Unbound: Worlds Apart Reviews
With its unique use of portals, Unbound: Worlds Apart is a great platform title with a flutter of Metroidvania in the mix. The framerate can be a tad annoying, chugging along at frequent intervals, but thankfully it's never quite disruptive enough to ruin the experience. If you like portals (and come on, who doesn't?), then this is definitely a game worth checking out.
Unbound: Worlds Apart is an excellent platform game with plenty of interesting portal puzzles, but it has a lot frame drops on Switch.
Unbound is a great puzzle platformer that takes influence from Metroidvanias without really being one itself. It focuses far more on the puzzling and a refreshingly linear path through its various environments, and the way that powers are handled prevents them from becoming boring while still leaving some room for extremely challenging optional paths. It's well worth checking out for fans of this type of game.
Unbound: Worlds Apart is a refreshingly original platformer, as its portal mechanic makes for some genuinely creative and challenging puzzles. The platforming is also bolstered by this same portal mechanic. The game is also quite gorgeous, thanks to its hand drawn art style. The way that the portals reveal another side of the world worked to make exploring that much more exciting. Alien Pixel Studios’ Unbound: Worlds Apart is an impressive outing from the indie developer and one of my favorites of the year so far.
As you will have understood, Unbound: Worlds Apart offers a genuinely nice adventure. It is, in a way, a real dive into an interactive poetry, sublimated by a superb artistic achievement.
Review in French | Read full review
From Ori and the Blind Forest’s difficulty to Limbo’s puzzles and aesthetic, Unbound displays its inspirations with aplomb. On top of the innovative gameplay mechanics, the game’s art style, monster designs, and narrative are all fantastic. For fans of puzzle-platforming or gorgeous narrative aesthetic, Unbound: Worlds Apart shouldn't be missed.
Unbound: Worlds Apart is an excellent Metroidvania that is a must for fans of the genre. The imaginative use of the ever-evolving portals ensures that each area feels unique, helping to create a great sense of pace. Although there are some performance issues, they don’t spoil the beautiful adventure through this grand, fantasy world.
A fantastic Metroidvania. The graphics and animation are great and the music is nice and relaxing, provided the occasional difficulty spike isn't stressing you out. There are performance stutters on the Switch version, and a couple of trial-and-error areas that can get annoying, but overall they didn't really sway my overall opinion on the game. If you're a fan of Metroidvania-style games, definitely give Unbound: Worlds Apart a shot.
After all is said and done, Unbound: Worlds Apart is a special little game. Sure, it wears its Ori influence pretty tightly on its sleeve, it has a bit of an unstable frame rate, and there are some difficulty spikes in the latter half. But the wildly different portals you get to summon and the puzzles that are intertwined with them are unlike anything I've seen before. They are quite creative and always made me hungry for the next area and its new gimmick. Give it a whirl if you enjoy variety, puzzles, and Metroidvanias.
Unbound: Worlds Apart blends gorgeous design and animation with puzzle platformer challenges that incorporate a number of unique mechanics to create an extensive and exciting adventure.
Unbound: Worlds Apart is a pretty standard puzzle platformer with its difficulty firmly planted in repeated trial and error. Despite gorgeous visuals, there's not much interesting to see here.
Fairly cliche and quite short, Unbound: Worlds Apart is still well worth playing due to its excellent gameplay, controls, level design, and constant variety.
Unbound: Worlds Apart is a challenging puzzle-platformer with a cool mechanic and demanding precision.
When your home falls into chaos, how would you go about saving it? Take on the role the last child survivor, and save your world from chaos. But the only way you can go about this is opening portals beyond reality, each presenting new gateways to worlds of opportunity.
Unbound: Worlds Apart isn’t a bad game by any means, but after a few hours of play it simply begins to feel bland and a little repetitive. Your portal powers seem interesting at the outset, but chances are you’ll eventually get tired of using the same combination of them to overcome platforming challenges and to make your way past creepy arachnids and other oversized bugs unscathed. If you’re in the market for a challenging puzzle platformer there are worse out there, but you’re probably not going to remember your time with Unbound: Worlds Apart once you’re done with it.
If you are looking for a bright and colorful puzzle-platformer with some nice environment and NPC designs, then Unbound: Worlds Apart will probably scratch your itch for a few hours. What it lacks in mechanical and narrative originality, it makes up for by just being an all around solid and enjoyable experience while it lasts.
Unbound: Worlds Apart is a game that looks and sounds wonderful, with a central gameplay hook, and it keeps players on their toes. Plus, with a lenient checkpoint system even the most difficult parts feel less daunting. Aside from some performance hiccups on Nintendo Switch and a passable story, this is definitely worth a look or two.
I wish that the game could have created a better shell for the entire experience. I like the look of the characters and the world, but it does need a little more variety. And the fantasy-driven story feels a little undercooked. The gameplay in Unbound: Worlds Apart is good enough to keep fans of the genre entertained, especially if they love the occasional challenge. But future titles from Alien Pixel Studios need a little more when it comes to narrative to deliver a truly great gaming experience.
Unbound: Worlds Apart is a game that follows traditional Metroidvania tropes but expands on puzzles that keep you on your toes more than a boss battle, on top of nicely animated and drawn backgrounds, you are in on at least a hundred flavors of fun spanning hours of gameplay. The game’s a good romp for playing through to the end and beyond, if not to challenge yourselves in speed-running it or going on a No-Deaths run, Unbound: Worlds Apart ought to have the challenge you want to keep coming back to, from time to time, making it a worthy addition to your game library.
Unbound: Worlds Apart is a thoughtfully crafted twitch platformer, though its odd blend of gameplay styles leaves it feeling, ironically enough, caught between two worlds.