Steam Community :: Alberto

8.2 hrs on record

Virtua Unlimited Project is a game that, in a healthy industry, would be completely overlooked as a mediocre Megaman ZX ripoff. Unfortunately, the game industry is in the toilet right now so this is one of the better indie games out there.

The gameplay feels exactly the way you'd expect, and that's a good thing. It plays near identically to the Megaman ZX games, with the notable exception being a dive kick move that's somewhat underused. I often found myself forgetting that it even existed until the game presented me with a long line of enemies over a pit as a not so subtle hint to dive kick off of them.
Speaking of pits, this is a good time to talk about the difficulty. This game is pathetically easy, even on hard mode. Pits and spikes don't kill you in one hit, and the game lacks lives. So if you die you can retry from the last checkpoint as many times as you want. This makes any challenge incredibly easy to brute-force your way through, although you probably won't need to very often considering this game just lacks challenge in general. Levels often contain long stretches of nothing, and there are rarely more than 3 enemies on screen at at time. And it's incredibly easy to kill said enemies before they even get the chance to attack you.
The bosses are the hardest part of the game, but that isn't saying much. I never found myself getting "stuck" on any of them, and since there are no lives if you die you just start at the boss door again without any fear of a game over.

The bosses you fight mostly consist of a bunch of anime girls, which is cool. The artwork is somewhat amateurish, and doesn't always match up with the sprites, but in today's gaming landscape filled with ugly brown women I was pleased to see a cast of very attractive characters.
As for what the characters are like, I couldn't tell you. I think they're supposed to be Vtubers or something? But I don't know for sure because the story in this game is translated abysmally. It reeks of ESL SEAsian translation or really bad MTL. Either way, it sucks. And it makes it near impossible to actually make sense of what's going on in the story. I'd say don't even bother trying. Just skip the cutscenes or watch them to make fun of how bad they all are.

While the character art is pretty, if somewhat amateurish, the rest of the art varies from passable to downright bad. The character sprites look... fine. But some of the animations feel cheap. For example, the sword swinging animation has less frames than the sword swinging animation in Megaman ZX, a DS game. Frankly I feel like this is unacceptable. I understand this is an indie game, but come on. It's 2024 and this game doesn't look as good as a DS game from over a decade ago.
The background art is straight up terrible, though. It's inconsistent in terms of presentation, with the game sometimes having highly detailed, almost hand drawn backgrounds, and other times having low res pixel art backgrounds instead. The aesthetics for the levels also leaves a lot to be desired, with most locations looking generic and forgettable.
One very stand out example of a bad background is right near the start of the game. In Stor's room, each background element is drawn in a different perspective. Resulting in at least 3 different perspectives overlaid on top of on another in a single background. It's insane.

The game's music is largely forgettable as well. I won't go on about this too much, as Megaman games set a pretty high bar musically. But I will mention that there is one song (I think it plays in the wheelchair loli's level) that sounds exactly like a Love Live song. But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at the game being derivative to a fault at this point.

All that being said, I didn't not have fun with the game. Like I said at the start of this review, there aren't many good games coming out these days. So I feel like I have to take what I can get at this point.
And considering this game is derivative of a series with two whole entries, one of which isn't very good (sorry ZX fans, Advent is the only one worth playing) I feel like this is still worth a try if you're a fan of Megaman ZX style games.

Just don't expect anything mind blowing. It is a Chinese game after all.

Posted 28 October, 2024.

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