UNYIELDER Review [Demo] | Bright Lights and Sweaty Fights

updated_at: March 10, 2025 04:09

published_at: March 10, 2025 04:09

UNYIELDER
Release Date	Gameplay & Story	Pre-Order & DLC	Review

UNYIELDER is a rogue-lite looter shooter with stylistic combat and spectacular fights. Read on to learn everything we know, our review of the demo, and more.

Everything We Know About UNYIELDER

UNYIELDER Plot

In 1972, Erebus, Antarctica's capital, has fallen, leaving behind a desolate wasteland. Now a magnet for apocalyptic catastrophes, the city is little more than skeletal ruins buried beneath an overwhelming surge of Pneuma—a residual by-product of entropic weaponry.

UNYIELDER Gameplay

UNYIELDER is a fast-paced roguelite FPS with looter shooter mechanics and a strong focus on movement. Players take on a series of boss fights, using agility and an evolving arsenal to survive. Defeating bosses grants new weapons and perks, but enemies grow stronger as well. Precise timing and movement is key to surviving UNYIELDER’s gauntlet of powerful enemies to counterattack and loot them of ammunition and health.

UNYIELDER Release Date

UNYIELDER will be coming out sometime in Spring 2025 at an unannounced date for the PC via Steam.

UNYIELDER Review [Demo]

Bright Lights and Sweaty Fights

On this episode of trying out Steam demos purely because of their thumbnails, we have UNYIELDER: a rogue-lite looter shooter that released a demo during the start of Steam’s Next Fest. Now, I may be a rogue-lite enthusiast, but combining it with a looter shooter certainly tickles my fancy even more. So off it went to my library, of course.

Actually playing it, however, I immediately realized something: UNYIELDER’s demo wasn’t just your average looter shooter—it was also a skill (and patience) check for anybody even remotely interested in trying out the full game.

Before we go into the specifics, though, I should probably explain what the heck UNYIELDER is first. As I mentioned, it’s a looter shooter with rogue-lite and very minor RPG elements. Relatively simple stuff. The entire gameplay loop forces you to adapt a deceptively uncomplicated pattern of parrying enemy attacks whenever there’s an opportunity and reappropriating anything your enemies drop.

Of course, that doesn’t exclude dodging enemy attacks, selecting perks at the end of every stage, and increasing the number of breathing holes your targets have (using bullets, I mean), but those are part and parcel of the roguelike/offshoot and shooter experience. Basically, you shoot at enemies, parry or dodge their attacks, loot their stuff, and move on.

Mouth-Watering Core Gameplay

Like I said earlier, UNYIELDER’s core gameplay is as simple as they come for a fast-paced action shooter. All you need to do is shoot, survive, loot, and move on to the next hellhole. However, the level of polish the game has achieved for every combat mechanic other than parrying (more on that later) is a wonder to behold.

First of all, the gunplay is very nice. The recoil packs enough wallop to give every gun weight behind it whilst not being unreasonable to handle. Plus, despite bullets having travel time and even drop, enemy hitboxes are fair enough that the game won’t punish you for not hitting a single pixel on the target. This makes compensating for the earlier two conditions far less of a punishment and more of a cool gimmick to keep you on your toes.

UNYIELDER’s movement mechanics—what you use to keep your faceless behind out of trouble—are also tuned to a speed that allows you to keep up with the bosses hurtling themselves (and their rockets) around the map at the speed of a drunk taxi driver.

There are four main methods to get around slightly faster than walking speed. The first one, double-jumping, gives you verticality, while sliding gives you access to low-headroom locations and dodges projectiles aimed at your cranium. Lastly, dashing just puts you from point A to point B horizontally, really, really fast, as long as there’s nothing in between; a very important skill to have considering everything in this game moves like it has the jitters.

As you’d expect, dash is the most important skill there. You can combine it with your other maneuvers to slide or jump extended distances in an instant. And while it does have a cooldown, it’s so short that it might as well not exist. This makes UNYIELDER’s combat feel like a frenetic dance between two antsy stuntmen trying to step on each other's toes every half-second. Oh, and there’s also the grapple command, but it’s mostly to get closer and punch the living daylights out of enemies to start the next phase.

Glorious.

Parrying is a Requirement, but Entirely Unreliable

Remember how I mentioned that every combat mechanic in this game is very well-polished except parrying? Yeah. To get you up to speed, UNYIELDER allows you to parry attacks by either shooting (counterattack) or slogging (parry—and it looks like a scene straight out of Fist of the North Star) the enemy’s face just as they’re about to perform certain attacks, as indicated by a brief flash of light. Pulling off either dents their HP bar by a good amount, stuns them into questioning their life choices, and forces them to drop their spaghetti—by which I mean ammo, armor, and health packs.

