Reviewing games is fun. But sometimes the games are not fun and everything goes for a toss. While many reviewers secretly relish writing reviews for bad games, I find no such pleasure in doing so for Unearthed: The Trail of Ibn Battuta. Developed by Saudi Arabia-based Semanoor, Unearthed had all the potential to set the standard for the Middle Eastern development scene, but instead borders on being the complete opposite.





In Unearthed, you assume the role of Faris Jawad, a fortune hunter, who embarks on an “exotic adventure throughout the Middle East on the trail of the famous Muslim explorer Ibn Batutta.” The reason why I am quoting is because the first episode of Unearthed barely scrapes the surface of its main story. It instead focuses on a prologue that feels unnecessarily long and does nothing to establish what the game is all about. For an episodic series, it is safe to assume that the main story arc would be touched upon as soon as possible, but Unearthed decides to writhe in its frivolous excess, and ends on a note that should have actually been its starting point. For a nearly 1 hour experience, and $10 per episode, this is quite preposterous.

And I have not even began counting the number of things that’s wrong with the game.

Unearthed is inspired by many games - its comparison to Naughty Dog’s Uncharted is mostly fair as it takes a lot of elements from the franchise and tries to Middle Eastern-ize it in a sense. And while that’s not inherently a bad thing - getting inspired by industry leaders is never wrong - Unearthed fails in trying to be just like every other game, resulting in a boring, vapid and generic experience. Being an action-adventure, it tries to cram in every single trope it possibly can. Witty, handsome male lead protagonist? Check. Bald, french-bearded, overly macho antagonist? Check. Car chase sequence? Check. Rooftop sequence? Check. Nonsensical jumping puzzles? Check. Room full of swinging blades? Check. Sure, this is like every other game we see and enjoy, but it’s just so horrid in Unearthed and so blatantly obvious in what it is trying to do.



The Street Fighter-esque fighting is unique but fails in mechanics.

When it’s original, it falters in execution. For instance, many of Unearthed’s ‘important fights’ - if that’s the correct term to use for it since these are certainly not boss fights - are played out in a Street Fighter-esque one-on-one brawling format. It’s an interesting concept that hasn’t been done much before and could have successfully offered a mix of shooting and brawling for a fresh gameplay experience. However, it is let down by poor controls that make you feel like you are controlling a stick figure, and it requires no strategy other than mashing buttons (which most of the time do not register) with zero tactile feedback. There is also a sequence where you control an RC Car with equally bad controls for a puzzle segment, after which the gadget is never used or mentioned.

In fact, poor controls are persistent throughout the game. From character movement that’s undynamic and floaty, to the camera which is incredibly stiff, to vehicle controls which will make you want to smash your controller right through your TV, Unearthed is an unpolished, bug-ridden mess. Even shooting feels flat, with cumbersome controls and guns lacking any sort of recoil. They also all tend to sound like an iPhone recording taken off the original Counter Strike.



The parking in this game is super realistic.

This is further compounded by lazy and poorly thought out level design that tries not a least bit to be challenging. One of the first ‘puzzles’ you are made to solve is to trigger a fountain to open up a gate. You must collect four artifact pieces and fit them inside the fountain to progress. Usually, such a puzzle would have us scavenging the place while posing a set of challenges that would require all of our wit and reflexes, but in Unearthed you simply kick open nearby pots to find the artifacts (SPOILER ALERT!). Further on in the game, you are tasked to find some kind of “dragon knife”. Again, the game just has you doing the most simplest of things, in this case climbing a couple of stone blocks to reach said artifact. Both of the puzzles requires you to get down from a height at one point, and funnily enough, there is no way to properly climb down so I just chose to jump off my ledge and die in order to respawn. The game then reloads without any progress being lost, which makes it easier to die and wait for a few seconds to respawn than try to figure out a safe way to get down.

Unearthed’s only saving grace is its music and voice acting, although I suspect they are only good in comparison to the rest of the game. They try valiantly to bring some atmosphere to the game, but are simply masked by other factors. The decent music is wasted on the overall game, whereas the voice acting is bogged down by amatuer writing that tries way too hard to have the kind of wit and sarcasm found in the Uncharted series. I particularly like the lead actor’s impression of Faris Jawad, although coincidentally or not, he sounds very much like Nolan North.



Huu--err, BRRAAAAAAINS!

Other than the single player campaign, the game includes a Survival Mode. It’s basically a horde mode with zombies, where you must defeat waves of zombies and other creatures before they get you (and given how the game plays, they probably will). Again, like the rest of the game, it’s haphazardly implemented so the zombies just end up mobbing you, leaving you with little to no room for strategy. Characters don’t automatically pick up guns or ammo (in single player too) and there are no clear indications of where you can find more firepower or health packs. It’s not fun.

Lastly, the game supports the PlayStation Move controller out-of-the-box. Sadly as expected, the Move does not add anything of value to the game, and instead makes the controls even more complicated and difficult to use.

THE VERDICT

With its clunky controls, poor level design, and horrible writing, Unearthed: The Trail of Ibn Battuta Episode 1 is an awful mess. The game did get a bit of negative attention for being a blatant Uncharted ripoff, however somewhere deep down I had hoped that it would force us to reject those prejudices, and stand high in its own right. Unearthed, unfortunately, does none of that and fails resoundingly. And at $10, it’s borderline cheating.