Overall, I enjoyed playing UnEpic. I thought the game’s premise was interesting and found the controls to be responsive enough while I explored the castle, occasionally discovering hidden walls, tripping over traps, and learning how to defeat all of the inhabitants. There’s a lot of flexibility in customizing your build as you level-up and allocate skill points, so everyone’s playthrough can be slightly or substantially different, and your particular build can have a dramatic effect on how difficult or easy certain bosses and enemies are. (Thankfully, there’s a sidequest that will give you a one-time option of re-spec’ing your skill points if you find that you’ve chosen poorly.) In addition, the game has random loot drops, a couple of unique weapons that you can earn through sidequests, and offers a selection of different pets to alternate between (each with a unique attack), so there’s a fair amount of choice and variety. Despite its enjoyable gameplay, though, the game has a few notable flaws. While there’s a lot of voice acting, the character you play is unlikeable and obnoxious, and I found the humor to be completely lacking and often lowbrow and crude with its fart and sex jokes (with one at the very end being downright distasteful). I’m sorry, but there was absolutely no reason for this game to bring up rape, nor do I feel that that’s a topic that should be joked about. The game also resorted to some arguably “cheap” mechanics toward the end in an attempt to add variety to the gameplay, but rather than make the game more interesting or challenging, I personally found that these changes only added annoyances.
I almost picked this one up but ended up giving it a pass after seeing how cringey the dialogue was. Ghost 1.0 seems a bit better in that regard, though I’ve only played it for a few hours.
Still, UnEpic’s build flexibility sounds pretty nice. I might have to take a second look at it.
The build flexibility was nice in the sense that customizing your character definitely has an impact on the game. For example, you might come across a very nice weapon that you can’t use yet because you don’t have enough skill points allocated to that weapon type… BUT, if you spend those points to use that weapon, you may not have enough points to wear better armor, make better potions, or learn more powerful spells, since you only get a limited number of skill points per level (and realistically, will only get to about level 15-ish by the end of the game). It gives you meaningful choices that way and can vary the way you approach the game, which is nice (a heavily-armored melee character will have an easier time with certain enemies and areas, but a tougher time with others when compared to a robe-wearing fire caster, for example). In some ways, though, it seems to cater to those who have already played the game, because you don’t get access to some of the schools of magic and the highest level spells until the very end of the game, so you can’t really take advantage of those unless you already knew in advancing that you were building your character for them and saved up the necessary skill points.
Some of the dialogue is definitely cringe-worthy and/or needlessly inappropriate, and at least for me, the attempts at humor failed miserably, so it only brought the game down. It got to the point that I sighed every time I saw dialogue pop up again, and I wished I had known that I could have disabled the actual voice-overs, because the main character annoyed me that much. Having never played Ghost 1.0, I can’t compare these two games, but between the dialogue and some of the more tedious mechanics in the later stages of the game, I’d personally recommend passing on UnEpic.
Massive well done for finishing Unepic, it was a SG win for me too and there was so much about it that annoyed me that put me very close at times to giving up… so I know what you’ve went through! I just had a look back at the post I made at the time and the trauma it caused me is flooding back lol, the boss that caused you to empty your potions and teleport you away right before you kill was especially horrible for me! And some of the enemies towards the end too that were invisible, or could steal your weapons, and the final fight too… eugh. Well done again :P
Thanks, but I don’t consider it to be that much of an accomplishment; I’m just stubborn and didn’t want to leave the game unfinished. ;)
I just looked up your review on it, and completely agree. It’s sad because the game did a lot of things right and I did have fun with most of it. On one hand, I give the developer credit for “thinking outside the box” by doing some creative changes to the enemies rather than just giving them more hitpoints and higher damage, but… like you said, it just made parts of the game tedious and/or annoying, and I can’t personally recommend this one because the closer I got to the end, the less I enjoyed it and just wanted to be done with it.