Review : Unbeatable [2025]

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After playing Rhythm Doctor in April and being kind of disappointed with it, I was looking for another rhythm game that would satiate my craving for a good game in the genre. After a quick perusal of my Steam wishlist I invited D-Cell’s Unbeatable to step up to the challenge. Did it rise to meet my expectations? The answer to that question is… complicated. The core of the rhythm gameplay is enjoyable enough and it has a lot of poignant things to say about our innate drive toward creativity, but is hampered by some significant storytelling missteps and rampant technical issues.

I definitely feel like I was primed to enjoy Unbeatable. I had originally heard about it from (personal favorite) YouTuber Julian “Noodle” Morley, who voices Treble, one of the main protagonists in the game. It honestly makes a great first impression, asking a series of questions about how you feel about music and rhythm games and then adjusts the difficulty based on your responses. Then you’re dropped right into the thick of things and assume the role of Eve, vocalist for famous rock band One More Final, which is about to perform one last show before they break up permanently. As Eve you can freely walk around the backstage area talking to people and getting a sense for how she relates to her bandmates Rest and Grace (guitarist and drummer, respectively). After taking the lay of the land and perhaps saying hello to some starstruck fans, you lead Eve onto the arena’s stage for one last show.

It really does start out with a bang. The cutscene depicting the band’s performance is animated with tons of expressivity, and the original music for the game is great and fits the vibe it’s trying to invoke. This is a trend that remains throughout; in terms of presentation Unbeatable is, well, exactly that.

When it hard cuts from the concert to the present day and you take control of the main protagonist Beat, however, is where the cracks start to show. Your time between the rhythm game sections are spent in a directed adventure game type of gameplay where you can freely wander the immediate area and interact with people and points of interest, and this is how it tells most of its story. The first few chapters of the game struggle with pacing and establishing character motives; Beat is a down-on-her-luck singer and guitarist who links up with Eve’s 12 year-old daughter Quaver with the intention of starting a band. We get vague hints and gestures toward what happened at her mother’s concert 7 years ago - apparently a malevolent force called the Silence appeared during the concert and caused a disaster but the details are mostly murky. There’s also a paramilitary police force called HARM put into place to prevent the Silence from returning, music is now illegal and instruments are confiscated as contraband. Aside from those facts, frustratingly little is elaborated upon in regards to the state of the world the characters exist in. More is explained (much) later in the story, but in my opinion the game keeps its critical plot cards too close to the vest for too long.

Because of this, the relationship between cause and effect gets iffy when it comes to the characters’ actions. Supporting characters Treble and Clef get arrested by HARM in Chapter 2 supposedly because law enforcement thought they were connected to a chase that Beat and Quaver lead the cops on in the prior chapter, even though this doesn’t make any sense; at least fifty HARM officers would have gotten a clear view of their faces before or during the chase. Beat and Quaver decide they can’t let them take the fall for what they did and supposedly hatch a rescue plan… off-camera. The game smash cuts from one scene in a restaurant directly to them being in prison no more than a minute later after having botched said plan. This is played up for laughs somewhat but it still feels disjointed, as if I’d accidentally skipped a crucial scene somehow. This kind of thing happens constantly, with important development happening off-screen that changes character relationships and lurches the plot forward whenever the writers seem to have decided that they’ve lingered too long in one place. It happens enough to make me wonder if the development of this game was troubled and if a lot of material was cut, which at least would account for these notable gaps in storytelling.

Speaking of troubled development, remember how I mentioned technical issues? Well, Unbeatable has its fair share and then some. It was developed in the Unity engine but I can’t fault the toolset for the issues I see here; the game often feels tangibly janky, like a Jenga tower precariously wobbling back and forth in the wind. A rapid-fire list of some of my grievances follows:

The characters are 2D sprites that don’t always translate well to its 3D environments; area boundaries are often poorly-defined and there are some transitions between height levels that make the character sprites glitch out when passing over them. During dialogue sequences characters will often talk over each other and text boxes will overlap. Sometimes this appears to be intended but other instances are clearly not. I failed one puzzle in the sewers area because Quaver’s sprite popped into the foreground and I could no longer see what I was doing (frustrating, but also kinda funny). The jail pool minigame is just straight-up awful. For some reason there are two offset adjustments (why??) for the rhythm game portions but it still took me a lot of trial and error before I was satisfied with the visual and audio sync, despite the game having a (not so great) sync wizard. I could list a lot more issues and nitpicks but I think you get the picture. Between the technical issues and the baffling storytelling decisions, there were a few occasions where I nearly put the game down and resigned myself to not finishing it.

But then the funniest thing happened. Somewhere around Chapter 4 there’s a noticeable improvement in the quality of the dialogue and the coherence of the storytelling. I was chuckling more often than not at the characters’ quippy dialogue. It finally starts to answer some of the fundamental questions you’ve had since the start of the game, and character relationships evolve to become more fleshed-out and meaningful. What you’re playing no longer feels like disjointed filler, and honestly it seems like the developers hit their stride here and finally got their shit together.

What follows is an incredibly insightful and affecting exploration of why people feel the drive to be creative and the process involved in getting to the point where your art truly reflects your own, authentic voice. In a flashback scene, Beat performs a song she wrote to her mother (who is also a musician) who gives her the valuable feedback that she’s “hitting all the right notes but performing like she can’t wait to be done with it.” This is essentially her character arc: her doing the incredibly difficult work involved in finding out how one expresses one’s true self in their art rather than imitating an ideal. At times the game is practically monologuing at you and it veers awfully close to being self-indulgent, but fortunately not to the extent where it didn’t land for me. I was captivated through the whole ending sequence, and the story finale was deeply memorable and left me with a warm feeling afterwards. After finishing it, I had the opening guitar riff from the game’s original song “Bookend” stuck in my head for days.

You’ll notice that I haven’t talked much about what is ostensibly the main point of the game, the rhythm action gameplay sections, and that is because… It’s OK. It’s fine, maybe even good. You’re basically hitting enemies on the beat when they overlap with either a high or low attack depending on their position. It shares a lot of the same elements with Dance Dance Revolution except with half the buttons, a different perspective, and of course without using your feet (though if you want to hook up a dance pad and try, be my guest). There’s an arcade mode alongside the story section which I’ve sunk a few hours into and yeah, overall it’s not bad. I certainly enjoyed its gameplay more than Rhythm Doctor’s.

So in the end, would I recommend Unbeatable to others? I’m not so sure. The game certainly has some lofty highs with its rocking soundtrack and excellent visual presentation — some of the setpiece moments of the story have some breathtaking animation and staging. Unfortunately the technical issues and the story’s dramatic early faceplant dampen my enthusiasm and make it hard for me to recommend. I’m glad I stuck with it in the end, but recommending a short game in which the first 70% is tedious but the back 30% is great is difficult for me to do. I think if you’ve read this far through you will have a good idea if this is your kind of game. It’s got deep flaws but also some very bright points. I’m still on the hunt for a rhythm game I’ll love; I think I’ll try Sayonara Wild Hearts next to see if that can finally scratch the itch for a game that’s the total package. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to share them.

Overall Score

∅

No Recommendation

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Review : Unbeatable [2025]