UNDECEMBER (Android, iOS, PC Steam) held its global launch (for the west) on October 12th. The game has been live in South Korea since January 2022 (I previously mentioned this in the summer of 2021, and wasn’t really impressed by it). This is going to be really short (by my own posting standards).
Weighing in at under 8GB, I decided to give it a try. And I quickly found it isn’t for me; the game just doesn’t have any sort of the dopamine fix that one would expect from something that is trying to carve out a niche in this particular genre. The PC controls are passable (like Tower of Fantasy) given this game is also a mobile crossover, while the graphics are what one would expect of a title that is designed with this sort of crossover in mind. I’m playing at 1440p with all the settings cranked up, and the visuals are ok (the opening cinematic and initial prologue looked way better as a hook compared to the actual reality once you are playing your actual character, where you can tell the assets are optimized for mobile devices). This is despite what was mentioned in the KR unveiling video (linked in the above prior posting). I doubt they have fully independent production pipelines for mobile and PC versus targeted optimization and tweaks when it comes to i/o control abstraction and visual elements.
I tried to play through at least the first few generic story quests (equipping what runes I got), but the game play is just lacking any sort of the “dopamine/gotta keep playing” fix. So I stopped. I did have a quick glance at the cash shop and found it to be no surprise. This is a free to play game that was obviously designed for the mobile market where this kind of shop is the norm. Free to plays have to make money somewhere (one needs to accept “pay 2 <insert favorite term>” will be part of that monetization).
How UNDECEMBER compares to Diablo Immortal is something I cannot say since I haven’t tried the latter (and won’t in keeping with my decision to steer clear of anything Blizzard Entertainment until I see what takes place with the Microsoft acquisition, and how they handle company executives who are long part of a gaming industry wide problem).
What I do know is that isometric games no longer do it for me. Lost Ark eventually made that abundantly clear to me where the exploration aspects of the game world, were all lost opportunity due to the decision to stick with the fixed quarter view camera. Devilian was the last one I enjoyed, and that was made tolerable because it hadn’t completely excised the 3D camera and controls (WASD was still available alongside mouse controls; just the ability to rotate camera was missing).
UNDECEMBER not doing it for me is not primarily due to this aspect though; it’s the core game play loop that failed to keep me hooked. Maybe this is the “you need to reach end game first to come to a better conclusion” aspect that some games have (which is normally associated with the difficulty level of the MSQ content being naturally scaled back to allow unfettered progression). The problem is that a game like this should already have that low level hook and addictiveness to at least give you an illusion that things might be better there (including the ramp in difficulty).
I believe this game will have its fans who will stick with it, but it definitely is not a longevity candidate where it will have staying power past the 1 year point. I guess we’ll see where the global version is 6 months from now (where I may try to continue my progression).
