Underrail Review

For now, most publications have ignored Underrail, partly most likely because it came out right at the end of 2015, but Destructoid’s Josh Tolentino gave the game a spin and came away not entirely satisfied. The final score of his review is a decent 7.5/10, but Tolentino has a host of issues with the title:

The good news is that most of UnderRail’s potential flaws are largely dependent on how highly a given player regards the era of late-90s PC role-playing games. As an isometric-perspective, tile-based, post-apocalyptic RPG with turn-based combat, it’s so much a student of the likes of Fallout and Arcanum that it’s not surprising to see some of its fans call it “the game Fallout 3 should have been.”

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It works well enough, but the flat writing lacks the creative spark that made those older games stand out, igniting imaginations to fill the gaps where primitive graphical engines couldn’t provide the details. As it stands, UnderRail’s world to me is less an intriguing setting than a series of cave labyrinths filled with mannequins.

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If what you miss most about games like Fallout is the act of rolling your character, exploring a space from that particular camera angle, allocating your AP in combat, or tweaking a build after several runs’ worth of trial and error, you’ll be in good hands with UnderRail. Otherwise, it may be more productive to simply play the older games again.