Unstoppable Review

Developed and published by indie studio Funnylocks Corp, Unstoppable is a top-down action-adventure game taking place in the fictional Schindler Tower. It follows the story of a man named Steven, who was tasked with delivering a biochemical weapon to someone in this tower.

After arriving at the tower and delivering the weapon, an infection breaks out in the building, turning everyone hostile. The story isn’t the most interesting and feels like more of an afterthought. There isn’t a lot to say about it, and the lack of an engaging narrative is disappointing as the premise sounds like a really cool idea. The way Unstoppable is balanced is horrible; there is virtually no way to know when you are about to enter a boss battle, and rooms might have five enemies or a single one with no way to tell the difference.

The game can be played with both a keyboard and mouse and a controller, but you can’t change any of the keybinds, none of which are intuitive. The way the character moves and attacks is also really frustrating, with large amounts of time in which you can’t move and in-game reactions feeling terrible. There are a lot of weapons scattered throughout the levels, allowing for every player to enjoy their own playstyle — though how to use some weapons is never explained. For example, with every melee weapon, you can just attack in a direction, but it’s impossible to shoot the shotgun without using the target functionality on a specific enemy first, which made me die multiple times. Speaking of dying, there is no manual save option in the game, and it only autosaves at the beginning of each stage — if you die at the final fight of a level, you now have to redo the last 40 minutes, and enemy spawns, weapon, and item locations are not randomised, making any subsequent tries very boring.

With facial movements that are very off-putting and attack animations that are way too long, Unstoppable isn’t the most impressive visually. Not being able to move for a good few seconds after pressing the attack button once can be really frustrating and cause you to die. The camera’s perspective is awful, and I kept moving the right joystick trying to change it, but that’s not a possibility. Animations are also not triggered in time, with characters just standing completely still if you’re not close enough to them, breaking any sort of immersion that the game could have had. Graphically, Unstoppable isn’t really impressive, but nothing is bad about how it looks.

In Unstoppable’s cutscenes, there is voice acting, and while there are some lines that sound a little off, it’s overall really great. Every character in a cutscene has a unique voice, and emotions are conveyed pretty well. There are also some sound effects and music, which are both fine, but the volume is really low. I could barely hear them on settings that would hurt my ears in every other game, and while it was easily solved by increasing my headphones’ volume, it was a bit of a bother I have never run into in any other game I’ve ever played.

There is a noticeable lack of settings, and quality-of-life features are non-existent. You can’t change any graphic settings other than resolution, and you can’t unpause the game with the same button you used to open the pause menu. The lack of manual saving or autosaves at normal intervals makes Unstoppable very frustrating, and its fights feel repetitive throughout the entire experience. The hardware requirements, while not really high, are still much higher than they should be for a game as small as this, requiring at least a GTX 960, so while I haven’t run into any problems with my higher-end GPU,  Unstoppable is clearly not well-optimised at all.

Overall, Unstoppable isn’t enjoyable and feels unfinished at times. Getting through levels is boring, and replaying them is frustrating. The lack of basic features that should be present in every game makes playing Unstoppable feel horrible; unless you like the very specific niche that this game provides, there is no reason to consider playing it, even for only £10.99.