UnEpic Review

Marketing news: “rogue-like elements” are “RPG elements” for indie games. While mainstream projects try to showcase their Depth and Interest by adding some role-playing choices and distributing skill points from level-ups to character parameters, the flourishing world of Independents loves to slap procedurally generated everything on the labels of their games.

UnEpic was supposed to be from the same wonderful cohort, and there were even some news about it, but it turned out that there is nothing like that in the single-player campaign. Several repeated starts of the single-player campaign revealed that the single-player dungeons of this two-dimensional fantasy hybrid of Metroid and Dungeon Crawler are completely sealed together with quests and other things, and the Will of Chance here will only play a role in the drop of various items from monsters.

Alas. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the announcements.

…but now it seems to me that Russians are behind all the projects on kickstarter.com. By the time the game was released on Steam, UnEpic still didn’t have cooperative multiplayer (where else can you find a game with a ton of loot but without multiplayer?), but there were already Russian-language interfaces, dialogues, and everything else. You don’t expect such a miracle a second time, and it catches up with you for the second time in a row with a swift eadorian magical jack.

Yes, the patented humor is also present.

However, the last one was announced almost as the main joke of the game. It’s one thing when you run around two-dimensional corridors in search of a +5 sword, and it’s probably a completely different thing when you manage to do quests involving orcs and introduce yourself to the locals first as Thrall, then as Zeratul, then as Anakin, then as someone else like the aforementioned personalities.

In general, it’s all a matter of taste. I was even warned, there was even a video with a plot twist, where the main character plays a DnD party and then teleports from the toilet to a magical world. That’s what I was waiting for.

Among other things, this game should be bought, after all. When dozens of rogue-likes of all levels of hardcore suddenly flash before your eyes, you need to stand out from the crowd. This one looks like Minecraft, there we have the ideological sequel Terraria, and here we have various quality vulgar jokes to let off steam. It’s sinful, the orc jokes were funny. You might like it, but if anything, we warned you.

And the gameplay, meanwhile, is ordinary…

Exactly ordinary. It’s very difficult to say anything about it. There was a time not long ago when a developer could release a simple 2D platformer without anything else, and everyone would be happy, release Outland, and everyone would go crazy with happiness. That time has passed – we already have Fez, the infamous Terraria, the released-on-computers La-Mulana (we’ll talk about it separately sometime in the future), there’s even the excellent Treasure Adventure Game, which will soon be re-released, this time for money, but with extras.

In UnEpic, we jump on platforms, fight monsters and bosses in the classic way, buy things from shopkeepers, brew potions, find items, and solve simple puzzles. That’s how it goes.

You know, that’s what disappoints in the game. There are jumps and fights, but they’re not hardcore arcade enough (see Super House of Dead Ninjas) to turn into an exciting thrill ride. Rare items drop, but they’re like fake Christmas ornaments; they don’t really change the picture, there’s no festive joy from them, what can you do. After sipping the local potion mechanics, you start vaguely remembering where the regeneration plague came from: Unepic-style potions should be banned medieval-style, with limb amputations for the designers, they generate so much stupid malice and hatred in critical moments. The puzzles are okay, but they don’t stand out against the aforementioned background, so it’s hard to consider them as strengths.

But as it is known, a whole is more than just the sum of its parts, and the gaming machine smoothly rolls back its mandatory program without any glitches. You know, there are things like that, nothing particularly special about them, but you can still jump around, fight, and not get frustrated with silly game mechanics. For some, in the end, it turns out to be neither fish nor fowl, but someone might actually like it.

***

To be honest, I really wanted to give Unepic a highly positive rating right after watching the first video. A retro 2D adventure with elements that is aware of being a retro 2D adventure with elements, and intentionally plays on this feature? Give me two, please, just make the second one even more retro, with even more elements, more action, and less filler.