Introduction
Immortal: Unchained is an action RPG that was developed by Toadman Interactive. It was published by Game Odyssey and released in September 2018 for PC and Consoles.
Video Review
Review
All alone you wake, to find the world in complete disrepair, and for some reason you’re in a cell aboard a space prison known as “The Core”. As you escape, you learn of a dark force, sweeping across the planets that is threatening all life, and you’re told that you were brought back to life to stop a prophecy from coming true. Now it’s time to venture to the planets, stop the looming threats from destroying everything, and save the universe!
The story of the game is very much told in a Dark Souls kind of way, where almost everything is told through the use of the environment, and talking to some characters multiple times. Now and again you may get a cutscene that plays more like a comic strip, but these never really have anything important to say. If anything they’re used for the sense of “look how you got stronger after killing this boss! Woo!”. Unfortunately the story is kind of basic and I saw the twist coming from a mile away when it comes to the antagonist, but the game tries to do a crazy fourth wall break at one point and I just left baffled that the devs actually did that. Mostly because fourth wall breaks just sometimes ruin the experience depending how they’re done.
As you go through the game, you come across just a few NPCs that if you keep talking to them over and over, you end up advancing a questline that you can continue if you find them. Other than one of them, I didn’t necessarily find any of these too interesting. Although maybe it doesn’t help that I failed an event and one of the characters ended up dying, but it’s not like I knew that could happen! Although with the style of gameplay, I really should’ve expected it.
The gameplay is where the game becomes a little rougher around the edges, but I couldn’t stop playing or thinking about it no matter how much it infuriated me to no end. The gameplay is a mix of gunplay and melee combat, and it’s almost necessary to be good at both, depending on the situation, or even the enemies. There was one kind of enemy that took almost no damage from bullets, but took massive damage from melee. As You defeat enemies, you get experience points known as “bits”, you use these bits to level up one of many attributes, like strength, perception, agility, and so on. I found myself honestly kind of upgrading these without any real proper path. The reason for this is because the requirements for weapons were all over the place. So sure I needed 10 strength and 15 agility for this assault rifle, but I may need 20 perception for the next assault rifle instead of the stats I was just leveling. The requirements made no sense, so again, I was just upgrading these stats seemingly out of nowhere, with no real path to a specific “class”. The bits are also used to open every new area in the game. Sure this is only used twice, but why do I need to use four thousand experience to unlock the next area?
When it comes to the gunplay, this is where a lot of the issues in the game arise unfortunately. So you have your reticle for said weapon in the middle of the screen, and you’d think “okay this is fine”, except it’s not, because bullets will scatter wherever they want, whether in your reticle or not. I was left just burst firing most automatic weapons hoping for the best if I was at a distance, but even if I used say a sniper rifle, this had its own problem, because you CAN’T zoom in on the scope. It’s all over the shoulder, all the time. Why even have a sniper rifle in the game if you can’t use it like a sniper rifle? Also, what kind of third person shooter doesn’t have a shoulder swap option? There were so many times I would’ve loved to shoot around a corner on my left side but couldn’t because of this!
The areas in the game are all beautiful in their own right. From a beautiful forest, to what is basically the inside of a volcano, I couldn’t stop snapping screenshots of the game. I mean it’s not overly polished, but it’s beautiful in its own right, and I absolutely loved the sci-fi aesthetic. But I did get sick of seeing some of these areas again and again when I was trying to progress. The game never seemed to get the perfect pacing for checkpoints. They were either so close together, you’re left thinking “why?”, or so far apart you’re left screaming “WHY!?”. It doesn’t help that when you defeat enemies, they don’t drop ammo, unless you have a skill slot fitted with an ability for enemies to drop ammo, but even then it’s just one bullet. Helpful for snipers, but nothing else. So you can only get more ammo at checkpoints, or you use a consumable item that only has a finite amount per playthrough. Use too many and you’re screwed.
It was awesome trying to figure out how to defeat each enemy in the most efficient way possible if I’m being honest. If you try to brute force every area in the game by just shooting things in the face until they die, you’ll be in a few hard spots for quite a while. I tried it many times before I realized I needed to actually learn things. So the game in all actuality plays a lot slower than once would expect as you take your time and wait to get behind most enemies to shoot their weak point. But I missed some of these weak points on many occasions only because aiming sucks a lot. Even after lowering the sensitivity, sometimes the game would just make my reticle zoom across the screen. There is an auto-aim option that is automatically on, and this is partially the reason for this issue. Either it doesn’t work at all and you can learn to work without it, or if it does work, it overcorrects for you, so you end up shooting the wall that’s three feet to the right of the enemy. I had a harder time with most basic enemies than I did any boss in the game! I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. But I guess most bosses were big deadly enemies, whereas a basic enemy is small. Either way, it all just takes a lot of getting used to.
The last thing I will say is that the armour system in the game is something I can’t say I’ve ever seen. Instead of finding armour to equip from fallen enemies, or buying some in stores, you find weird little altars in the areas, and you interact with them to get armour or other things. So you may end up getting an upgrade that gives damage reduction, or an extra grenade or even extra ammo. As you find these altars, your character slowly gets more armour on him, which I thought was cool. But I did feel a bit underpowered sometimes in terms of damage reduction and was left wondering if I missed any. So as much as I loved this, I wish they had a more traditional system. Oh also, the pause button doesn’t stop the game at all!
Rating
Pros:
- Beautiful Areas
- Exciting To Learn Enemies
- Sci-Fi!
Cons:
- The Twist Is Too Obvious
- Gunplay Is So Rough
- Need Bits To Unlock Areas
Summary
I really enjoyed this game, because I love weird spins on the soul genre. I do wish the gameplay was more polished, and there were more weird characters with crazy storylines, but for what’s here, it’s worth a play.
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Game & Developer Information
Developer Website: Toadman Interactive
Developer Socials: Twitter
Publisher Website: Game Odyssey
Publisher Socials: Twitter
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