UNBEATABLE

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phenomenal experience, if you somewhat like rhythm games i would try to give this a shot

A game with a story that struggles to find any kind of footing to make itself meaningful paired with one of my favorite rhythm games I've ever played. UNBEATABLE (yes, all caps) is a game that's been in development for 7 long years and for the most part you can tell that they've been developing this game for that long. Both in terms of quality additions and in terms of feeling like this game has had 7 years worth of ideas thrown into one pot and stirred for that long. For the most part the game is split into two halves, half one is the story which seems to be the game's primary focus as most of the promotional material and the entire store page focuses on the story above all else. Meaning to the developer's even if the arcade mode (Which I will get to) is more fleshed out, the story is what the developers want you to experience more than anything. The second half is the pure rhythm game attached to the story (that ironically doesn't always feature in the story as often as it really should). I want to talk about the story as its still fresh in my mind from beating the unbeatable (ha ha). This game's story should have had someone look over the entire thing and said "we're redoing 90% of this, this is a total mess". I don't mean that in a mean-spirited way as though I'm suggesting its irredeemable, quite the opposite actually. The story is told through the eyes of the titular UNBEATABLE protagonist, Beat as she meets many (too many) characters through her adventures through... what was this place called again? as she does... musical things? with her friends? (I think). This represents the story's first big problem. Its aimless. Initially there is a very well communicated goal that the story gets stuck on- Beat wants to help Quaver take pictures where her mother and father were in their younger years. Why? No idea, Beat doesn't have any idea why she's doing most of this either, it's just the only motivation through the entire game that we have a clear step-by-step way of accomplishing our goal. Unfortunately, this is almost instantly smacked down and the game's story shifts its focus from a personal journey between Beat and Quaver and is now a story about breaking out of prison, then it becomes a story about opposing the *Man*, then its a story about making an album and a band getting into conflicts, then its a story about some sciencey mumbo-jumbo that randomly decides to drop a bunch of philosphical questions in places where they don't relate at all. Then it's a story about a family drama, then its a story about... You get the point. UNBEATABLE's story is completely disjointed and goes nowhere for most of its runtime. It has a bunch of well written characters, chiefly Quaver and Beat, as well as Quaver's mother (by exclusion) which makes the story tolerable, but the problem is that none of that is even the focus by the end. It's almost as if the developers themselves lost their way while making the game and just started adding whatever they were inspired by that particular year of this game's absolutely biblical dev time. The frustration at the missed opportunities is mostly overtaken by boredom punctuated by some genuinely well crafted gameplay set pieces that make the boredom leading to them actually managable. The problem ultimately is that UNBEATABLE's story is the potential man meme. It has every ingredient to craft a very tightly designed, beautifully animated and memorable story, but every single part of its recipe was used wrong at the worst possible time. It's like taking the time to home-grow each part of a sandwich all to make the sandwich with ham in place of bread and using the bread like sauce. The ending is possibly the most hammed in meme of an ending you can come up with for a story this disjointed, and yet... I feel no disdain for the game or even any negativity beyond frustration at the lost potential here. I chalk that up to the fact that even when this game's story is bad, its told so genuinely that it feels like you're huddled around a fire as your mom poorly recounts a story from her childhood. It's not told well because she's a few eggnogs deep, but it has a certain feeling of warmth that is impossible to create unless the developers really cared. They just really cared in the wrong ways at the wrong times. The second part of the game is where the negativity hat is getting taken off and tossed into a trash compacter fire pit. The gameplay for this game is pure rhythm game mastery and every element of its gameplay has been scientifically designed to be fun and satisfying. The animations of the characters, the song variety, the STYLE. Most indie rhythm games have a similar issue that almost always dates them and makes them quite hard to want to play for more than around 50-100 hours, which is the actual music library. Of course, an indie game will never be able to compete either with big budget games that have the money to release several thousand tracks from a million genres/artists to make the variety as bountiful as possible or with open-source rhythm games where the limit is how many people want to chart the steam message notification. However, UNBEATABLE's devs are very clearly very experienced Rhythm Gamers because they've used their budget to a borderline scientific degree to make the variety of tracks however limited not tire. On top of that, they've found a band that has such a wide scope of what kind of music they can make that it's difficult to find two songs that sound the same. Including that, they've gone out of their way to get a lot of artists to make all sorts of remixes to spruce up the music roster even further. Aside from that, the arcade mode of the game (which is where the rhythm gaming actually takes place) understands HOW to make a good rhythm game song roster. You see the problem with rhythm games is the following two issues that will always affect the quality of the roster's longevity: 1. The variety of kinds of music and 2. The scope of difficulty. In regular gamer game terms, issue 1 is the equivalent to having a game with great combat that never changes its enemies and you're forced to fight the same pool of enemies over and over, issue 2 is the equivalent to having a game with nothing but the story content. Yes, every Rhythm game has higher and lower difficulty settings but purely beefing up a chart by playing different parts of the composition isn't the most effective way to handle this. What we're looking for isn't a higher difficulty, we're looking for songs that are designed to be harder due to factors outside of the charting. Examples of this include Through the fire and flames in Guitar hero for being extremely demanding and long or Nightmare from DJMax for having very complex charting with an odd BPM that forces the player to focus on parts of songs that would otherwise not be the primary focus of the charting. UNBEATABLE nails this with a song roster 1/10th of those games with way less chances to get it right. And so, we're ultimately left with a game that has a very heartfelt story that's poor and gameplay that is extremely good and makes the game an extremely worthwhile package overall.

It's both a masterful rhythm game and a masterful story. I don't want to spoil it in this comments, but this game is without a doubt, one of the greatest games of this decade.

the graphics and the music are so cool my ONLY qualm is the low framerate because it makes the fights in the story kinda difficult when coupled with the flashy visuals. but the story is really interesting and i have only played for 4.6 hours but that's lowkey a lot for me and it's only been 2 days. idk i'm rambling but awesome game would recommend

This game broke me, I literally only bought it to play Do No Harm and I knew nothing else. Picked it back up only recently because I did like it and wanted to finish it. Crying is good. I have two regrets, I wish I knew about it so much sooner, and that I can never experience this for the first time again. But that's ok, its fine, I'm just going to make my girlfriend experience this at some point. I love her. The last two games I finished have broken me, both quickly went right to top of my favorites. As much as I am still confused by everything I am glad I finally finished it, and now I'm literally going to buy the rest of the soundtrack because I am me and I need it.

Y'know, once in awhile its nice to see a kickstarter project that gets an overwhelming amount of funding success AND doesn't immediately hit the pavement face-first. Solid experience. Its hard to say much more without spoiling things, but I can say I did not anticipate the plot direction. +Fantastic music of multiple genres, even the small fights had fantastic beats. +Great, varied quantity of animations from cutscenes to the 2D panes showcasing sheer talent. +Fun characters with contrasting personalities that still share just enough to get along for chemistry. -Graphical hit or miss. It works in the aesthetic and reason, but it can be hard to ignore some parts. -Dialogue might be grating at times, too much 'overlapping dialogue funny' moments. -Scuffed (but functional, dont worry) transition cues and hangups for scene scripts. -Scatterbrained level design (Multiple spaces that exist just for dialogue to make beat to say some form of 'why am I here?' in a humorous fashion). Normally I like that, but it disrupted my sense of objective direction multiple times and often made navigation a pain in the ass. My main gripe, as you can tell. Loved it more than I was annoyed by it. 8/10, great on even -20% sale.