Unyielder
Review
Boss Rush Movement FPS
by JamesWorcester
reviewed on PC
Boss Rush Mayhem
Unyielder combines a pure FPS boss rush with roguelite mechanics, lite looter-shooter features and a flowing movement system that will have you blazing a trail through boss arenas. Unlike most first-person shooters, Unyielder largely focuses its combat on countering bosses with near frame-perfect timings, making each boss fight focused on memorising attack patterns and reacting proactively and exceptionally quickly. If done correctly, bosses can be stunned with a perfectly timed ranged Countershift shot or melee Parry, dropping vital health and ammunition and providing a window to damage them until you can initiate a melee Phase Break coup de grace. With a class system, skill trees, perk cards, a variety of ranged and melee weaponry and the randomness of roguelite mechanics, each run will have you dashing, sliding and jumping in an endless pursuit of mastery.
Mach Speed Movement
The first thing I noticed about Unyielder was its incredibly satisfying and reactive movement system. With a very quickly refilling stamina bar, you can quickly dash in any direction, even while in the air, and this ability to dodge from side-to-side so quickly means that almost every attack from every boss is avoidable and can be reacted to. Similarly, you can gain incredible speed by infinitely sliding across arenas, providing the ability to rapidly move around and reposition. Your starting class also enables you to swing around levels with a grappling hook, allowing more vertical movement options.
Counter Combat
The counter focused combat system is something that I haven't encountered much in first person shooters. Normally I'm used to wailing away at boss health bars until they keel over, however doing so in Unyielder will simply mean that you will run out of ammo and your roguelite run will be over unless you can get off a clutch Parry. This makes the combat more of a dance than a deathmatch as you dash around to avoid fire until a very small window opens for you. I haven't imbibed in many fighting games over the years, but some of these windows require almost frame-perfect precision, and although some bosses felt fair and balanced, I found others to be frustrating almost purely because it was so hard to react in the time required, causing me to run out of ammo and be unable to continue. Overall though, it did motivate me to achieve high style ranks and get good, and once I'd accumulated enough perks and weapons with desirable traits in a run, I could really enjoy myself.
Roguelite Reliquary
For a roguelite to succeed in bringing a player back and back again, it must rely on several interesting interconnected systems combined with a level of randomness to foster replayability. Unyielder does this through a few different systems to varying degrees of success. The first is the class system, and although I was unable to progress enough through the unyielding difficulty curve to unlock more than the starting Gatling class, based off the Gatling tree there is a reasonable level of complexity in advancing in a class tree, providing both passive and functional changes to how the class plays. The Universal Mastery tree is a lot less interesting, and allows you to increase your perk, gunnery, vitality and mobility mastery. These are all trees that provide passive bonuses, with most being very uninteresting such as increasing your health, shields or ammo capacity by 10%. The mild exception to this is the perk mastery tree, where you can increase the tier of roguelite perk cards that drop from bosses, which I found exceptionally powerful.
The perk cards are quite interesting, however. When you start a run, you pick a suit of three different types of perk cards that will drop during your run, which include Sorcerer, Fearless, Undying, Daring, Grandmaster and Pacifist. When you kill a boss, you get a new weapon, and you can select from one of three perk cards which can provide quite powerful gameplay changing functionality. The weapon that you loot to add to your loadout will similarly have different random attributes, such as increased reload speed around enemies, a non-Euclidean magazine, and an instant reload on Countershift; with light, heavy, burn, special and melee weapons available. Weapons can behave differently when aiming down sights, providing additional loadout flexibility.
The Bosses
The bosses are a mixed bag. Some, such as the Hatchling, Hopper and Dredger are a great introduction to the game and very forgiving with their flashing Countershift indicators. However, when I got to bosses such as the Monolith and Surveyors, I found that I often couldn't react in the window required. The worst boss, who was clearly bugged, was the Hermit, and it took me 40 minutes of wailing against him in an uninteresting fight where he stayed in the same spot and didn't do much of anything. In another session, although I was having a great run at the time with the soundtrack pumping and pushing me forwards, once I got to the first special boss, Daiymo Rain, I just got obliterated and didn't really understand the fight. At other times, bosses glitched through walls and floors, limiting enjoyability, and I found the arenas to be bland and uninspired.
Final Thoughts
Unyielder is an interesting and somewhat masochistic game. It has a lot of potential, and I experienced a lot of enjoyment and a lot of frustration playing it. I found the difficulty level to be very punishing, just from a reaction time point of view, and frequently got frustrated because the harder bosses seemed almost impossible to counter correctly. When I managed to get some powerful weapons or perks, I could do really well but often couldn't find myself getting through more than six or seven bosses in a row. It feels like with enough tuning and some more development, Unyielder could turn into a really polished gem. Despite that, I did have fun with it, particularly with the movement and feel of weaponry.
As always, follow Hooked Gamers on Instagram for news updates, reviews, competitions and more.
7.0
fun score
Pros
Fluid movement, feel of weaponry, satisfying counters
Cons
Punishing difficulty, bugs, gameplay loop tuning
