Comedy video games. This writer's blood runs cold just to think of them. In a medium that sees you define your own pace, how can comedy possibly work without fundamentally transforming the medium from interactive to inert? The comedy and the gameplay are necessarily completely separate and so few games have managed to integrate the two in any truly impressive way just yet. Undertale, perhaps, but there's still a lot of sitting around reading dialogue in that.
UnMetal is... a comedy video game. A parody, if you will, and unfortunately not the Parodius kind. What we've got here is an affectionate ribbing of gaming in general, presented in the guise of a stealth game akin to the original MSX Metal Gear, being a quasi-top-down sorta-stealth game. We say "sorta" because the enemies in UnMetal are dumber than a box of particularly uneducated rocks, but that isn't really the point. In fact, playing this thing barely seems to be the point — it's so fragmented in its style that it almost feels like a minigame collection. You jump from cutscene to marginal exploration to adventure game-style item-combinations to more cutscenes to a shoot-out to... well, you get the idea.
And by saying "comedy game" and describing the whole thing as slapdash, so far we've no doubt made it seem as though UnMetal is a bit crap. But that's the darndest thing of all - it's actually pretty good, by virtue of being — pretty much inarguably — consistently entertaining and surprising.
See, lead character Jessie Fox is a bit on the unreliable side as a narrator so, in a touch that reminded us of Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, scenarios will change based on his half-formed (or simply made-up) memories. A creature will grow extra limbs, a ditch will spring out of nowhere as Jessie tries to justify being unable to reach a boss battle, and every so often the player will be allowed to make a choice that can have amusingly negative effects on a situation for you.
It isn't funny, though. As we say, it's entertaining, but we didn't laugh or even really smirk. The humour here is either very meta or very dumb, and unfortunately not the good kind of dumb. Still, we'd be remiss not to state that humour is, obviously, extremely subjective, so who knows — you might find yourself absolutely doubled over in hysterics at the fully-voiced antics, but we'd be surprised.
Perhaps it works better as a spectator sport. The choices you can make do call to mind Twitch chats and general interaction. Side note: it's quite a culture shock seeing how commonly games are tailored to streaming these days, but that's another article. Somewhere. Presumably.
Anyway, the actual top-down-ish stealth here is entirely serviceable. The game understands quite well that if it's going to be a flick-screen job, it needs to have at least one interesting thing on every screen, and it does. Whether it's a gag, a little stealth puzzle or some interesting visual reveal, UnMetal is a game that could never be accused of lacking in ideas across its 10ish-hour runtime. It's all quite traditional, when you get down to brass tacks; you hide from guards, attract their attention with single thrown coins, strangle them, repeat. Your grace period on being spotted is quite significant so we never really felt in terrific danger, but — again — UnMetal isn't about danger, it's about changing things up consistently. Which it does.
The visuals look a little amateurish, but in a way that's somehow charming rather than just low-quality. Indeed, plenty of care has gone into crafting this world and writing all the dialogue. Dying never sets you back too much and you can skip cutscenes you've already seen simply by holding 'B'. It's very accessible and the constant change-ups to the scenarios did a good job compelling us to keep playing, just to see what would happen next.
Conclusion
UnMetal is a tricky one, really. It doesn't play brilliantly and we didn't really find it funny at all, but it is consistently presenting new and entertaining ideas to complement the core simplistic stealth gameplay, with plentiful genre changes and a metric ton of references, callbacks and metahumour that will definitely appeal to plenty of people. We're old and jaded, though, and we've seen a lot of self-deprecating humour in video games — this stuff goes right back to the likes of the ZX Spectrum, for goodness' sake. Still, we recognise the very clear surplus of enjoyable content that's been crammed into UnMetal and its appeal should not be disregarded simply because we found it a little familiar. It never lets up with the gags, subversions and new sights to see all the way through its surprisingly robust length, and it doesn't forget to make the actual stealth enjoyable to boot. Definitely an impressive effort that assuredly deserves to find an audience.
Comments 19
My type of game for some good lols.
Edit: I am giving it an 8 for the humour.
This is on my wishlist currently, alongside Unsighted and a few other undies, glad to see it reviewed well, I was hopeful after the trailer!
The sense of humour here is great! But of course, it depends on the person.
I haven't played through a real Metal Gear but I played some Christmas Flash parody that was pretty good.
Merry Gear Solid?
Playing through it now. I'm enjoying it. Some of the scenarios they put you in are so over the top and feels like they intend for you to die several times while you figure out how to progress. Some of the humor is definitely bad, some of it is good though. The one thing so far I dislike the most is all the foul language. Definitely don't play this around little kids...
hat we didn't personally find very funny? How is this cons? Just because you didn't like it must be con? Okay copy paste IGN calm down.
@JokerCK "How is this cons?Just because you didn't like it must be con"
But if Stuart finds something that they didn't like or find not funny then it should be a con since a review is a person opinion on said product. If you were reviewing this game and you loved the jokes then that would be a positive for you. So you just take that con and put it into the positive and add a point to the score.
"just because you didn't like it must be a con?" Um. Yes. A review is literally a presentation of what a reviewer did and didn't like about something.
Reminds me of a similar sense of humour to Retro City...
I do feel like the author is overly cynical in the topic of comedy video games though. Some games do in fact marry the gameplay with comedy. The purest example is quite probably Untitled Goose Game - it's funny because it's the player is the one actively doing the funny things in the gameplay. A more mixed example is the comedy adventure game, like the Monkey Island Series; more scripted, definitely, but the player still interacts with the game in funny ways and the whole affair can be quite mirthful.
This is somehow not the first top down stealth game that's a blatant Metal Gear parody I know of, despite not even being a Metal Gear fan.
@SilentHunter382 Shouldn't the reviewer be able to critique how well the game executes its humor, though? Considering the humor is the major selling point. It seems that this reviewer is entirely opposed to the style of comedy that the game employs, or possibly to the very concept of comedy itself. It would be like if they had somebody review a game from a genre that they detest, and they took points off because they don't like the genre.
I found Unepic to be pretty consistently funny throughout so it was weird that the jokes in the trailer for this did not land with me at all. But it does look like a tight little adventure so I'm still gonna play it regardless.
The Indie to surpass Metal Gear... Well, maybe not, but us Stealth fans should consider taking a look.
Downloaded. Probably not going to fire it up until I'm Swoled.
Thanks for mentioning Parodius in the review! Parodius, Jumping Flash, wipEout, and a few other games deserve more attention, more releases!
So the humor's subjective, no biggie. Most funny game for me was Eat Lead/Matt Hazzard, and same deal for reviewers there. I'm glad they tried, regardless.
The reviewer is probably as interesting as drywall and has no sense of humor. This game is funny in a clever way and I got some chuckles throughout. The reviewer has also probably never played the original Metal Gear or MGS. This is literally a parody of that series and it does it very well.
To the author of this review -
"If your head is empty, alas, the greatest sense of humor will not save you." Lewis Carroll
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