of shmup games and X-Com (god, what a mess of a combination), it is iffy. As an adult title, its a mess. The design team wanted to make an honest to god game, but the face of the game is its adult elements. If you were to pick this game up at a sale, you wouldn't know what you're in for at a glance.

The elements of its adult nature and its two opposing genres, all clash.

The writing thinks its funny; the decent voice acting only serves to highlight how painfully embarrassing that fact is.

The world already has Geometry Wars, X-Com, and the vast landscape of adult titles. Pick one; attempting to crash them into one another has led to this extremely polished turd.

I actually supported this game on kickstarter, as I was all about getting a high quality porn game with decent gameplay. This game delivered on a lot of things, but failed on the most important thing; The actual porn. The porn is a afterthought almost despite being the number one reason I bought this game lol. The scenes are all animated at least but there's barely any interactivity with sex scenes if at all. And the writing... At first it was silly but funny. But the self-awareness got annoying. Not to mention the jokes just didn't land or got repeated in slightly different ways.

The actual gameplay is is decent. Not stellar but serviceable. The voice acting and graphics are top notch though. The girls are hot as well so no issues there. But all of that overshadows the actual sex scenes and to be frank that is way you are here. The major saving grace is that this game isn't finished, so this can be fixed.