Immortal: Unchained

Well this is another of those cases that i wish steam had a "Neutral" review option.
The good:
-Cool graphics
-Good amount of weapons and weapon types(even if some of them are pretty useless)
-Good amout of stats and build possibilties
-Overall cool map design(except for the last 2 maps, i will detail later)
-Amazing map exploration, the game really wants you to explore every corner of it.
-The story is pretty cool and the ending is really unexpected(wont spoil anything)
The neutral:
-The combat if a little clunky, but honestly it is easy to adapt
-As i mentioned before, there are some types of weapons that are so weak that dont even make sense, pistols and smgs
-Some enemies are pretty bad designed, it would need to have some improvements.
-The game have some balance problems, most on the weapons side, some weapons felt too OP and some too useless
The bad:
-As i mentioned before the 2 last maps felt REALLY uninspired and boring, there was sometimes that i was asking myself, "why i am still playing this?"
-It has some performance issues, i have a 10700k overclocked and a 3070 and sometimes my game was running at 40 fps
-The beginning of the game felt WAY harder than the ending, probably because you have better equips and etc, but i feel like it should be the opposite, as you get stronger the game should be harder, not easier.
-The bosses of this game are the worst, they are boring, easy and pretty dissapointing
I am letting a positive review because the game got a huge price cut, and right now is really cheap, for the price asked now i really think that it worth it, if you want something different and like difficult games, you will probably like this.

First few bosses and areas are gonna make you go "wtf is this shit" for sure, between your character's tank controls and the overall jankiness of things. For instance this is the kind of shooter where your crosshair lies to you if the enemy is closer than 5m, and bullets travel at the speed of a moonwalking toddler.
You'll soon find that this isn't a Soulslike as in DS3 or Remnant-like, more of a "2009 OG Demon's Souls with sci-fi guns but somehow clunkier"-like.
A few hours in tho, you'll discover just how much content and careful level design was put into this game. Most bosses I've seen are shit and/or cheap, almost everything is cheesable in some way, but the levels themselves are a treat, with a lot more features, ambushes and stuff to loot and fight than in your typical Soulslike.
Looting and character progression are a hate it or love it kinda deal: unforgiving if you commit to the wrong build, but very rewarding when you do it right.
If this is enough for you to scratch the itch, then go for it. It worked for me and I had just finished Sekiro before trying this, so at first I was in physical shock from the abyssal downgrade on all fronts. Yet I'm somehow 12 hours in with no intention of stopping, so I can't give this a thumbs down in good conscience.

Immortal Unchained has improved a lot since it first released. It received a lot of polish since then and is pretty underrated for what it is. Is it as good as Dark Souls? No. It's probably as good as The Surge, and it does a decent job of fusing a shooter with a souls-like.
I'd give it a 7/10, but has the potential of becoming an 8 with more polish and balancing (possibly with the assistance of mods).

