Connexion
Unbeatable Review
The pitch for Unbeatable is an enticing one: a visually striking rhythm-adventure hybrid about a punk rock rebellion in a dystopian city where music is illegal – kinda like Jet Set Radio meets a more story-focused Taiko no Tatsujin, which is great in theory. But the promise of that concept doesn’t always line up with the disjointed yet heartfelt mess we actually got. Unbeatable positions itself as a mix of both story-driven exploration and pulse-pounding musical battles, but what that means in practice is a conversation-heavy walking simulator with occasional rhythm segments and a few genuinely brilliant moments awkwardly wedged in… plus an endless arcade mode that has some real promise. That’s where the rhythm game “meat” is hidden away, and it’s decently fun for a few hours with a great selection of tracks and plenty of challenges to unlock, though it’s a shame part of its selection is locked behind day-one DLC.
Welcome to a world where music is illegal, nobody remembers what it is, and, miraculously, you’re the only one who can bring it back! The story mode follows the vocalist Beat and her bandmates as they fight against HARM – a police force defending the music ban with lethal imprecision. The musical names and quirky characters would be charming if the writing supported them with consistent cleverness or emotional weight. Instead, what you get is a script that infrequently touches on what it really feels like to try and become a musician in a world that barely has space for you. The rest of it reads like a long back-and-forth Discord conversation between teenagers who think random equals funny. It works well in short bursts, but gets tiresome across the roughly eight-hour campaign.
It’s a shame that there’s this much filler between the parts that are genuinely moving, especially towards the end. But even during those latter parts, Unbeatable lurches from location to location with minimal clear connective tissue. One moment you’re talking to a guard in prison, the next you’re suddenly in the prison cafeteria with no transition or explanation. Then the camera cuts again and you’re asleep. Then you’re in the factory doing work detail. Now you’re skateboarding on a pair of headphones through an entire platoon of guards. There is some logic behind these transitions, but most of the time, Unbeatable’s zones are disorganized – its story feels like a cassette tape of vignettes that just teleport you between scenes, doing the bare minimum to show you how you got there, and that happens constantly throughout. It's disorienting in the worst way – not as an artistic choice, but as a failure of basic storytelling. There are even a few drawn-out dialogue sequences that repeat themselves multiple times – you’ll literally see the exact same cutscene or conversation recycled for no clear reason.
But what’s most shocking about Unbeatable is how little rhythm gameplay actually exists in the story mode before the final chapter. You'll spend the vast majority of your time running through empty environments, talking to poorly-written NPCs, and participating in mandatory minigames that have nothing to do with the core rhythm gameplay found in the arcade mode. For instance, there's a bartending minigame with obnoxiously loud jazz providing sound cues. There's a batting cage that appears out of nowhere. You'll close sluices in a sewer in a "puzzle" that has you running back and forth while your incompetent bandmates keep turning valves back on as a "joke." Even when rhythm sections do appear, they're sometimes completely disconnected from what's happening in the story – you might be mid-conversation, and suddenly you're in a yard fighting someone with no setup or context. Thirty seconds later, it’s over and you’re back in your bunk talking about something else.
The story itself centers on bringing music back to the city by being punk rock rebels, which is a perfectly serviceable concept. But the execution is often so shallow and heavy-handed that it hardly feels like anything real is at stake until the emotional payoff at the very end, after the credits are already rolling. The villains are also written like annoying teenagers rather than any kind of credible threat. It's trying desperately to be edgy and rebellious, but never actually lets you in on what you're rebelling against or what rebellion truly costs in this world.
As a result, that world feels less like a believable dystopia and more like a caricature designed solely for game mechanics to happen in. Everything is music-themed to an absurd degree – you tie headphones to your feet to escape prison, Beat stops every few minutes to argue with another character about the specifics of being in a band, and every named NPC you meet is vaguely named after musical terms. It's aesthetic-driven to the point of parody, but the message it’s trying to communicate still somehow takes itself too seriously to lean into that absurdity effectively.
