Unbound Saga For PSP

To call Unbound Saga repetitive is to utterly miss the point. It’s like criticising Oblivion for being too open, or Mario for having too much jumping. It’s a beat-em-up. You beat things up. That’s as much as there is too it, and as much as there needs to be. Granted, Vogster could have done a little more to add variety with more characters and co-op support, but you’d still be hitting other people. If you find that sort of thing dull, this is the wrong game- and likely the wrong genre altogether- for you.

Unbound Saga is about hitting people. We’ve established that already, but I want to make that point a little clearer. It is about hitting people. There’s little else to complicate things, and it follows in the now-faded footsteps of genre stalwarts like Streets of Rage and Final Fight (as well as recent offering Castle Crashers) by offering a simple premise that is much more focussed on the amount of enemies you need to defeat to reach your destination than it is with the destination itself. That’s not to say that Unbound Saga doesn’t have much of a story- its tongue-in-cheek approach is a welcome and entertaining setup- but it, again, is not the point of the game.

It’ just a shame that, for all this focus on the gameplay, the mechanics themselves are a little underwhelming.

You play as one of two Characters in Unbound Saga. There’s blockheaded brawler Rick Ajax, who is fully aware that he is a fictional character and is pretty pissed off with The Maker for the life he’s had to lead. Joined by the underdressed Lori, he sets off to get back at his creator, fighting through the streets of the city to reach his unseen masters secret hideout. The premise is silly, yes, but exudes a demented charm, thanks largely to the great dialogue and lovely comic artwork that buffers each chapter of the story. The self aware storyline ties into the gameplay as well, with our heroes leaping from panel to panel of the story in a manner reminiscent of Sega classic Comix Zone, and the hand of The Maker popping up to draw in some more enemies for Rick and Lori to fight.

In combat, you can switch between Rick and Lori on the fly, the other character then switching to AI control. Rick has slower, heavier-hitting moves that are great for crowd control, whilst Lori is much faster and can perform nasty jump kicks, but is nowhere near as strong. In practise, you’ll probably find that you prefer one character over the other, and this is likely to be Rick, since Lori’s attacks feel decidedly underpowered and ineffective compared to his, even though Rick’s are painfully slow. There are various items and weapons that can be picked up and thrown at the seemingly endless opponents who will attack you, though most are pretty much useless, and you can spend experience accumulated in-game on new moves and abilities. These don’t make for a particularly expansive arsenal by any stretch, but they do at least add some variety as the game progresses. You’ll spend most of the game facing the same generic thugs and slightly bizarre bears wearing aprons, with a few bosses to spice things up, though the bosses often don’t stand out at all apart from boasting their own health bars, and you can normally just repeat the same basic attack patterns on them to get by.

Indeed, that’s where the real criticism of Unbound Saga comes into play- the difficulty. It’s not that the game isn’t hard, or even that it’s too hard- but rather that the way in which Vogster tries to increase the challenge is very simple: throw more enemies at you. Very few enemies will require you to use different tactics to defeat them (think back to the likes of the jetpack wears in Streets of Rage, or skeletons in Golden Axe for examples of what I mean here), so instead you are stuck fighting enemies who react the same way throughout the entire game. And when you’ve beaten them, a bunch more will appear, and you’ll fight them too. With the same strategies. And again. As is common for a lot of brawlers, it can also be tricky to judge if your blows are on the right vertical plane to hit their target, which can lead to some minor frustration at times.

But at least the combat succeeds on the very basic level that a brawler needs to: Its fun. It also looks pretty good, with some nicely styled prerendered backdrops with cell-shaded 3D characters and objects overlaid on top, dukeing it out. The characters are a little chunky but animate well, and bodies and items are controlled by a basic but effective physics engine. The comic cutscenes are easily the highlights, with lovely artwork and animation, which coupled with the sharp writing can be very funny in places. The voice actors do a great job of bringing the characters to life, particularly Rick, whose perfect delivery will have you hanging on his every line.

 Source:http://www.gameshard.net