Finally got around to play Unbox, a game I’ve been interested in since it was first announced. A quick summary would be something like “Yooka-Laylee, but (mostly) better”. If you want to “unbox” more details about that, please keep reading.
Developed by Prospect Games, Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure is a 3D platformer in which you play as a cardboard box. The game contains 4 worlds: Tropical islands, snowy mountain tops, an oil rig, and ancient Maya ruins.
The story revolves around Newbie, the latest in autonomous box technology. He is tasked with taking out the Wild Cards, another type of box. In the process, he meets with a mysterious box who helps Newbie on his adventure, alongside other characters.
Newbie is the box the player plays as, whom can be customized as the player sees fit.The player can choose 4 types of items for Newbie: Box design, hat, face gear, and clothes. The items consist of other boxes’ customization items, and holiday items, amongst others. You can unlock new customization items from progressing through the story and gathering collectibles.
As stated previously, the game is a 3D platformer, and therefore it revolves around moving and jumping around. Playing as a box, you can expect a bumpy trip when rolling around, however, it’s a pretty smooth bumpy ride overall, but as you can imagine it also makes some of the movement hard to control as you’re never consistently moving straight. This can be helped by jumping instead of rolling. Speaking of jumping, jumping around can also be a bit annoying, likely for the same reason. Like rolling, jumping isn’t always consistent. Sometimes you can get over an obstacle with ease, and sometimes that same obstacle is too high.
Luckily, the game contains a double-jump feature. Unlike other games, the extra jumps are consumables. You can have up to 6 extra jumps, which can be refilled by either collecting the ones spread out over the world or by going to a checkpoint. These come in handy when scaling mountains and tall buildings. The jumps also double as your HP, so every time you explode, get hit by a Wild Card, or stand in fire, you lose one. If you lose all your boxes, you won’t be able to double-jump anymore, and if you get hit once more, you die. Dying is often only a minor inconvenience, as it respawns you at the latest activated checkpoint. Speaking of checkpoints, there are a lot of checkpoints in these worlds. Everywhere you go, there’s almost always one nearby, sometimes even two. The density of the checkpoints isn’t something to complain about; however, the world sizes are.
Like mentioned earlier, there are only 4 worlds. These worlds are huge, almost too huge. Somewhere between 1-3 square kilometers huge. They are pretty filled with interactable boxes, collectibles, and activities, so there’s a reason to explore them all. Each world contain 10 Zippies, 18 Stamps, and 200 golden tapes. Zippies are boxes trapped in cages, and you have to pull a lever to free them. Stamps are the main collectibles, the ones you need to progress through the story. These are acquired either through missions, or by finding them in the open world. Golden tape is the obligatory collectible that doesn’t do much, but still has the largest number to collect. Should you ever need help finding missing collectibles, the red box Bounce is always nearby and can show you the location of a random item. Hidden throughout the worlds are also the diary of the mysterious box, which provide some backstory to it.
The missions you have to do to collect Stamps vary. Some are obtained by racing through the worlds, sometimes a delivery is to be made, other times parts need to be gathered. One may be acquired from a platforming challenge, or occasionally from defending a village from Wild Cards. The Wild Cards are the game’s enemies, and they have a few variants. The standard ones roll into you, trying to explode like a stun bomb. The long range ones hit you with a variety of weapons. Big ones may try to squish you. Then there are the bosses, of course, with a new type for each world. The enemies provide a decent enough challenge throughout the game, but as they never really seem to actually hurt you, they mostly become an annoyance.
Regarding different missions and weapons, Unbox contains a multiplayer mode. Gamemodes include such as Racing and Oddball, along with e.g. Collect the most Gold Tape. The multiplayer game modes utilize the same weapons as those the Wild Cards use in the single-player. These consist of ice (slows you down), balloons (lifts you into the air) The multiplayer aspect is a good addition to the game. I don’t think there was an online aspect of it, however.
If I were to compare any one game to this, it reminded me a lot of Yooka-Laylee. Both are 3D platformers with big worlds and tons of things to collect. While Yooka-Laylee looks like the more professional product, its gameplay was a bit slow from what I recall. Unbox’s mobility surpasses that of Yooka-Laylee, and considering the former is not as long as the latter, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and you leave the Unbox experience with at least some fondness, whilst I can’t guarantee the same for the latter.
To wrap this review up, Unbox is a fine game with a nice concept. When put into execution, the concept falls a bit flat, but it still provides a nice experience. If you find the game interesting and the price alright, I’d recommend a purchase. If you have people you often play games with, this could work as one of the party games.
To explain the description: It is not an essential game by any means, but it’s a nice game you should play through, and one which thereafter deserves to be stored in your catalogue of games, rather than being sold off.