The silver lining is that if you’re big into music, you’ll appreciate a lot of these references, but Unbeatable tragically struggles to decide on a tone. It's simultaneously trying to be an irreverent internet-humor comedy and a heartfelt story about found family and artistic expression. Those two approaches could theoretically coexist, but Unbeatable rarely demonstrates the writing chops to pull it off. The result is a game that hamfists its themes into each interaction with breathless exposition and forced drama, with cutesy characters who desperately want you to think they're clever.
When Unbeatable actually lets you play its rhythm game, you can get through it by pressing exactly two buttons. You're either hitting ground opponents or jumping to hit aerial enemies, all synced to the beat. It's functionally similar to Theatrhythm Final Bar Line. To its credit, the rhythm synchronization at least works well – this review was played on PC at 1440p with a 180Hz G-Sync monitor, and the beats lined up perfectly with the refresh rate.
The problem is that, with only two real inputs, Unbeatable has nowhere to go for additional difficulty except "more notes, faster." On Normal difficulty, songs are almost laughably easy. Crank it up to Hard or Expert, and suddenly the screen is filled with so many simultaneous inputs while the camera shakes, zooms, and bounces around that it becomes overwhelming without necessarily being rewarding. You're just trying to parse visual chaos. That said, there is at least a welcome option to turn off the VHS filter enabled by default, which just makes everything look unnecessarily glitchy, as well as a reduced camera motion option, which is a good accessibility feature given how much it can bounce around during rhythm sections.
The music selection itself is at least decent overall. The story mode is a bit more middling; aside from the main themes and songs played by the virtual band, the campaign’s filler tracks feel like what people imagine Portland's indie music scene sounds like when they're making fun of it. But the saving grace is that Beat’s band puts out a few bangers before the end of the story. The arcade mode also has good music from top to bottom, which goes a long way toward making it a lot more fun to play than the story itself. There are tracks from artists like Alex Moukala and Peak Divide that are genuinely great. It’s a little questionable that some of them are locked behind day-one DLC, but you don’t need to pay extra for plenty of excellent beat maps that come along for free.
The arcade mode is structured like a proper rhythm game with unlockable songs, an expansive and fun-to-complete challenge board, leaderboards, and a good selection of difficulty tiers ranging from Beginner up past Expert and beyond. It has the replayability and polish that the main story mode completely lacks. Drop the “adventure” and that's where the actual, complete game lives.
One thing Unbeatable does nail is its looks, with a strong punk rock aesthetic and standout anime fusion art direction. The 2D character cutouts layered into cartoonish 3D environments look great, especially in locations like the town and beach, where the late afternoon light dances off the ocean. The pause menu also has this cool scratchy vinyl aesthetic that really sells the punk vibe. When you pause a session, there's a neat record-scratch effect. These are the moments where you can see the vision underneath Unbeatable’s jank.
But strong art direction can't save poor game design. For instance, the camera is frequently positioned in ways that make navigating each level confusing. You'll often need to run toward areas of the screen that are partially obstructed by walls to trigger the camera to pan to the next room, leading to constant moments where you're just wandering around trying to figure out where you're supposed to go. And these environments feel empty and lifeless, more like stage sets than actual places.
The UX is similarly messy. At first, it looks pretty clean due to a straightforward menu system and sharp dialogue boxes that have a cool, comic-book-inspired vibe to them. The rhythm gameplay cues are solid in the main rhythm game (the one you play during key story moments and in the arcade mode), but are totally incoherent in some of the minigames, like the game where you have to do quality control for bombs in the prison or mix drinks to screechy jazz music. And more than once, dialogue boxes will pile on top of one another or slide to the bottom corner of the screen as NPCs run straight into the camera or off-camera entirely.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Unbeatable is that there are moments that really do show promise. There’s a train sequence where your band is playing music while fighting enemies that’s genuinely cool, but it doesn’t arrive until several hours in. These highlights come way too late, and are immediately followed by more filler. It's almost like the entire game was built around the most promising sections of Unbeatable’s impressive demo from back in 2021, padding them out with fetch quests, repeated cutscenes, and unnecessary minigames rather than making more of what actually worked. That demo framed these moments as representative of the full experience when they're actually the exceptions amidst hours of aimless wandering.
