This is the worst game I've ever played and I highly recommend it. It's up there with Ride to Hell Retribution in terms of hilarious incompetence and misery. It's one of those unique experiences that are so bad that you just have to see it for yourself.

You owe it to yourself to suffer and laugh through this game.

Well this is it ladies & gents, the most horrid game I have played in recent years.

As soon as the game loads up you will feel the clunky, awkward controls and notice the incredibly bad character animations. The camera can be manually rotated, but it often gets "caught" on obstacles. The voice-acting is simply atrocious, and is backed up by an exceptionally poor script. I actually looked forward to ending the lives of the protagonists just to free them from their dull existence. The only thing this game had going for it was that the surround sound (5.1) seemed fairly consistent and some of the background noises such as flies buzzing around bins, were surprisingly good. The music was generic and uninspired though.

The story of this game is not fleshed out at all... in fact, it barely exists. The narrative boils down to this: you look for treasure with your sister, but someone else wants that treasure too. That is it.
To make matters worse, the game consists of several very short scenes which do not even warrant the title of being "levels". They are incredibly linear, and only the first scene (after the intro/tutorial scene) actually consists of any platforming and exploration. One level is simply walking through the market at snail pace without any meaningful conversation between the three people walking together. That level was the most tedious experience I've ever suffered through in gaming.

Oh and also there's a pointless zombie survival mode tagged on at the end in which you get placed in a corridor while zombies spawn on either side of you. What... The... Hell?!
Who thought slapping that in would make this game any better? WHO?
The entire game lasted me around 90 minutes for me to 100% it (story, achievements, and a go at zombies)

I cannot describe how bad Unearthed is in a review, so I will summarise with this: please do not waste your money on it.
I did not waste my money on this; luckily (or unluckily) I won it for free.

UPDATE: Here is a full play through for the game done by me. I went through it a second time for you guys.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDaqY5XSwlA

First and foremost I would like to say that their are a lot of people bashing it just based on what they read from Metacritic, without actually owning or purchasing the game. I have in fact purchased and played through the entire game already. In short I can't recommend it as it is the shortest story driven game I have ever played (1 hour to complete going slowly). Here are my basic points and review of the game.

The pros:
- The story, while your two main characters are a bit weird (brother and sister), has some potential. Sort of Indiana Jones'ish.
- The environment looks pretty decent for a $5 title. Recently Indie games have been scaling back the graphics to focus on gameplay, this actually has some pretty decent looking areas.
- It is fully voiced in English and Arabic.

The cons:
- Short! The game is super short. It took me about a hour or so to complete and I could have done it a lot faster. 1 tutorial level, 1 full exploration level, 1 short vehicle combat level, 1 walk around level, 1 quick chase event, and 1 driving event.
- Weird movement issues at points. I would try to interact with a ladder to go down and it would jump me in the air and climb up something that wasn't there.
- AI is dumb. I would shoot someone with a SMG and their buddy a couple feet away would still be walking patrol saying something like "I know he's around somewhere". Also some other nuances like "Cover me, I'm reloading" when no shots were fired.
- The melee combat is awful.
- The driving sequence has you driving around Moroco, but the city just loops around. You will drive through the same streets no matter how you progress.

Would I recommend it? Not really. The game has some glaring issues with it, in many cases to the point of them being comical. However I am curious what they are going to do with the next few episodes. I don't regret the purchase if for anything will make for a good playthrough video. It is a $5 USD game for let's say 1 hour of campaign. There is a survival mode that I unlocked after completing it, but I could take or leave that. The price point is so low that you might want to pick it up just to see what it's about, but you aren't going to miss anything groundbreaking if you don't. Plus it is probably the shortest campaign driven story game that I have ever played.

It's like I discovered the meaning of life. But it ended up being horrible and the complete opposite of what I wanted/expected.

On the other hand they were nice enough to include graphics, sounds and controls.


My favorite part was being able to rotate the camera through peoples faces and seeing their teeth from the inside.

5 minutes in and already dropping down into white endlessness because of clipping errors. Moving is a hassle, left/right movement is not strafing but will turn the character, move him forwards and re-align the camera - no matter what the mouse tells the camera to do. Might be handy on a console, but when you're using a mouse to control the camera view - why build in things that override the player controls? It's really an utter nuisance. Controls can't even be configured. Maybe you'll find it better with a gamepad, but even with a controller there's nothing you could do to avoid "jump-rolling" into a wall and dropping into eternity. Doesn't look toooo bad, it's obvious that some work went into this, but to my eyes it's PS2 level, hardly PS3. Not "current shooter average".
Pigeons sitting under water, enemies staring at walls and shouting lame "reloading, cover me" commands into an empty room, showing zero AI at all... Really sorry to be so negative, but it's just not worth the 4€ from my point of view.

