There are always new horrors discovered when playing many, many terrible games that exist for the wrong reasons. This game here The Unknown City The Horror Begins.....Episode 1 is one of those shockingly bad games that somehow managed made it in to the digital online stores without any knowledge of what kind of mess the player is about to witness. What I have witnessed is one gigantic turd that I should have placed on my Worst Games of 2018 list and trust me when I say this but any of the games I put on the Worst Games of 2018 aren't anywhere near as bad compared to the steaming mess I downloaded from the PlayStation Store. It's an abomination to the FPS genre, an abomination to indie games and it's an abomination to gaming period and let me tell you something, it's on the PS4 and just from looking at the screenshots and eventually playing it for myself it is one abysmal game it would make you regret buying and playing right away.
Let's start with the story and writing, this game follows two police officers John and Kelly as they end up lost and their car broke down, they explore for help only for Kelly to get captured somehow by dozens of zombies and demons John has to fight his way through whilst also helping some spirit named Serena where she asks you to get the Golden Gun and the Silver Tail bullet to defeat the Demon Master. Wow, just from watching the first few minutes you can tell that there is so much wrong with the storyline and dialogue and I wouldn't know where to start. First up the writing is atrocious and some parts don't make any sense like Why would they kidnap your partner Kelly when they are quick to kill anyone else? Why would they take her to an empty Swimming Pool in someone's yard? And lastly how do pieces of the Golden Gun end up in different time periods. It simply begs for a better explanation. Lastly the voice acting is beyond a joke, I am serious the develop simply used text to speech for the dialogue which is something you would hear on these Goanimate and YouTube parody videos that spread online and it's really embarrassing to listen to plus you got to love it more when you can't hear the voices well when other sounds drown out everything and the volume for the voices is too low.
When you start playing, you look around and find that the whole area is infested with zombies and other kinds of demons and so when you go to get your guns and the moment you pass through the first gate is where the nightmare really begins and that is the gameplay which is either broken, poorly designed or doesn't work entirely. You simply move mostly from point A to point B shooting enemies that get in your way whilst picking up health and ammo items to keep yourself stocked up. The gameplay might seem simple on the surface but however the constant number of problems make everything in the game a chore then it needed to be plus it shows the lack of competency that was put into the game. First up is the basic movement in which your character moves very, very slowly as if the character is a snail or something. You can sprint with the L2 button (which I'll talk about the controls much later) although sprinting has you sliding all over the place making it super difficult to control precisely where you can move around properly and there doesn't seem to be any kind of Sprint Meter or something letting you know how much sprint you have left meaning you just have to wait a few seconds before you can sprint again.
The next offender is the shooting which I have to say is just broken beyond belief all of the weapons have a ridiculous recoil kickback that it makes shooting enemies more difficult not to mention they all lack any kind of impact or power to them. First you have a basic knife and a pistol and when you go the police car you get an assortment of assault rifles, sub machine guns and sniper rifles and almost all of them just aren't fun to use and because of the awful recoil you'll end up wasting your ammunition very quickly. You are playing as a police officer in full gear who should by very efficient with firearms and there shouldn't be any excuse for the over the top weapon recoil kickback. You can zoom in with sniper weapons but leaving the zooming on toggle will leave you with a horrid quick scoping animation where your character will constantly toggle between looking through the scope and out rapidly. Speaking of which sniping enemies is also pretty bad as head shots aren't always consistent even when the crosshair is on their head. The enemy AI is also insanely bad as they mostly spawn in big numbers and just simply attack you but they seem to have difficulty with path finding as they can sometimes get stuck in the level geometry and when you are taking damage from the enemy it's impossible to get out of the enemy attacks because you end up stuck and become helpless unless you can somehow shoot all of the enemies off you before you lose all of your Health and have to reload your last save. Yes, the game has checkpoints when enemies spawn in every level besides the final level where it puts you against Demon Master and restating at it's checkpoint leaves you with low health and ammo instead of being stocked up and healed after visiting the room where the items where which just shows off the terrible programming. Whenever you do reload your save you always start in the middle of the area where the next enemies spawn in and you even though you have all of your guns you start at the last checkpoint with the pistol equipped and you have to switch to the weapon you were last using while enemies are attacking you, how is that even remotely fair? And why can't I reload my progress with my current main weapon equipped instead of a weak pistol? Like I said there plenty of guns that you can use for combat and you have like the Knife and Dessert Eagle which aren't very effective, but you get a shotgun which I have to say is an insult to FPS shotguns cause it takes two full shotgun blasts to the face to put an enemy down at point blank range. Next are the Barret M98B Sniper and the Dragunov Sniper Rifles which I said before have a comical quick scope animation and sometimes require two headshots for an enemy to go down. Then you got the Sub Machine Gun, the SCAR Rifle and the M642 Machine Gun which end up being your go to weapons through out the whole game mainly the M642 Machine Gun even though they are quite underpowered. You also have the Assault Rifle which has the worst recoil I have ever seen for a weapon in an FPS game, the M4 A1 Carbine which has the top of the gun missing and lastly the AK-47 which upon selecting it shows an MP5 gun model. Can I just say that is a gigantic lie and a massive kick to the balls just because you show the AK-47 in the inventory screen but show the MP5 gun model instead shows off the complete lack of human competency and understanding.
