Immortal: Unchained is a brilliant idea, but it's poorly executed. The concept is simple: it's kinda like Dark Souls but with guns. The gameplay revolves around dodging and shooting; so enemies shoot at you, you dodge their shots, and then you try and shoot their weak spot, which is usually some glowing part on them, often on the back. Each enemy has interesting weaknesses to exploit, or you have to bait certain attacks/movements so that the weak spot is revealed. Bosses offer more of this kind of thing but on a grand scale. The way the gameplay feels and performs, it's original and it's quite a lot of fun (at first). It has bonfire things, a stamina bar, RPG-stats you can level, and a large array of weapons to choose from (shotguns, pistols, sniper rifles, machine guns, etc).

The world of Immortal: Unchained is creative and memorable. The setting is sci-fi, but instead of your tired old tropes of the genre, this world is one of horror sci-fi, so think H R Giger, Alien or Hellraiser, etc. The game is split into a bunch of worlds and each is really well done, from surreal jungles, apocalyptic hellscapes, and these cold industrial sky scrapers carved from the mountains. The setting is quite otherworldly, terrifying and dreamlike at times, the art direction is superb. The story is really fascinating too, and while I didn't quite follow the lore, there's a bunch of characters and weird apocalyptic stuff going on, I was into it when I was paying attention.

Despite all these promising elements, the game has some glaring issues. I feel as though the gameplay, the combat, it could work, in theory, but they didn't quite pull it off. The first 10 hours of the game, I had a ball, thought it was brilliant. But as you dive deeper, the game is more of a grind. Some of these later enemies can kill you in one hit, and yet you have to headshot them 30 times with a fully-upgraded sniper rifle, really poor balancing. It becomes rather repetitive and tiresome, especially when they're teleporting around like crazy in the later areas. It's this problem that Souls-ripoff games often have: they think that you can improve the "fun" by just adding multipliers to enemy HP and damage. It kind of misses the point. Like, you can take Skyrim and make all the enemies one-shot you, and give them all a million HP, but that's not Dark Souls, rather, that's an unplayable dumpster fire. Some enemies just don't give you any opportunity to get behind them or take advantage of their weaknesses, so it's just not fun to fight them, and you end up running past scores of enemies because killing them is so boring. They really needed some kind of parry mechanic, or a stun, or some way to deliver a visceral blow, to make the combat more satisfying.

I have some other qualms with the aesthetic choices, which was sad because they actually nailed it most of the time. Firstly, there's some pretty awful cinematic orchestral music playing the whole time you're playing. If you're going to ripoff Dark Souls, do it properly by leaving it silent apart from bosses. The music actually killed the atmosphere for me, it would have been better to just have eerie cackles and rain and such ambient noises. Another problem is the boring enemy designs: there were just too many big humanoid dudes in armour with shields. Come on guys, at least throw a spider enemy or a slime or anything in there.. it doesn't have to be creative, just give me a robot lizard or flying creature or something. But no, there's about 20 enemy types, and they're all buff cyborg dudes in armour, all humanoid, even the bosses. The enemies actually seem out of place, given how creative and original the environments are.

Ultimately, I still like Immortal: Unchained, but perhaps I like the game that it could have been, rather than the game it actually was. The first 10 hours were fantastic and intensely enjoyable, so I got my money's worth, but I'm not sure whether I'd recommend this. It's a shame though, because the concept could work, but the devs failed to deliver in a few crucial aspects, and so crippled the experience entire.