Official Score
Overall - 40%
40%
Unplugged blatantly copies One Finger Death Punch’s tried-and-true formula, but fails to jot down what made that indie darling so great. With simplistic gameplay and game-breaking bugs, this title is a pretender more than a contender.
For fans of Keanu Reeves, they’ve no doubt wanted to channel their inner John Wick as an unstoppable assassin. omijdm, no doubt a regular at the Continental, pays homage to this character with his new beat-em-up Unplugged. It’s one player against the world in this brawler – should players take on the fight?
Unplugged Review
Set in a dystopian futuristic world, the protagonist of this title will find himself transported to different locales, where he must fight his way through a number of baddies. A number of rough sketches, comic book panels, text messages, and stilted text is available at key points, but the main focus of this title is squarely on the action.
After popping up in such shady locales as back streets, rooftops, and guarded facilities, a near endless stream of goons will slowly rush toward the player from the left and right sides of the screens. Not one to succumb to defeat, it’s up to players to hit the left and right arrows to knock out these foes. It’s important to get the timing down though, swinging too early or too late will cause the player to miss and be left wide open. However, well timed strikes will allow players to build up their combo as the battles wage on.
After taking down a set amount of enemies, players will be able to see their accuracy percentage, the number of misses that happened, their total score, and their best record.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Unplugged is almost a carbon copy of 2013’s One Finger Death Punch. The whacking action was simple enough as it was back then, and nothing has changed in the past eight years to make this worth a go. Even the slo-mo feature of the original is back in this title through the use of its rechargeable “Stamina” meter.
The development team did try to add some wrinkles to the formula, but they simply aren’t enough. Players will be able to “download” patches that give access to weaponry like shotguns and pistols, but they don’t drastically change how the game plays. The aforementioned Stamina meter also features button prompts at select points that allow players to pull off special moves that can take out multiple enemies at a time. When it all comes down to it though, players will feel like its overly simplistic gameplay is a bit of a grind.
Unplugged also proves to be a buggy experience. There were times where we got stuck in an animation loop, with the only way out being an Alt-F4 to stop it in its tracks. Other times had us petering along with no health left, unable to do any damage or get hit – this too required a hard exit.
Unplugged blatantly copies One Finger Death Punch’s tried-and-true formula, but fails to jot down what made that indie darling so great. With simplistic gameplay and game-breaking bugs, this title is a pretender more than a contender.