May I remind you that this is a game released on the PlayStation 4 in 2018 the same year we got Call of Duty Black Ops 4, Immortal Redneck, Battlefield V, Fallout 76 and a few others and somehow this manages to be worse then most cheap budget indie games released on Steam. I know that this is an indie and it was done in quite a short time but there must be quality control when creating a game and ensuring that it is designed accurately no matter the budget. Care and effort are also key words in creating a game and I think it's something the game designer should look up cause that person lacks it big time.
The level design is atrocious, most of the levels are easy enough to get through with the basic layout leading to where you need to go but however when you get to the third stage the game throws you into a large empty field with houses randomly placed about and you have to collect three pieces of the Golden Gun to complete the stage. It goes on forever as all of the houses are empty and have nothing in them causing you to waste your time and nothing else. You might only find only two out of three parts before giving up and losing your way because everything looks the same and it makes the stage confusing and frustrating to go through on top of the game's combat. On top of that the area is very dark and I had to turn up the brightness of my TV to be able to see where I was going. The game doesn't even have a map system let alone a way point telling you where they are, you just simply waste your time You die really easy in this game even on the easiest difficulty with all of the annoying enemies spawning in sometimes too close or behind you which is just cheap. It's rare that enemies drop items to restock your ammo and health but they will always drop orbs which give you Experience Points and may I point out that there is nothing in the game to spend those points on, nope, nothing not even a store where you purchase upgrades or resupply which is something all good games have, this doesn't so what is the point of having Experience Points in the game when there is nothing in the game to spend them on? Nothing it's just there to distract you to try and pick them up as if the game wants to tempt the player to get them like someone trying to get you to smoke when you know it's bad for you. Also about picking up ammo instead of collecting ammo types for each gun you have picking ammo up only fills up what gun you are currently using which is stupid.
By far the biggest offender of the game are the game's controls as I most baffled by the decisions about where they are mapped. I already mentioned that L2 Sprints but get this Zoom is L1, reloading is R1 which is something that's only okay in Gears of War (Which isn't even a traditional First Person Shooter by the way) but do you want to know what the button for pausing the game is? You would think the Options Button right? Wrong! The button for pausing is Circle, that's right Circle is the button to pause the game and I am dead serious. What scumbag thought that pause should be Circle instead of Options button and to add further idiocy in the controls menu it shows that the button for pause is on the X button. Obviously the game designer if I could ever call him/her that never has held a game controller before while making the game and had no idea where the game controls should be set to. Sometimes the aiming sensitivity goes high for no reason in one stage even when I changed nothing in the options menu and then it's normal again for the next stage. We all know that playing First Person Shooters is tough because of the aiming is slow and less precise compared to playing with a Mouse and Keyboard but when you make the most basic controls terrible combined with the abysmal sensitivity and the almost uncontrollable movement then you got a very uncontrollable mess on your hands. You might get lucky with the controls and the gameplay somehow but with everything so broken and how messed the controls are you'll end up dying rather constantly because of that.
The Unknown City is one ugly looking game that is hard to even look at and you have to witness the amount of bugs and glitches the game has. First up this game must be using Unity Assets cause the zombies used for this game must have been taken from The Slaughtering Grounds game which also was a truly terrible game. The models in the game might not look bad but their animations are super stiff and jerky. I have seen textures and various props that are not even placed or connected properly into the levels like any game should be. The lamp posts and the light they are meant to shine for example are not even connected to the roads, a part of the environment like the back yard of someone's home is not even placed in properly as parts of it are floating a mile or two above. On top of that the environments look dreadful and the textures are poorly rendered and are at a very poor quality, you can also see two layers of textures on part of the environment literally flickering, waterfalls which look like scrambled mess of lines, the blood splatter and gun shooting effects on screen look just as bad as everything else and also tree leaves also disappear when you get close for some strange reason obviously due to terrible rendering. That might look glitchy but let me tell you the whole game is chucked full of bugs and glitches that it's almost unplayable, you can actually get stuck on walls which you never get out of which forces a checkpoint restart, walking into Kelly your partner in the beginning of the game has you bouncing several meters away, jumping if you could ever call it that also has you either doing a tiny leap or the moon jump which seeing that for the first time made me burst out laughing. One of my other biggest annoyances I had with the game is trying to get up the stairs, I'm serious trying to get up the stairs is a pain, it's possible to get up the stairs but most of the time you could get blocked and stuck on it when there is plenty of room to get to the top of the stairs and it's broken and annoying to put up with.