Unfortunately—I don't know if it's a skill issue or an actual game issue—but the windows for both are too short for them to actually be accessible without great pains against many of the game’s bosses. The tutorial actually gives you false hope because the first two bosses have incredibly forgiving parry/counterattack windows, but when you actually try the main game out, especially on higher difficulty stages, you’ll find out that the actual number of frames you can parry or counterattack within are a small fraction of what the tutorial implied.

Weirdly enough, the timing varies between enemies, despite using the same indicators. In other words, the window of opportunity to punch your opponent’s face before he makes yours explode may be shorter or longer after the flash of light appears. That’s a bit of an issue. That just means the light is entirely useless to help in timing parries and counterattacks and is simply there to tell you which attacks you can or can’t deal with. And I didn't even get started with the visual clutter making that flash difficult to see in the first place.

This annoying facet of the game is a major blow to its playability, as counterattacks and parries aren’t just a suggested means to style on your opponents; they’re a requirement. That’s because these are your only reliable methods to obtain drops to replenish your ammo and recover your vitality. In other words, if you can’t wrap your head around the mechanic, you will eventually have to fight bosses barehanded, hoping to luck out on a counterattack—or die trying. Mostly the latter.

It’s an easy fix, though. One way is to add a ring of light from when the flash appears that closes in on the enemy, letting the time it takes to do so be the window of opportunity for counterattacks and parries.

Future Updates Look Quite Promising

There are a few content drops in the future that I’m particularly excited about. The most important one would be the unlockable playable characters, which is particularly essential because I haven’t seen the character in the thumbnail yet. Hopefully, this also means that there will be changes in the default weapon you start out with; I don’t want to begin each stage with the same revolver every time, thank you.

Story Mode is also locked at the moment. Now, I know that story isn’t particularly important for a roguelike offshoot, but considering that you’re already making small progress every time you finish a stage, might as well add some lore to your grind, right?

Lastly, the game will also have collectible items; not a very exciting feature, but one I’m looking forward to nonetheless.

Vague Writing Makes Vague Stories

Being a demo, I can forgive UNYIELDER for its underdeveloped storytelling. It’s not very important to the roguelike offshoot experience anyway, but since it does count as a reward for progressing, it warrants a high-quality delivery. Still, that doesn’t excuse the game for giving you a metaphorical cold shoulder during the many cutscenes that you’re required to listen to.

See, the game starts off with two characters talking to each other while they watch over your unconscious body. Normal; I wouldn’t talk to a sleeping person, either. However, for them to continue doing so even after you wake up is wild. It’s alienating whenever your peers only refer to you whenever they have a question to ask.

The way they talk is also an issue. Even at the start, the two aforementioned NPCs talk in a way that hints at their long history together. That is, their dialogue is full of implied understanding and knowledge that they’re aware they share—something that you, as a newcomer both canonically and literally, don’t. It’s kind of like being a novelist who finds himself chucked in the middle of two rocket scientists discussing their latest project together. Not fun.

Not Quite a Looter Shooter, nor a Rogue-Lite

UNYIELDER also suffers from a bit of an identity crisis, particularly in its personality as a looter shooter and a rogue-lite.

Now, how is a looter shooter defined, anyway? I would describe it as a shooter with loot collection and progression mechanics. That is, you pick up loot that grows stronger gradually as you progress through the game, making judgment calls on which to use depending on your preferences and the circumstances.

UNYIELDER, though… well, let’s just say there’s not enough loot in this game to call it a real looter shooter. Heck, just getting a new weapon beyond the starting revolver is already a massive pain in the neck.

You see, a weapon can only be obtained by meeting BOZ, the weapon merchant, in a peaceful stage, or by pulling it out of the corpse of a major enemy. The first method is easy enough, sure, but the second way is quite a bit unreasonable considering major bosses have some of the strictest parry and counterattack windows—especially if you’re a new player.

As a rogue-lite, the power-ups you can obtain after defeating a stage also somewhat present an issue. See, among the many upgrades presented to you after forcing the enemy boss to ascend to the next plane of existence, the vast majority of them, at least in my experience, are those that raise your stats greatly at the minor expense of another stat.

That’s… not good. At the very least, those kinds of upgrades that force you to sacrifice a stat without a significant impact in performance—like maybe dropping grenades every few seconds or shooting laser beams from your eyes—should be avoided. Unless players are looking for specific builds, becoming weaker in even one aspect isn’t a very appealing option regardless of the benefits.

There’s also a severe lack of gimmick-based upgrades like… yeah, dropping grenades every few seconds, or shooting laser beams from your eyes.

Overall, though, I would put UNYIELDER as a game that has potential. Many of its issues can be easily fixed, after all, and the biggest hurdles—like polishing the core gameplay experience—are already nearly perfect. I look forward to the game’s progress from here on.