There seems to be a void that everyone is trying to fill now days. With Left 4 Dead 3 unlikely to happen for quite some time, there is a long line of developers coming into the field with plenty of new, exciting multiplayer horror games for us to feast on. While games like Resident Evil and Vermintide may get the spot light, we tend to forget there are indie developers that produce some terrifyingly good games. UNLOVED is brought to us and it may have the edge over the competition.
UNLOVED is a co-op survival horror game where up to four players can venture into different, sinister locations and battle hordes of sick and twisted creatures from your worst nightmares. You and a team will enter abandoned apartments, clinics, towns and basements to discover the truth behind sinister looking doors. Usually it’s more doors and let’s not forget you’ll duke it out with hellish creatures until you complete the mission. The worlds are dark, grimy and intense where the decaying and damp location will make you paranoid at ever turning and opening every door. While aesthetically the game is pleasing to horror fans, while messy and gruesome gore levels which offer spectacular results and the sense of horror can be unnerving.
What UNLOVED does well is to introduce this gory, grimy dungeon style crawler with plenty of bite, but what else it offers feels very thin. The best way to describe my experience is cliché, which I see in the monster designs and also how repetitive and dull the game can be. We’re treated to the usual batch of uninspiring demonic clowns (most horror), blood covered nurses (Silent Hill), faceless naked creatures (Silent Hill again) and Slender Man style screamers. There’s no personality or originality to them, unlike the game Cry of Fear, which did a good job at producing some horrific monster designs, whereas there’s little imagination to UNLOVED. They’re boring and many of them have the same attacks and behaviours as each other and this limits the variation in combat with these encounters. It doesn’t help that you’re limited to just four guns with nothing else like spells or grenades to spice things up a bit.
Fire balls seem to the most popular and at times the most annoying form of ranged attack by NPCs. I mean, it’s infuriating as there seems to be little to no logic to which enemy types can use this power or the proper balancing of when they can use it. You’ll soon notice a pattern of when a mass gather of creatures occurs that fireballs will never endingly pummel into you. This attack will be relentlessly overused by enemies and when the amount of creatures build up behind a door you must open, well, you can call it quits as the survival rate will drop. It’s not so much a problem when you’re faced one on one but as soon as there’s more than 2/3 NPCs onscreen everyone decides to make it rain the pain down on you! Cooldown timers for this attack aren’t so much in place but the numbers and the majority of the enemies can use it relentlessly.
As mentioned before, there’s no structure to the game for its enemies/NPCs. In any level, whether it’s the apartments or the clinic, all the same enemies come about. There’s no theme or formula, which makes them kind of boring after a few rounds, as you see them all the time in every level. While enemy behaviours are very bog standard as they’ll just charge you, with very few having altering attacks which are normally just simple ranged ones. Then the fireballs come about (I’ll stop talking about those now).
This, overall, makes single player kind of an awkward and long-winded journey of rinse and repeat. Because the difficulty can spike horrifically you can lose everything you earned when the game decides to play nasty and even on the easiest difficulty it can be a nightmare for single player. UNLOVED can keep you engaged as you gain Karma points (which I don’t fully understand how you obtain them) to buy new perks or collect photos, cards and ink for some interesting extra content. But nothing really in terms of purchasing new guns, which is a shame. Multiplayer, for what I played, was more enjoyable and does relieve the stress and overwhelming difficulty spikes in the lower difficulties. You do still have the problem of the overwhelming difficulty spikes and as pickups don’t respawn, you’ll have no chance if there’s four players. You could change the game mode to, say, FPS Classic, which increases recourses but also ramps up the NPC count massively as well. Levelling up also seems to be a slow process and I personally found it to be more rewarding completing the missions on single player.
While UNLOVED does have an in-depth customization from choosing a game mode, size of level and a few more tricks it does lack interesting objectives or appealing game worlds. It’s dynamic as the game worlds do change in their layout to keep the experience feeling fresh and the challenge engaging. But the exploration can be rather irritating as it’s so confusing at times to navigate with an impractical mini map. Not to mention the worlds can be rather dull. We get level themes such as Apartments, Basement, Town and Clinic which, all for the most part again, lack identity or interesting features, feeling rather bland and empty looking. Their atmosphere is the saving grace as it’s unnerving at times to play and in a rare instance you might get a nice set up of a room with some cool horror elements to it.
As for objectives, it’s always the same it seems; go and pick up a Blood Crest to open a door; pick up Moon Crest and repeat, and then pick up Sun Crest and open door to next objective and so on and so forth. There’s not much else. No dynamic objectives, side quests (other than a small bonus objective to kill something or melee kill) or any cool boss battles. Besides, there’s only four weapons to find as well and they’re pretty standard if you’ve played plenty of shooters before. The Nail Gun is my favorite and packs the most punch while mods can help make the other weapons feel more powerful. This is where exploration does come into play and it’s important to do so as it’ll help out a great deal.
Overall, UNLOVED is an interesting and compelling concept with great potential but it lacks some fundamentals in its design and balancing to make it as enjoyable as other multiplayer games like it. It can be too difficult for single player, lack the charm of other shooters and feel quiet repetitive and limited in its design with monsters or worlds. I love the survival aspect and the level of customization is great to keep the experience feeling somewhat fresh on multiple plays. It’s a decent multiplayer game but it may need some more love from the developers to make it much better.