Game Check: The Unliving – The Army of the Dead – News

In The Unliving you take control of a necromancer whose ability to revive the dead you take advantage of. This is also imperative. For the world through which you move is hostile to you. The pack of resurrects – made up of those who attacked you before – represents your army in a sense. And your protective shield: Although you are a powerful necromancer, you quickly bless yourselves in face-to-face combat. When this happens, The Unliving’s roguelite approach kicks in, allowing you to quickly find yourself back on the battlefield. The basic concept is quite entertaining and fun, but the Early Access version hasn’t caught on for me yet. This check tells you why.

At the dealer you can refresh your life energy, buy new skills and exchange fragments.

Fight till you drop

In The Unliving, you control your necromancer and his army of undead from the iso perspective through a neat fantasy medieval world with a comic look. Groups of enemies will regularly get in your way as you make your way across the map. You set your pack on his neck with one click, whereupon a wild brawl begins. When a group is defeated, you resurrect your former enemies and they join your horde as undead.

In the fights, you not only command, but also actively intervene: With your scythe in close combat or with a magic arrow in long-distance combat. You’ll also expand your repertoire of skills over the course of an attempt at different points on the map. Which skills you get is left to chance. So you expand your combat options to activate skills, such as a turret. Or effects that are triggered when consciously sacrificing individual undead. For some of these skills you also need resources, such as bones or drops of blood that deceased opponents leave behind.

You fight your way from group to group, try to survive as long as possible and collect as many of the same resources as possible, which you will use after your death in your base to permanently improve skills and weapons. If your horde is destroyed and you have no corpses left to raise, you are an easy target for your enemies.

In your hub, you gradually unlock more skills for your runs.

Early Access construction sites

You return to the “edge of immortality” after the inevitable end of each run. Here you upgrade your weapons and abilities and unlock new skills, which are then included in the random rotation of the upcoming attempts. In addition, there are various NPCs in your hub with whom you can have conversations after each run. In these conversations you will learn more about the game world, your destiny and the past. The content of the small talks did not stick in my memory, they are staged too contextlessly and irrelevantly for that.

The Unliving started in Early Access on November 7th, 2022, the present version seems to me to be only the basic structure of a still very unfinished game. After five hours of play I lack the motivation for further rounds. This is mainly due to the fact that the runs are still too similar at the moment. Although I’ve unlocked a considerable number of skills in the meantime, The Unliving doesn’t play with more variants for me as a result.

There are also other problems: My undead inconsistently harry the enemy groups and prefer to stand in line “at the back” until it is their turn. The controls overall are a tricky affair and also not completely freely configurable – which means that I, as a left-hander, can hardly use the sacrifice skills on the number keys. In addition, the performance drops ugly when there are many opponents on the screen.

The “apotheosis” must be protected against attackers. The playful highlight in my five hours, although I didn’t reach the goal.

Conclusion

I like the basic concept of The Unliving and initially it was really fun to send my ever-growing group of undead into battle. The various classes – consisting of melee fighters with pitchforks, archers and fantastic creatures such as giants and werewolves – are animated in a chic way. This also applies to the graphics of the game world, although it is currently far too monotonous visually.

Above all, The Unliving doesn’t convince me playfully at the moment. The runs just play the same, the concrete effects of the improvements remain too hidden for me and my horde lacks determination. Far too often she’s hunkered down in one spot instead of flanking enemies and attacking different positions. I also often lost track of my necromancer’s movement, undead coordination, and timing of various skills. Using the latter sensibly in combat seems too complicated to me at the moment. In short: there is still a lot to do!

• Roguelite for MacOS, PC, Playstation 4, Switch, Xbox One
• single player
• For beginners and advanced
• Price: 16.99 euros on Steam
• In one sentence: Visually attractive roguelite with fun combat mechanics, but which currently offers far too little play.