Naturally, you’ll help him solve puzzles and open doors so that he can fly away home. One day, said robot is floating about with his buddies when he’s pulled into the ground by a metal tube and trapped in the middle of a giant metallic city. This makes this the definitive version of the game. It adds a whole new chapter for players to explore. Like the best crossovers though, UE isn’t simply a port. This game first found life on PC, was brought over to mobile phones, and now makes the journey to modern consoles as well. If you see a downloadable game on one system, it’s bound to show up on the others at some point as well. In a gaming world where most games spoon feed us solutions to difficulties you may face, it’s a nice change from the norm.Ĭome for the mental challenge and you won’t be disappointed.One of the many boons the digital revolution has bestowed is that exclusive games are simply becoming an endangered species. I wouldn’t invest in Unmechanical: Extended for the additional part just yet, maybe they’ll iron out the bugs, but there’s enough of the original game to make it worthwhile to have on your Xbox One for £7.99. It wasn’t just the one area that did this, so my opinion here was soured by the end of the short story.ĭoes this outweigh the enjoyment I garnered from the main story? Of course not, because the puzzles in this part were challenging, unique and most importantly worked. After a few reloads and repeating the solution just as many times, it eventually opened up the next area. When you spend a vast amount of time on a problem, only to find you will go no further because the game has bugged out it becomes bloody frustrating. The puzzles are also just as mind bogglingly great as before to discover, hence you must be thinking, what’s my issue with the story extension then? Quite simply, bugs.ĭue to the fact that the player will never fully understand a puzzle until you’ve worked it out and moved on, I didn’t even realise the first bug until I was exploring back and forth looking for something I’d not done correctly. There is no control over the second robot, if it appears and is meant to do something to help progress it will, so no need to worry about controlling two at once. This time, two robots have been taken and although in separate parts of the facility they will have to work together at points to escape. Although you’ll find it’s less of an enhancement in reality. Now onto the reason this is the Extended edition an extra new level, story and puzzles to enhance the experience. So, it’s fair to point out the standard Unmechanical game keeps you occupied for a good few hours and at times takes you as close as it can to frustration without ever really getting there, ending up as a real mental workout that’s for sure. That being said, a story isn’t a must here but it’d certainly compliment the well thought out gameplay. I guess your imagination will be the main source of taking anything from all this.
This was one of the more trial and error based puzzles that feel like a real achievement once completed.Īs for the story, it’s a little bare and with no explanations as to what is going on within this strange underground world of weird spider looking robots, darkness and even a beating heart. Only by messing with these scales do you realise that something moves depending on the weight placed upon each set. After entering an area, all I see is a few weighing scales each with differing sized stone blocks on and a couple of surplus stones by the side. However, as an example to get across to you what to expect, I’ll recount one of the simpler tasks I faced. I don’t wish to spoil the many puzzles involved here as one of the joys is actually figuring out the nature of the puzzle before even attempting to solve it. And that’s why the major positive note I have for Unmechanical: Extended is towards the complexity of puzzles they offer, using very little tools to solve them, whilst still being enjoyable to solve. Instead they have a variety of conundrums in place which, to name just a few, aim to test your memory and bamboozle you with the power of reflection.
Given such basic controls you’d possibly think there isn’t much scope for the type of quandaries it could place on your path to freedom, and well, to be quite frank the developers don’t seem to have allowed it to limit them at all. It is quite fortunate that there are only two abilities you’ll need to figure out one, performed by the analog stick, to move the robot using its rotor blades and the other (one of many buttons doing the same job) to lift things using a powerful beam.
You are expected to figure it all out on your own, not just how to solve the various puzzles but also where on earth you’re meant to go. What becomes apparent from the moment you take control of this poor robot is that there’ll be no hand holding in this game.