You can just tell just how unfinished this game actually is just from playing only seconds of it. Again this is a game released for the PlayStation 4, yes and again the PlayStation 4 and it's absolutely hard to believe that it was released in an unfinished state and that Sony actually licensed the game for release on their store. Yes, I am not joking, Sony gave this giant turd the thumbs up and allowed it for release, and this was last year in 2018. I know that it is not Sony's job to judge a game's quality from how it is designed but you would think that Sony would look at the game and think that maybe it would need plenty more time to actually polish everything and make sure that it actually works properly. Even the frame rate is terrible as it chugs all of the time and never maintains a steady frame rate throughout the whole game.
This game is simply just unfinished and the fact this is even on the PlayStation Store and that it costs money to download this is an tremendous insult to the person who bought it. It's broken, buggy and glitchy, the controls don't work properly and are placed wrong completely and I still can't get over that Circle pauses the game not the Options Button. The gameplay and design is downright awful, the checkpoint system is a nuisance at times, the controls aren't properly mapped and is also a pain to control, the weapons are terrible and the shooting is complete garbage thanks to the weapon recoil kickback, the level design is atrocious, the music and the sound are just horrible to listen to and that spawning sound effect really gets annoying. The graphics are unpolished and it is ugly, has no effort or any form of detail put into anything, it steals assets from other games and other mechanics like the upgrade system were not actually implemented. The storyline makes no sense at all and the text to speech voice acting used from Google Translate is intolerable and throughout the cutscenes you'll be cringing all the way through by how nonsensical it all is. Like it's not even funny bad like the dialogue in the original Resident Evil game on PSOne, it's just terrible and all for the wrong reasons and you might end up slapping yourself in disbelief multiple times.
At least the game has only 4 levels and with 4 unlockable trophies and to be honest when you get the Golden Gun parts you finished the trophies although the game has one more level to beat after that. Yes the game has 4 levels yet the game lies and says that there are three when there is actually four. When you get to the Demon Master to save Kelly you shoot the Demon Master with the Golden Gun, he gets away from you and you chase after him and then the game ends with a To Be Continued leaving you with a dissatisfied conclusion and it leaves you traumatized from how absolutly shocking the game is. Let us hope that we don't see an Episode 2 of this because with everything so broken, poorly designed and executed and the fact that I have spent money on this disgusting excuse of a game is a travesty considering I could have bought a better game for the price that this game costed and had a good time with it instead. It's not worth downloading at any price either on PS4 or on Steam nor is it worth the time and effort to go through it and what does prevent me from giving this game a 0 out of 10 is that using the Gamespot's game review system the lowest rating you can give it is a 1/10. If I could give this game a 0/10 then it would certainly deserve it cause everything about is abbysmal and it's worse then all of the bad FPS handheld ports that I played through and for a PS4 game especially one that is released in 2018 it is unacceptable. It deserves to be not only ranked among the worst games of 2018 but also without a doubt one of the worst games ever on the PS4. Seriously stay away from this game, don't even download the demo out of curiosity not even just to see just how bad it truly is, it deserves to be left alone in the piles of trash bins to collect dirt or any kind of rubbish that is left there, that is if the game ever had a physical release.
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Game Score: 1.0/10
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Game Title: The Unknown City The Horror Begins.....Episode 1
Platform: PlayStation 4/PC
Developer: Yash Future Tech Solutions PVT LTD
Genre: First Person Shooter
Age Rating: PEGI: 16+
Release Date: 6th July 2018 (Europe)
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The Bad Points:
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1. Stolen assets from other games
2. It's broken, glitchy and buggy
3. Weapons have atrocious recoil and are underpowered and selecting the AK-47 shows an MP5 model instead
4. Atrocious level design
5. Checkpoints are at times a nuisance
6. Controls aren't mapped as they should be and also Circle pauses the game, not the Options button
7. Horrible sound effects and music
8. Text to speech voice acting which is very cringy and unfunny for the wrong reasons
9. Very unpolished and very ugly graphics plus the frame rate is very unstable
10. No proper upgrade system even though the game's description says that
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Reviewed by: Anthony Hayball (AQWBlaZer91)
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