Unalive 010

Genre: 2-Stick Shooter / Roguelike

Players: 1

.

Review:

Unalive 010 is a 2-Stick Shooter and Roguelike released on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch in 2023 (though as of this writing, the PC version of the game appears to be no longer available). This game is a sequel to the 2017 PC game Unalive and seems to feature a similar premise – you are the sole survivor of a terrible accident in a research laboratory creating biological weapons who must now grab a gun and shoot your way out through a randomly-generated series of rooms filled with hostile monsters.

Unalive 010 starts off on the wrong foot by blurting out all the game’s mechanics in a single page of text that is a poor substitute for a tutorial. There’s a safe room with machines you can use to make upgrades, but you don’t start with any capacity to create those upgrades, so it seems like you’re being frontloaded with a bunch of useless information when it might be better to give the player this information when they can actually make use of it.

This is one of the earliest signs of just how sloppy Unalive 010’s design is, though there are certainly more. The game’s 3D visuals are poorly-constructed and poorly-animated, and I strongly suspect that at least some elements here are purchased assets. Everything here gives off a cheap and amateurish feel, and this hardly matches with the serious and ominous tone that the game is trying to go for.

Sadly, the gameplay doesn’t make up for these flaws. Hit detection is a bit of a crapshoot, with enemy hitboxes often being much smaller than the enemy itself. What’s worse, enemy AI is pretty dumb, and the old standby of either running backwards while shooting a charging enemy or running in circles will be your main go-to here.

And despite the Roguelike nature of the game, you won’t be getting particularly interesting upgrades here. Your weapon fires agonizingly slowly, and while upgrades will slightly increase its power and firing speed, it never becomes anything satisfying or even interesting. You do at least get a drone to assist in your fighting, but the tedious need to recharge the drone at charging stations seems purposefully designed to sap any fun out of that part of the game.

If it wasn’t for the poor graphics and sloppy game design, I suppose Unalive 010 could have possibly been a mediocre, boring 2-Stick Shooter Roguelike. However, even if that were the case, why would you play this game? The Nintendo Switch has tons of great 2-Stick Shooters, Roguelikes, and 2-Stick Shooter Roguelikes. Play one of those other games instead.

tl;dr – Unalive 010 is a 2-Stick Shooter and Roguelike where players take the role of a survivor of a research laboratory accident who must shoot your way out through randomly-generated rooms filled with monsters. This game is dreadfully ugly, monotonous, has bad hit detection, issues with its non-tutorial tutorial, and it is simply not fun to fire your slow, boring gun in this game. You have countless better options for this sort of game on Nintendo Switch, play one of those games instead.

Grade: D

.

This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2023 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: The “Why is this taking so much space on my memory card!?” Award (1.69GB)

.

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Ilya Zverev, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}