Does this game actually deserve more love?
A revealing childhood anecdote:
When I was in grade school, I was often in various daycares because my parents were both working. I arrived at this new daycare center and met a bunch of kids all at once.
I noticed that a group of kids were picking on one boy, and I immediately felt sympathetic towards him. I am at heart something of a romantic as well as an idealist. Nowadays, I try to go against those qualities as I don’t feel that they are accurate ways to describe the world. I tend to want to root for the underdog and I didn’t have these defenses as a child.
So, I tried to defend this boy against the other kids, I tried so hard to befriend him and to stop his aggressors. I tried so hard to be a friend to this kid and then one day for no reason at all, he slaps me across the face. Hurt and confused, I went up to the kids who had been picking on him before and found out that the reason that they had been picking on him. Before I arrived his numerous friends had been going to the daycare and he and his friends had bullied his present aggressors. Now for whatever reason, his friends were no longer at that daycare, so it was payback time for these kids. Clearly none of this was right but it was real something which my romanticism didn’t prepare me for.
This is not to say Immortal Unchained is a bully or there’s something fundamentally bad about the game but I think this anecdote shows (partially) why I have dedicated so much time to a game that is ultimately kind of broken and unfinished. I love an underdog and will always try to see the good in something that is hated but sometimes things are hated for valid reasons.
“Immortal Unchained” is an underdog, it was made by a small studio and has become something of a punchline over the years. However, the actual game isn’t really good enough to be a hidden gem, it has a lot of charm and there’s great things about it but it’s a fundamentally unsatisfying experience despite the promise that certain aspects of the game have.
That’s why I ultimately feel silly putting this review on this list because while I don’t think the game deserves the hate it’s gotten; it doesn’t really deserve more love. It’s not a bad game but it has such huge flaws that it’s hard to see why the game should be rescued from oblivion.
Not that the game seems likely to be rescued, “Immortal Unchained” has been delisted on PlayStation and Xbox. The version on Steam is pretty much abandonware with many glaring technical problems and frame drops. But Immortal unchained is something if not great, at least interesting. It’s a soulslike with guns that came out before the “Remnant: From the Ashes” series and it is also more in the mold of the original “Dark Souls” with its slow and bruising gameplay.
There are different kinds of souls players, there’s the players who worship the later Fromsoft titles post-“Bloodborne” when the gameplay became much faster. These players are akin to mainstream gamers in that they tend to care a lot more about technical polish and hate the slow methodical gameplay of the original “Dark Souls”. I tend to be in the small minority that, while enjoying the later Fromsoft titles, miss the slowness and jank of the original games. “Immortal Unchained” is much closer to the style that “Dark Souls II” and the original “Dark Souls” both shared.
This game even copies “Dark Souls II”’s flaws such as an “Agility” stat that functions much like the hated Adaptability stat from “Dark Souls II”. In “Dark Souls II”, this stat controlled how many invincibility frames you had during your dodge roll. This lead many people who were unfamiliar with the stat to dismiss the game as unplayable. You would see your character dodge out of the way and then get hit with damage because your Adaptability was much lower.
Because of the roughness of both “Immortal Unchained”, it’s hard to tell if this “Agility” system is why some of the hitboxes in the game are off or if it is due to a lack of polish.
Despite this slowness, “Immortal Unchained” seems to be unclear whether it wants to be “Dark Souls 2” or “Bloodborne” in its combat rhythms. The pace of combat can be slow, but the dodging has a Bloodborne feel with a quickstep when locked onto enemies. And the speed and aggression of some of the enemies feels very “Bloodborne”.
One of the reasons I love the game is the delicious amount of jank, your character at times moves goofily and awkwardly, enemies have weird AI where sometimes they will aggro from very far away and start shooting at you before they would logically be able to see you. At other times, you’ll be standing right in front of them, and they either won’t react or will start slowly reloading their weapon while you shoot them repeatedly. And unfortunately, sometimes you will clip into backgrounds and get stuck or die inexplicably by walking into an undesignated kill box.
To me, this jank and the very 90’s comics style of the game is fascinating in its mix of the embarrassing and cool. The character creation screen is really hard to get past with every combination making your avatar into a muscled lunkhead with tribal tattoos, dreadlocks or a bad mohawk.
But when you actually start playing the game, the enemy and monster design is memorable and interesting. The idea of repurposing undead and making them into weapons of war is probably not unique to this game but the way it’s done here is quite stylish. A lot of the enemies have as much personality as the best enemies in “Dark Souls”. The red dual axe wielding warriors of Veridian come across like cocky football quarterbacks who charge at you and then will crash into walls if you sidestep them just right. In Arlen, the undead cyborgs in black metal armor bark unintelligible digitized nonsense at you as they fire energy cannons.
In the regressive times of the pandemic, I got into collecting action figures, a hobby that lasted until I ran out of places to put them. There’s something especially about “Dark Souls 2” where the enemies have a look not unlike action figures that you dreamed of as a child. Immortal Unchained shares this look of the enemies who have a robotic-knight-with- assault- rifle look that is incredibly cheesy yet aesthetically enjoyable to me.
It’s unfortunate that you can’t pick up enemy armor sets because that’s one of the fun things about dark souls. Sadly, the fashion souls here is limited to applying different patterns to your character which ends up being hard to notice. Given that your character looks so much less cool than the enemies it would have been nice to cosplay as them.