While it's refreshing to see a game like this that doesn't feature a burly white American man as the main character, Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta, is unfortunately a very buggy, poorly slapped together game with hilariously bad voice acting, animations and writing.

It's nothing more than a mockbuster created to capitalize on the success of the Uncharted series. Even in one of the early cutscenes it's mentioned that the protagonist "always enjoyed raiding tombs and uncharting mysteries in videogames." If the game wasn't so broken I may have enjoyed it, but it makes Deadfall Adventures look like "the Citizen Kane of Video Games". It's sad because the Unity engine is capable of much, much more.

Would only recommend it if you want something to laugh at.

Despite the fact that Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta - Episode 1 has some development potential, I can't recommend it in its current state, since it has many flaws.

The first problem I had was dealing with the wacky controls. I played it with mouse and keyboard, and there were movement issues at various places, as well as scenes in which the camera was stuck in some weird position (I was unable to move it with the mouse). Being a console ported game, I expected it to be easier with a controller, but watching someone else play it with a pad and seeing that he had the same issues as me made me realise that these are in fact serious programming errors.

Secondly, this game wants to be a mixture of adventure, puzzle, TPS and fighting games. However, it fails miserably at any of that. The story is too simplistic to be qualified as an adventure game, the puzzles are almost non-existent, the TPS scenes excel through how horribly the character models hold their weapons, and the melee fighting scenes are solely painful. On top of that, it offers a survival mode in which you have to fight zombies whose movement physics are utterly silly and who frequently get stuck on pathing nodes in big groups, unable to reach you even though you are standing right next to them.

Thirdly, the story itself is very uninteresting and not in the least entertaining, with some very forced humor.

The only thing I liked about this game was the nice Egyptian setting from the first episode - but this is only a subjective perspective, since I am a great fan of the Egyptian culture.
It's also really easy to obtain 100% of the achievements - it only takes 1 hour. Any more time spent with it would have left me with irreversible damage.

More reviews on the Lilly's Corner Curator page

Guide to uninstalling : Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta

1) Open your Steam libary
2) Find "Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta - Episode 1 - Gold Edition"
3) Click Mouse Right Button -> Delete Local content

Many people would try to tell you that Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta is a poor man's Uncharted, when it's clearly the other way around. My friend and I discovered after playing through the whole game that what we have here is clearly the better experience. For example:

Uncharted had Nolan North. Unearthed has Troy Baker. Which one of these voice actors won GOTY last year? That's what I thought.

Unearthed: 1 Uncharted: 0

Unearthed runs at 60 FPS at 1080p. Uncharted only runs at 720p at 30 FPS. Basic math tells us that since the frame buffer has roughly 4 times as many pixels and twice as many frames, Unearthed is at least 8 times better looking than Uncharted.

Unearthed: 9 Uncharted: 0

Uncharted 3 had horses. Unearthed has 4 wheel ATVs. That's 4 more wheels than Uncharted lets you ride.

Unearthed: 13 Uncharted: 0

Uncharted only runs on the PS3, while Unearthed runs on Android, PC, Mac, and probably the Gizmondo.

Unearthed: 17 Uncharted: 0

Uncharted only has creepy slippery Nazis. Unearthed has full on zombies, and it doesn't need to explain why they're there.

Unearthed: 18 Uncharted: 0

Uncharted usually only gives you a few weapons to choose from at any time. Unearthed has more weapon types than there are enemies in the entire campaign.

Unearthed: 19 Uncharted: 0

Nathan Drake is a ♥♥♥♥♥ who gets scared and emotional when the going gets tough. Faris Jawad doesn't stop cracking jokes even when a gun is fired at his sister.

Unearthed: 20 Uncharted: 0

Finally, as Unearthed rightfully points out on the store page, this game has been translated into more languages than most best-selling literature will ever see, because Semaphore knows everyone will want to play this and wants to be culturally sensitive to everyone. Uncharted consists of playing a white guy shooting minorities. I think we know who is more socially responsible.

Unearthed: 41 Uncharted: Racism

Winner: Unearthed

This is just a summary of all the things that make Unearthed the best. I didn't even go into detail about the leisurely strolls through the city discussing the plot, or the Kafka-esque analysis of the futility of escaping in a car as the city loops around you. There's just too much to this game to pack in one review, and I implore you to check out what may already be the de-facto GOTY of 2014.

This game took me 52 minutes to complete the story mode and a total of 60 (extra 8) minutes to get 100% achievements. That kinda sums it up .-.