Unknown 9: Awakening Review (Mostly Harmless)
I REALLY miss when hot chicks in video games were the norm rather than the exception too, but taking a baseball bat to some random dude's Toyota isn't going to make the Ford plant reopen (yes I am a Boomer).
Anyway, the game's not great, not terrible. It's an Inversion/Dark Sector/Damnation/Timeshift, not a Ride to Hell/Kong:Skull Island/Gollum/Left Alive/Dustborn. I bought it on deep bargain bin discount ($12) and thought it was ok for that price. It's one of those games which makes you think the Steam review system really needs a "thumbs sideways".
As has been said many times before, it's Uncharted but with Souls-lite melee combat rather than guns, in which you basically play an Indian Jedi. Eastern mysticism was huge among the late 19th century/ early 20th century Victorian crowd, so thematically the game is cohesive. However, it doesn't really do enough with its setting; it would have been much better if it had gone full pulp, men's adventure magazine, two-fisted tales, instead of its very mid "general audiences" aesthetic.
Game was apparently made by a bunch of Ubisoft alums with previous experience in Assassin's Creed and Far Cry. It's competently made but makes a bunch of rookie mistakes that do lower the fun quite a lot.
Graphically the game's a step behind the times. It looks more like a game from 2017-2019 rather than one from 2024. Still, it doesn't look horrible. I still play games from the 90's and 00's, so I don't care that much.
Gameplay makes a very poor first impression, as you don't get your full suite of powers until more than 1/3rd of the way through the game, until which combat just isn't that great. This seems to be to encourage you to use stealth early on, but the early stealth is pretty uninspired. Once you do get all your powers it is pretty fun to combo them in different ways to clear an area. Unfortunately, without the powers, the basic combat just doesn't click very well.
You can't spam the dodge button and have to actually time your dodges based on the enemy's attack animation. This is fine, clearly they expect skill from you, but the implementation is poor; enemy tells are poor, it feels like there's input delay on the dodge, dodge/parry canceling attack animations is extremely inconsistent while your attacks don't interrupt the enemy's own animations. Overall the controls feel mushy and loose. I played this game back-to-back with Wanted: Dead, and Wanted: Dead had WAY tighter and better controls even if it was jankier. However, it doesn't actually matter, because the difficulty isn't punishing at all; you have nearly infinite heals and on Normal difficulty you can just mostly trade damage with enemies and still do fine up until the final boss. The game would have been way more rewarding if the combat was very slightly less forgiving but the controls and gameplay were much tighter and responsive.
There are a bunch of other rookie flaws, like the fact your bracelets light up to let you know a health/mana upgrade is nearby, but they also light up in dark areas, which is very confusing. Loading a save game also completely deletes all your collectible progress from replaying earlier chapters, not just for that save point. No other game does that, why would you do that? There are also not enough skill points to purchase all skill upgrades, but no way to re-spec your skills.
The game is pretty linear, but I don't mind that. I'll take a shorter, linear game over something like Forspoken or Star Wars: Outlaws where massive amounts of money were spent on a big, empty open world that's mostly pointless to the core of the game. One thing I do like about Unknown 9 is that it doesn't overdo it on the climbing and platforming, unlike a lot of games that try to ape Uncharted.
Despite all my complaints, the game is generally decently made. Compared to Wanted: Dead, I'd say Unknown 9 was more professionally made, but Wanted: Dead was more fun.
I guess I'm only giving the game a thumbs up because I play (and enjoy) a lot of indie and euro jank so a completely mid big studio game is still decent by comparison. I think for most people, they have no reason to play this when they could be playing something like Uncharted or Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia instead. At the same time, the game is ok and not some kind of trainwreck like some people are making it out to be, so there's that. I disagree with A LOT of the creative decisions that have been made in the pop culture space over the last 10 years or so, but I recognize the people who made this game had nothing to do with most of that.