The enemies also have movesets worthy of Fromsoft’s better enemies. Some of them are fiendish tricky with some greatshield enemies in Apexion do a combined shield bash and a delayed laser shot that I could not figure out how to dodge. But the patterns are intelligible given enough time and It’s tremendous fun to dodge behind an enemy, fire at their exposed energy core on their back and do massive damage.
Another thing I could see seasoned FPS players getting into is targeting specific limbs of enemies. I am not skilled enough with mouse and keyboard but given that you can target enemy legs or blow off their weapon arms, I can imagine this being really fun especially in that sniper rifles are so powerful in this game.
The level design in “Immortal unchained” is particularly brutal, at times this game feels not unlike a firefight in the levels of stress it puts the player through. Most enemies have range weapons and can shoot at you from fairly far away. As well, enemies will often be positioned above you and have an advantage in targeting you. If you happen to pick up a character with a low “toughness” stat, your healthbar can be shredded within a couple of seconds. (For some reason: the game hides the stat that increases health in the middle of your character page and makes it easy to miss.)
You can see why the game is so disliked as the first difficulty jump, Veridian, is incredibly punishing. A combination of assault rifle wielding grunts backed up by charging axe wielders will make a mess of you before you can even get to the first bonfire. The area is also gigantic with 4 different subsections and a lot of space between each Obelisk (the game’s term for bonfires). These spaces are filled with a profusion of enemies worthy of post-“Scholar of the First Sin” Dark Souls 2.
This starts a theme that will run throughout the game, each area will have a really tough gauntlet that must be survived to get to the next bonfire. This can be gratifying but “Dark Souls“ wasn’t so heavy handed with the tension. Even Dark Souls knew when to provide you with an easy challenge and when to throw a roadblock in your way. If the entire game becomes roadblock after roadblock, then you start to question why you are still trying to play it.
At times in “Immortal Unchained”, you can feel like you are running in place or barely crawling between Obelisks. This can feel incredibly unfair in early areas like Veridian where several key bonfires are well-hidden. This is fun when you go off the beaten path and discover them. If you don’t it can seem as if the game is throwing a sadistic amount of enemies at you with no chance to replenish resources. While “Immortal Unchained” isn’t one of the hardest souls games out there, it tests how much frustration a player should have to undergo before the game goes from a challenge to a stressful chore to complete.
Veridian is the first choke point, but this is offset by it being such a unique looking area, a lush tropical forest swarming with guerilla fighters. However, the fact that is so huge and the fact that you have to backtrack all the way to the entrance of the area is a bit of a tough pill to swallow. Much like “Dark Souls”, the ability to fast travel is unlocked after the midpoint of the game; this ends up adding a lot of extra frustration as it feels like a punishment that rather than being able to leave a tough area after defeating a boss, you end up having to repeat at least half of it on your way back.
Then comes Apexion which is probably one of the best-looking areas of early game, where the futuristic trappings come more to the forefront where you’re presented with a desolate rainswept city in the sky. Here and the later area, the senate halls, have an effective turn of having your character walk through once luxurious living quarters reduced to some dusty furnishing and a ton of screens on the blink. The unspecified apocalypse has destroyed the technology that would have created luxury, and all is unusable.
Unfortunately, on the Steam Deck performance would tend to tank here slowing to a crawl of 15 or 20 frames per second, I’m guessing because of optimization issues.
Apexion is the point where the game really begins to be quite unfair and not unfair in a fun way. In general, the game tends to abuse its sci-fi conceit by having enemies warp in or come out of the ground as you approach. This to me is already a bit of an issue as the “Dark Souls” series (while not having ambushes completely off the table) generally plays somewhat fair in letting you take a look ahead of you and have some idea of how many enemies you will have to contend with.
But here this informal agreement is further violated as you start having teleporting sniper enemies that will not only teleport behind you, but they will do a delayed attack that takes 75% of your health bar. I had struggled in this area with my previous character that used shotguns and sniper rifles weapons that both do huge amounts of damage. But it was pretty much impossible with my assault rifle build because my damage output was so low.
And despite having gotten past this area on an earlier playthrough, I gave up here. The issue is that the build I was using this time around was one of the weakest in the game. I had thought that specializing in assault rifles, pistols and sub-machine guns would be fun but at the stage it was almost impossible to progress. This may be an issue with it being a smaller studio, even Fromsoft has often struggled with balancing a variety of classes.
From what I remember as well, rather than the teleporting snipers being an anomaly in the rest of the game, the teleporting enemies become even more common and have even more powerful attacks including some of them firing sticky bombs at you which can one-shot you.
After you beat the first three areas to put the network online again, you return to more complex areas within the doorway off of the first area. Again, Veridian is a standout here with a tough area that is part of a rainforest that has all been burned down in combat. The boss in this area is one of the most interesting and toughest in the game, Arlen a grotesque misshapen tree monster.
On my first playthrough, I made it to the last area of the game and then gave up because it’s a frustrating design where you have to warp from one place to another and I soon got hopelessly lost. A common mistake made by these indie soulslikes is not having a map but one of the reasons Fromsoft mostly has been able to do without one is the areas in their game are incredibly memorable and have many landmarks. Immortal Unchained has some sections with clear landmarks but the majority are places that you can get easily lost in.
So, I feel somewhat conflicted on this piece in the series, I guess I came not to praise “Immortal Unchained” but to bury it. The problem with replaying games for this series is that frustration can override nostalgia, and this is what happened here. Nevertheless, I think if you try out “Immortal Unchained” you’ll be fascinated at least before you are ultimately repulsed.