A new game hit the Steam store as a free game for players to all enjoy. This game is UNDEFEATED, a game project made by three students at Vantan Game Academy. This is the first game the school itself has published, but could be the beginning of their most potential student projects to be published moving forward. Not only was this project popularized through social media due to it looking like an awesome superhero-simulator, but it plays better than a lot of other games out there from paid studios.
Gameplay
Without any story elements to explain your character or what is going on, you start off the game with a bad guy and his big-bad machine terrorizing the city you are in. This will serve as a tutorial and will take you through the various steps needed to understand the basic controls and functions this game offers. From movement to flight to the fighting itself, you will know how to do everything this game can throw at you by the end of this short tutorial.
From the first tutorial they will use lights and icons to let you know of the dangers in the city for you to go and provide superhuman aid for. The different things that this could be are saving citizens trapped under fallen rocks, putting out a threatening fire, or fighting against foes both small and Boss-sized. Well, the bosses are the same size as the rest of the characters, just more powerful really.
There are also both destruction and speed challenges. In these challenges, ranging from easy to hard, you will either have to destroy all of the towers that appear for the challenge (presumably something the bad guys set up) or go through each ring in a course that is mostly in the air and flight-based. The speed challenges also have little red circles in the middle so you can rank up your score by being more centered and an overall score will be given at the end that will result in your rating from 1 to 5 star. The destruction challenges have small and large towers where the large ones tend to destroy the small ones around it due to its blast radius which will aid you complete the goal of destroying as many as possible to rack up points in order to get the best star rating at the end.
Other than doing challenges, you can simply fly around the city and see the simplistic style to it that shows a mix of care and quality that you would expect from a student project. It actually may even show off more than you would expect as it isn’t just a repeating mass of buildings and rather all uniquely made throughout the small map.
Visuals
Visually the game is aesthetically pleasing in its mix of minimalism and simplicity to pull off the atmosphere and effects.
Audio
The music is a rock-based hype track that loops to keep you amped up as you fly around the city. All of the sound effects are fitting to the gameplay, but overall rather generic.
Replayability
There is always room for improvement in the challenges and there will always be random events popping up throughout the city, but this is likely a game that would just kill an hour or so due to its small map size and repetitive actions.
What It Could Have Done Better
I could sit here and load this section up with all the different aspects this game could have offered and improved on, but we all know that for a free, student-made game, this is about all we could expect. It is full of potential to be a full-scale game that would hold many players attention if given an actual difficulty fluctuation instead of being a simple and fun game. Of course the map size is way too small, the enemies and AI are slackingly easy, tons of minimalism, and so on, but none of these are things worth going into given the background and lack of price on the game.
Verdict
UNDEFEATED is worthy of the hype it was given and is a fun way to kill an hour or so! Loaded with potential and bringing a great superhero experience without the weight of story and accuracy to keep it from being anything but a simulator. It is a free game worthy of at least giving a shot.
