Three new conscripts are already hating their time in the army. The armour is awful, the commander is rude, and everyone hates them. When a mission comes up for some disposable conscripts, everything changes.
Undefeated follows the story of three conscripts – Bastien, Marcus, and Fela. One day they receive a “training” mission that will take them through the mountains with an army captain. The catch is that the captain plans to just abandon them there as, to the army, conscripts are just disposable. What ends up happening winds up with them having to face down an unknown evil in a place they never dreamt of having to go to – the Wasteland.
Undefeated is your basic 2D RPG. You follow the conscripts as they team up with other army members – first a Captain who wants to abandon them, and then a Junior Officer who sticks with them for most of the game. The general list of areas you’ll visit is rather short, with several of your “next plot points” being to head back to the first city. There’s a handful of dungeons and fields, and hidden in these areas are secret rooms – 25 in total.
The battle system in Undefeated follows your typical turn-based formula. Input each attack and watch as the turn plays out. Characters will gain TP as they either hit or are hit, and those capable of casting magic have access to MP. Multi-hit attacks are your best friend out of the TP users, as even when you’re faced with a single for – for example, a boss – they’ll still hit multiple times. Spells will come in either a single target or a multi target form. The damaging ones are up to your judgment to figure out which you should use, and the buff ones are often better to just use the multi target versions. Buffs (and debuffs) can stack multiple times as well, so they’re definitely a worthwhile benefit.
When you start Undefeated, you’re given a few choices in regards to battles. You’ll be able to choose either visible or invisible encounters. I played through with visible encounters and found that they would respawn if you left the screen, sometimes even blocking you into where you were until you defeat them. Escaping doesn’t make them disappear either, so if you encounter something you’ll either have to hope you can get around it or you can just fight. The other option you’re given is a difficulty setting. Playing on Casual, I found that it wasn’t that challenging overall. I hardly ever used healing items until near the end of the game as I just never really needed to.
Money in Undefeated can be a bit hit or miss. Only humanoid enemies will drop actual gold. The majority of your money is made from selling the items you find off the things you kill and from treasure found on the field (either in tree logs or treasure chests). While on Casual it didn’t really make that big of a difference, I did find that it was a bit of a struggle to actually upgrade equipment. Most of what you can actually buy is extremely expensive. Luckily, the game does give you a few upgrades along the way, but the stuff you can buy is vastly better. While the game mentions that the best weapons are found in secret rooms, I never did actually find said secret rooms in my playthrough, only finding those that had buyable gear or consumables.
There are 16 quests available for you to complete. Some of these quests have a limited availability. I only ever managed to find around 7 of them to do, and some of those I didn’t actually finish. There is a special place you can visit – the Giftly Shrine – that will give you rewards depending on quests you’ve completed. You can only enter it once though, so make sure you make a save beforehand so that you don’t screw yourself out of a reward if you haven’t completed the needed quests!
Depending on how many quests you do or don’t do, Undefeated can either be a short or decently sized RPG. The general world map is actually fairly small, lending to the fact that you’ll end up revisiting areas a fair bit. The game does have a few typos and grammatical errors present, but they don’t do much to detract from the experience. With that said, Undefeated didn’t leave an overall lasting impression on me. If you value being able to backtrack to complete missing quests or find more secret areas, you’ll need to be sure to keep backup saves near the end of the game. Should you have only 1 save leading into the final boss, you’re permanently screwed out of exploration unless you restart the game.
Finally, Undefeated seems to have a few spots where the pathing is a bit oddly. Namely, there are some places on the map that look like you should easily be able to get to them but you can’t because a tree has been made a larger “object” than it seems. On the flip side, there are spots where you can just casually walk on a cliff side that you normally shouldn’t be able to. There’s more issues with large tree locations blocking paths than there are with casually walking off the cliff, but both are still a bit annoying.
As I said, the game didn’t leave an overall lasting impression on me. It was an enjoyable experience while it lasted, but it won’t be one of those games I look back on in a few months to a year and think, “Man, that was a pretty good game.” That leaves me torn on whether to give this game a recommendation or not. It’s definitely a game to look at if you’re in the mood for a shorter (6-8) hour RPG, but if you want something longer, there are other RPGs out there.
Undefeated Review Score
3/5
Undefeated is available now on Steam.
I would like to thank the publisher for providing me with a copy for review.