On release I don't think this sold too well, it was pitched as Dark Souls with guns (which it is) and it's extreme difficulty and occasional flaw (some of the NPC animations are a little ropey, when they speak thier jaws just flap about for example) made critics give it some harsher than justified reviews. Given some time and a bit of grinding, Immortal Unchained is a great SoulsBourne homage and a great game.
Set in a distopian sci-fi universe, you start out in The Core, which serves as a very basic tutorial area and the central hub (think Firelink Shrine). From there there are 3 worlds to explore:
- Arden: A frozen surface covering a mechanical necropolis
- Veridian: Dense inhospitable jungle over rivers of lava and magma
- Apexion: The ruins of a civilisation with sprawling city scapes and decrepit urban environments
You have a huge arsenal to find of both ranged and melee weapons. The games is all about gunplay though so melee weapons are primarly a last ditch resort if you've found yourself in over your head and need to do some quick, massive damage and then run like hell. Guns come in various forms; pistols, SMG's, assault rifles, sniper rifles and launchers. There's different types of each with different attachments (silenced weapons come in handy for attacking without alerting nearby enemies), they come in different rarity from common to unique and on top of all that all weapons come in 1 of 5 flavours: Physical damage, Fire, Ice, Energy or Acid. Different enemies are resistant or vulnerable to different elements which you can generally work out by what colour they are or where in the game they are (ice world enemies are vulnerable to fire usually and so on). In most cases when you get a weapon it'll be crude and you can upgrade it 6 or 7 times to be perfect, this along with levelling up your character is the key to progressing in the game. Although you only start with one ranged and one melee weapon, you can unlock 3 additional ranged weapon slots as you progress.
Combat can take a minute to get used to (especially coming from Dark Souls) but is extremely satisfying once you get the hang of it. Click the right stick to lock onto an enemy when you are close enough and you can blast away at their centre of mass. If you don't lock on you can free aim to get head shots or blow off limbs, extremely handy when an enemy has a shield or a very powerful canon trained on your head. Blow off their gun arm and move in for the kill. Most enemies have both melee and ranged weapons too as well as a big glowing weak spot on their back so often times the best way to attack larger shielded enemies is to head shot them to weaken them, get in close, lock on, dodge the devastating melee attacks to get behind them and blast their weak spot. This combination of combat techniques is what makes it so much fun, it's not like simple FPS combat where you blast until they drop.
There's all sorts of consumables including health syringes and grenades which renew each time you spawn or reach a checkpoint and other items like ammo packs and defensive upgrades which are finite and have to be found in the world. There are 4 quick slots or you can use items directly from the inventory.
The game universe itself is massive and varied, on a par with Dark Souls in size. It's filled with secrets, shortcuts, items, chests and doors both locked and open, meaning you have to revisit areas once you have collected the required keys to get to the good stuff inside. Locked chests aren't just place holders for pickups like bits (think souls), ammo packs etc, they usually have stuff that you really want like rare weapons.
Bosses, there's a bunch and they're all over the place. There are optional bosses often sat behind those locked doors and main bosses. Wierdly the optional bosses are a lot harder than the main ones. Most of the main bosses I've been able to beat 1st attempt while the optionals have me rage quitting.
The storyline I haven't really been following to be honest. Space, prisoner, save the universe, something like that. But I've been paying attention enough to know there's some big twists and turns without spoiling it. Like Dark Souls, there's no mission log, you just have to remember what you've been told to understand what you're meant to be doing. Same with NPC's and their side quests. To make life easier, the main quest is like this:
Escape from the prison (tutorial), go to each of the worlds and find the Nexus (a big orb) and activate it. Activating all 3 unlocks fast travel and the path forward. From there you have to explore further into each world and defeat their bosses before going head to head with the end boss.
I've gone into so much detail as the game doesn't tell you how to play it, barring the very basics, and it is a great game once you get into it. So if you give it a chance, this will give you a head start.
Definitely recommended for SoulsBourne fans, overlook a couple of little flaws and a grind up front and you'll be rewarded with an excellent 'Dark Souls with guns'.

