THE UNCLEARNESS

This game is strange. It has many unfinished parts, but these moments doesn`t disturb you to receive cool impressions. This is like mini Max Payne. You can spend here 2 or 3 hours of your life, not more, but you will do it with pleasure

I'm going to recommend this. And considering the state of it, that needs to be explained. The Unclearness is clunky, and generally a very bad game that should still be in early access. It can best be compared with the movie The Room. Which is also a very very bad movie. Hilariously so. The fun in unclearness comes from playing with an audience, or watching someone else play, sitting there laughing at it. Play it alone and you’ll probably just feel insane. But for the current asking price of 7 euros, it’s not bad for a laugh. That having been said the combat is tedious and annoying, and there are a few sections of it that just drag on. Which gets in the way, again imagine The Room, you’re laughing your head off but every 40 minutes you’re asked to step outside and juggle for 30 minutes straight and if you drop a ball you have to start over. And then you’re allowed to go back in and laugh at the rest of the plot. Most of the comedy comes from the hilarious English translation. I’m making the assumption that the original Russian may make a bit more sense or at least not sound as completely insane. But being unable to speak Russian I can’t say for sure. The voice acting ranges from bad to decent, the thing is though, the main character clearly is a native english speaker, but I got the feeling that he just had the script sent to him and was asked to record the lines. Often he sounds very confused at what he’s reading and having to record. It feels like the Eye of Argon game where you have to read the story typos and all without correcting them while trying not to laugh. “I must penetrate his number” “Mental soil deviation detected” “I must obtain vial of lieutenant” Those are from the journal, the dialogue is a whole different tier of hilarity, characters will often contradict themselves repeatedly. And now for the technical stuff. It’s an unreal engine game. There are hardly any graphical options. And the four that are there have Low to high settings, so you can’t actually tweak anything specific. There are no options for subtitles, nor are there sound sliders, and music or some other sound effect will often play over dialogue. There is a “Load game” button on the menu, you only have one save and that’s an autosave, clicking the load game button will automatically load that one without any confirmation prompts. So if you’ve played for a while and you’re wondering when the last autosave was, clicking that button hoping to get a menu that’ll list your saves will result in you loading your last save. The auto saving makes some very long combat sections very tedious. You often have to redo the entire thing, putting you back possibly 30-60 minutes. The combat is fairly standard third person shooting. There are two weapons, a handgun and an assault rifle. There are only two kinds of enemies, one of which I won’t mention, the other and most numerous is the same SWAT guy. Your shots will often get eaten by terrain and corners. There is also fairly significant bullet spread, and your weapons are not hitscan, and the bullets are fairly slow. This makes accuracy difficult. The enemies have pin point accuracy and will start shooting you the second they have line of sight, they can be staggered with their gun out to the side pointing away from you and bullets will still come out of it, turn a sharp 90 degrees and fly into you. This also means they can shoot around corners since only the tip of their rifle needs to have line of sight to you. Basically this means that if enough enemies see you you’re dead, they chip away at your fairly generous health pool steadily but surely, so if you can’t kill them or get into cover in time you’ll just die. And with your bullet spread, need to reload(they don’t) and them being able to shoot around corners. You have to be very careful to not have to redo long sections of bland due to dying. Taking cover is also problematic as this will cause them to chase you, and they have the advantage on corners. You have some things to counteract this, although I suspect it was added as a crutch since the combat would be even more tedious without it. You have Max Payne like bullet time, and it is infinite. Your health pool is fairly large and regenerates quickly. It also seems to regenerate in real time seconds, using bullet time does not extend this, so you heal faster in slow motion. This might sound nice but in the end it puts you in a position where in order to avoid redoing the worst parts of the game again you’ll be running around a massively large area constantly in slow motion, extending your torment. Since it’s very easy to slip up and die and have to restart. You also have night vision. This is direly needed in some sections, as the game is very very dark. It is however not infinite like your bullet time. Nor does it seems to have a recharge meter that drains when it’s on. It’ll simply just turn off after 4-5 seconds. So you’ll be spamming an often unresponsive night vision button constantly. Yay… Urgh. In short the combat seems like a thing that is there because there wouldn’t be much “game” otherwise, and it also serves as padding for an otherwise short game. You get to drive a car every now and then, and it’s pretty hilarious. There are bugs and it’s often unclear what you need to do. People will talk absolute crap and if you’re lucky it’ll make just enough sense for you to know where to go. Most of the time you’ll get a marker on the map you can follow so that isn’t a problem. Sometimes you won’t. In short if you think you can tolerate these things for a laugh by all means go ahead and play it. In the end I do think the devs cared and tried, which is more than can be said for most seemingly shovelware stuff. It is however fairly short and has no real replay value unless you think you’re able to laugh at the same things again. There’s no way to do anything differently. It’ll be exactly the same. The initial asking price when it came out was ridiculous and pretty offensive considering what it is. Currently at 7 euros it’s likely worth it for the laugh.