When Eternity: The Last Unicorn isn’t putting players to sleep with its bland design, it’s driving them up the wall thanks to annoying technical hiccups.
Making a game is hard, and Eternity: The Last Unicorn stands a stark reminder of that fact. Simply put, Void Studios’ Norse-inspired game is a broken mess of an experience. When its bland design and combat isn’t putting players to sleep, a myriad of bugs will have them bouncing off for a more stable experience.
Players switch between two protagonists: Aurehen, an elf, and Bior, a viking. Aurehen must save the last unicorn in existence to restore her people’s immortality. Bior seeks to learn the fates of his missing shield brethren. Despite giving the impression that both tales relate, the writing fails to establish any real through-line between them. Aurehen is clearly the star while Bior’s plotline feels so inconsequential that it may as well not exist. What the stories do share, though, is dull writing and cringe-worthy dialogue.
Eternity: The Last Unicorn’s uninspired design feels like Void aimed to hit the bare minimum of what a third-person action-RPG should be. Neither the world’s aesthetic nor level design feels remotely interesting or engaging. Players run around, fight enemies ad nauseam, and solve mostly generic puzzles. Tedious fetch quests force numerous return trips to the same uninteresting areas. In Metroid fashion, progressing often means upgrading weapons to bypass a barrier. However, certain spots can only be accessed as a certain character, adding to the already annoying amount of backtracking. Eternity’s world is disappointingly small as well. Case in point: only one of what I’d consider a true dungeon exists in the entire game.
Combat boils down to mindlessly spamming the attack button to victory. Enemy AI lacks the sophistication to require any thoughtful strategy. Both characters play similarly (which include laughably weak special attacks), but Bior’s sweeping, more powerful blows make him objectively better. At their worst, battles can also be a rage-inducing nightmare of cheapness. The lack of any post-hit immunity means enemies can easily gang up and stunlock players to a swift defeat. It’s infuriating, especially when knocked down and getting mauled.
The bloodthirsty AI also exposes the imperfect design. Bad guys will pursue players to the ends of the earth, sometimes into scenarios they shouldn’t be able to access–namely boss fights. I had enemies Kramer their way into encounters that were seemingly designed to exist separately from the main world. One showdown against a giant wolf became unexpectedly trickier when a stubborn mage glitched his way into the arena’s entry point and lobbed firewalls at me.
Speaking off boss battles, they’re probably the worst parts of Eternity. Some feel designed as unfinished wars of attrition. One tentacled creature attacked so relentlessly that dodging barely worked. I could only retaliate and consume heal items quicker than it could drop me. Other encounters can be exploited to victory. One poor giant met his end when I stayed between his legs and hacked away while his model helplessly spun around unable to respond. Eternity’s fixed-camera angles exacerbates combat’s flaws. Designed to garner old-school nostalgia, the perspective only creates annoying blind spots for enemies to hide in. Larger foes can obscure the view entirely, allowing grunts to wail on players as they desperately try to locate themselves.
Unfortunately, the only effective solution to these issues is to grind excessively. That way adversaries can be dropped before shenanigans can occur. Growing stronger never feels rewarding. Rather, it feels like you’re brute forcing your way up an unstable hill. The need to grind also means having to spend even more time putting up with combat. Crafting items offers little help thanks to an unnecessary chance system. Blueprints display a percentage indicating the player’s odds to successfully craft them. Bizarrely, you can still fail to make an item even if you have the required ingredients. Failure then results in the permanent loss of the materials used. I never figured out what factors dictated these odds, but I didn’t need to. A majority of the items aren’t worth making to begin with.
If it wasn’t obvious already, Eternity: The Last Unicorn’s biggest problems stem from its litany of technical bugs. Movement and animations have an unpolished quality to them. Periodically, the player randomly freezes in place after performing basic actions. Imagine the frustration this creates during the aforementioned bad combat. For some reason currency and health gems float towards players at a snail’s pace. On two separate occasions, I defeated a boss only for the game to crash and force me to replay the fight. In one instance, an post-fight cutscene froze up because the boss’ grunts still lingered in the background. How do I know this was the problem? Because during the second attempt, I made sure to kill off the minions before finishing off the boss (god forbid I target the real threat first). The scene played out fine after that. Even cinematics feel half-baked, presenting lengthy, unskippable slide shows that feel like they were meant to be voice-acted.
Trudging through Eternity feels like playing a game design student’s graduation project. The game functions, which is enough for a passing grade, but no one would want to actually play through it. Eternity doesn’t do anything that countless other games don’t do substantially better. It’s also broken to the point of being more insulting than amusing. Unicorns are better off going the way of the dodo if it means avoiding this disaster.
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Eternity: The Last Unicorn is out now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Screen Rant was provided a PS4 download code for the purpose of the review.
