RPG Genre Discussion Thread

[lestatdark]

We brought out Skeeuk :D.

Started playing one of my Winter Steam sales purchases, Immortal Unchained. For anyone interested, it fuses the typical game-play of a TPS game with the overall structure of a soulsbourne game and also adds some sprinkles of metroidvania elements into the mix.

Your character build is still heavily reliant on how you invest in the main attributes in this game (Strength, Finesse, Perception, Agility, Toughness, Endurance, Expertise & Insight) which in turn affect not only how much the stats of your character scale individually , but also have some additional bonuses like faster Reload speed, faster Dodge, higher health recovered when using med packs, etc.).

Instead of focusing on the typical melee weapon assortment of other soulsbourne games, on this game your main weapon types are guns. Distributed between Primary (Assault Rifles, Auto Shotguns, Launchers, Sniper Rifles and Compact Guns), Secondary (SMG, Pistols & Shotguns) and melee weapons (which in this game are only sort of backup weapons when you're out of bullets), you can plan a really wide variety of different builds, depending on how you want to focus your character on.

The way enemies are handled in this game also plays into this build variety pretty well. Most enemies have glaring weak-spots, like their head or big orange reactor-like thingies on their backs, so you can play as a high-risk/high-reward kind of character that's always up close in shotgun range while falling back to their melee weapon should; you can be a mid-range kind of character with your Assault Rifles/SMGs keeping enemies at bay; you can be a stealthy sniper picking off enemies before they can see you or should any of these fail, you can fall back to your melee weapon as well.

Keeping up with the soulsbourne theme, there's a central hub area linking all of the other areas in the game (which is only accessible after passing through a sort of tutorial area). Even though all areas in the game are split between 3 different planets, there's elements linking all of them (like portals locked behind doors that require certain types of rare key items).

Alongside those portals and keys, another metroidvania aspect of the game is the gradual unlocking of special bonuses for your armor. Instead of having different armor sets, you have armor shrines scattered all through the game that unlock more functions for your armor, along a nifty visual bonus of adding more armor layers to your character avatar (you start "naked" and with every armor shrine you unlock you gain another layer of armor).

I would recommend this game for someone that enjoys the Souls genre games and who is looking for a different take on the experience. While the game does have quite some flaws (there are some balancing issues, the 3rd planet suffers from a severe difficulty spike when it throws teleporting snipers into the mix, some weapons completely outclass others for a large portion of the game, the gameplay can be a bit clunky & clumsy at first and it takes a while to get the hang of it), there's a lot of variety to keep things fresh which also force you to rethink your strategies and your approach and it lives up to the whole "git gud" spirit of the souls-genre.