Immortal: Unchained

Immortal Unchained is an exercise in frustration, with seemingly every single gameplay mechanic specifically designed to annoy the hell out of me. What’s even more upsetting is that the exploration and overall level design are actually not bad, but the atrocious gameplay overshadows just about everything good the game has to offer. I came into Immortal Unchained with relatively high hopes. The Remnant series have proved twice now that it’s possible to make a soulslike with guns, and I really enjoyed both of them. They work because they are designed as third-person shooters first and foremost, with some soulslike elements tacked on. Locking-on to an enemy is simple, the aim assist is just enough to help you pull off some of those tricky headshots, and the entire thing is fast and snappy. Immortal Unchained made the terrible choice of doing the complete opposite; i.e take the lock-on and targeting mechanics from Dark Souls and attempt to adapt them to ranged combat. And it doesn’t work at all. Let me explain. Basically, you have two ways you can shoot at enemies, either by free aiming, or by locking on with the right stick. Now, all the enemies have weak spots you want to tr…

10/10 would dark souls 1 with guns again.

Tough game to recommend, if you can even consider that. It is a “souls-like” with guns that suffers from lack of polish and numerous bugs or glitches. I gave the game a fair shot and completed a full playthrough but it took me some effort to do so as the core gameplay becomes repetitive within first hour and doesn’t get much better later on. There’s a lot of odd design decisions that make combat more frustrating than fun, for example there are snipers that can teleport and shoot you from behind within less than 1 second, every ~5th enemy also has some sort of bulletproof shield that forces you to to flank them or aim for barely exposed head or feet. It wouldn’t be a problem in itself if they didn’t spawn in narrow corridors or had 2-3 earlier mentioned snipers to back them up. There’s also zombies with broken melee hitboxes (you get hit even if you stand 1.5m away from them), exploding enemies spawning from the ground around you (etc.), the just just goes on. And since you fight groups of them 80% of the time there’s no reason to use other weapon than a sniper rifle that can hit most targets beyond their engagement range. Core game progression focuses on improving your stats in…

Not fun at all game needs alot of correction and bug fixes before i consider it a solid pc game

I feel like a lot of people didn't give this game enough of a fair shot when it was released in 2018. Playing this today I can say I genuinely enjoyed my time with this game even though it was not a perfect experience. It's a bit rough around the edges, but I loved the core gameplay loop so much it carried me through the game. This game was instantly improved for me by two options: 1. Remaping the controls (using Steam-input) to something akin to Remant: From the Ashes 2. Enabling Auto-aim in the options menu. The "raw" aiming felt very floaty no matter how much tweaking I did. With Auto-aim enabled, the challenge comes from dealing with the enemies and their response to your actions, not fighting with the right thumbstick to place the crosshair where you want it. The action feels very reminiscent of Metroid Prime this way. The game is obviously very challenging and "souls-like", but in particular it has very sharp difficulty spike once you enter the second area. This is where I believe most people drop out of the game. If you can stick with it, get better loot/upgrades, advance your skill in the game, I believe the game is certainly worth experiencing.

The controls are horrible. Some might like it though.