This game really does its best to make you hate it. It's like somebody said, "Hey, let's make a game that's basically Dark Souls, but more assholeish." Success! And yeah, I gave this a thumbs up. But I also waited until it was six bucks. This mofo has been on my wishlist for years now. It's not that I'm that cheap, honest, it's more that I sort of forgot about it until Steam was like, "hey, this game is six bucks, why don't you buy it at last?" Okay Steam, I will.
Anyway! If you're not familiar with Dark Souls, and I envy you, it's a game that prides itself on punishing the player. It's BDSM in game form, except it's not with a sexy leather nurse or whatever, it's an old raisin of a nun, a lady in her seventies who never had sex and hates you for your dirty thoughts. You're in her highschool class solving math problems and if goof up in the slightest she cracks you on the knuckles with a meter stick. Really hard, I mean, like bone bruise hard. It just hurts a lot in a totally unsexy way that lingers for a few days at least.
Dark Souls isn't hard, per se, regardless of what its ardent supporters say. The enemies are predictable, always in the same location, act in the same way, have a limited repertoire of attacks and telegraph them openly and obviously. It's just if you screw up your fight, you take a *lot* of damage. Like a weak, cannon-fodder opponent can take half your hitpoints off in a second, with a bit of bad luck on your part. CRACK! Meter stick to the knuckles! PAIN.
You blunder through new areas, looking for all the new opponents and traps, learning them one surprise death at a time, tasting the meter stick as you go. And everything respawns between your deaths, so you better enjoy the really basic fights because you'll be doing a lot of that.
This game isn't any different. It tries really hard to be Dark Souls, except GUNZ. All the gunz you get have really crap range, and aren't especially accurate *unless* you get into some kind of lockon range, in which case it feels serviceable. Though if you start using the lockon much, it will rapidly snap your camera to other opponents, will eff up your view if you get remotely close to an obstacle, and totally constrains how you move relative to your opponent--which gets awfully exciting if it changes your lockon target on you.
How exciting? This game has well-hidden traps like every-fuckin-where that hold you still while a melee dude comes up to teabag you, and sometimes just random infinitely deep pits that insta-kill you. SURPRISE! METER STICK TO THE KNUCKLES! PAIN.
Enemies with guns are remarkably good at leading their shots to hit you, no matter how fast you are. Try to run past one, you're just gonna eat a RIFLE BURS. Oh look, here's the fucking meter stick.
So you want to play it slow and cautiously, except any enemy with a gun outranges you and has no ammunition worries. While you can return fire if you're not *too* far, if you're outside of the totally poor lockon range, you have to carefully manage your fire, control the recoil, etc. They'll be blasting at you the whole time you spend a lot of time dodging, so it can be really annoying to deal with. You do have ammo worries, though, so you can't afford too many of these long-range plinkathons. You may have to run past some guys. Watch out for traps and pits as you sprint, with the added bonus of also being mindful of RIFLE BURS or it's the meter stick again for you.
And when you die, and you will die, you drop all your carried space-cash, which also doubles as XP. And if you die again before picking up your dropped bux, you lose it forever. Look, it's the meter stick a-gain.
Seriously, the game is soooo annoying.
Yeah, okay, if you get into a sniper rifle early you can just hang way back, play Hunt the Pixel, find their little pixelly heads and click on 'em. Gee Jay. You have too little ammo to not play hunt-the-pixel, so I hope you like that sort of gameplay. If you chose a non-sniper class, you're going to be grinding a lot to equip one because you probably statted yourself up for your rocket shotgun or whatever. I tried it, I gave up on it, and preferred to take my chances with pits, traps and BURS.
I have a lot of negatives about this game, it's true. But I've put some time into playing it, and I'll probably go back for some more. Why? It looks kinda nice, the plot is thinly-disguised Scandinavian mythology, and everything that isn't you is crazy high tech to the point of incomprehensibility, may as well be magic. Even the undead are cyborgs. I love it. The terrain is bizarrely entertaining and just nice to look at, surprise deathpits and metersticks-to-the-knuckles notwithstanding.
So I might finish it. I'm not doing much else for a couple weeks. But I suspect it will be with a perpetual question in the back of my mind, "Why am I doing this to myself? Do I have a thing for old nuns?" That thought is going to trouble me for days.

Immortal Unchained is weird and a bit goofy but really captures the feeling of a soulslike with guns instead of swords. The gameplay can be tough and knotty but it really is effective.

The ONLY souls-like that really suit this title I've tried so far.
An incredible opera from an indie devs team.
Amazing gameplay, challenging as it's supposed to be, almost always greatly rewarding (some chests might need better items drop rate increased) with the addition of some interesting new mechanics:
Guns as main weapons is the most obvious, new skills with a different way of scaling them into character bonuses and abilities (example vitality does not only increase your health pool but also your steadiness during fights), plus a totally different system of passive and armor perks.
Set into a distopian future it has really his own touch, and dive really deep into the history of the worlds, bosses and NPCs and you can explore the narration as you wish, fact that most of the lore-explaining scripts you find troughout the levels remain in your inventory.
Great ambient and levels design, plenty of interconnections between them, hidden paths and rare but wisely positioned checkpoins, encouraging exploration and try-harding a bit.
My playtime (27hrs) is referred to a single run, and I din't even completed all the optional stuff.
This game is in many good ways a good alternative/successor of the original Dark Souls.
Is not perfect (minor graphical glitches, couple of areas are really obnoxious, some enemies are dumb some ore OP just like DS) but it's definitely UNDER-RATED.
If your a souls fan don't waste your time with Code Vein anime bulls**t, nor Shattered: Tale of the Forgotten King stupid platforming addition, both missing the proper gameplay action and the feeling of a souls-like, and get this game instead.