I know I heard about this game somewhere. I don't know if it was at an conference of some sort- (although in hindsight, I seriously struggle to believe this is the kind of thing Geoff would allow to touch his annual celebration) all I know it that Unturned was in my head before it hit the silly pages. Umm... Wait- no, Unturned is the blocky zombie game, isn't it? Undawn- there we go- totally forgettable garbage, I should have known! Still, it really is wonderful that after only a few months The Day Before has it's sequel and they managed to score Tencent as a publisher and Will Smith as a celebrity endorsement- what a glow up! At least- considering the game in question is every bit the most bargain bin generic uncultured zombie trash waste of time game- I can only assume it is the 'long anticipated' Day After.
Undawn is what happens when you have a studio run entirely by the boardroom. I know we like to joke about with some of the least creative developers in the Industry right now but I always insist that some of the artists manage to ply their trade before the entire work is largely ruined by executive meddling. Assassin's Creed has some of the most talented world artists in the industry, hands down, Rocksteady may have sold their soul but they didn't flog off their incredible animation talents nor their connections to top-tier voice talent- and as for the Saints Row Reboot... umm... you see... that game... it... was fully voiced. Which is more than you can say for the game Undawn, which some may spy as Will Smith's grand return to the limelight.
Return from what, I heard you blatantly not ask? Well allow me to undermine your intelligence by reminding you that Will- well, he's been on a bit of sabbatical, honey. Ever since committing assault on stage, at the Oscars, in live recording, in defence of a woman who would then go on to throw him under the bus by saying 'I don't know why he did any of that- we haven't even been a couple for ages!'. That was pretty much the brakes on Wills career for a bit as he did the classic thing of disappearing from the lime light until everyone forgot what he did and he can come slinking back to make a name for himself bit by bit. You know- like Kevin Spacey! (Ohhh- actually maybe that's not the kind of comparison his team is looking for.) How about... current famed Twitter-denizen OJ Simpson? (Nope! Nope! Definitely not!) Uhh... Mel Gibson, the Anti-Semite! (Yeah, that's about the best comparison he could hope for, to be honest.)
I'm racking my brains trying to think of literally any other thing that Will had done cementing this as the age of his comeback- there is no way in hell that Undawn is his return debut, is it? I mean there were the various apologies, his public mocking by Jada, nothing in the way of projects- I must have missed something, let me check. Good god- his IMDB reads only Undawn for all of 2023... the only people who wanted this man were the crappy mobile-dev team under Tencent likely built with the intent to sell to a Chinese audience- considering the clear quality deficits that any self-respecting gamer with access to literally anything else would scoff at. Ain't that just sad... how the man has fallen. But hey, maybe there's a soul somewhere in the game if you look deep enough? I mean, we are talking about a Will Smith endorsed product here, the 90's king of charisma and cool! Surely he saw something the world didn't, right?
No, of course not- did you even look at this travesty? It's straight average Korean-app store cookie-cutter garbage all the way through. Basic ass third person shooter gameplay slapped atop 2D pictures of idol-looking women in skimpy outfits- only this time there's also a Will Smith stuck in the middle of them sometimes. And how about the game itself? Will Smith's likeness made it to the game, but unless my man was acting on his worst off-day of all time that is not his voice. It seems they got a rough sound-alike to voice over the very few lines that his character even has as a basic quest giver, but then they couldn't even hire that actor to do all of his lines. That right, some of these lines are literally just dead air whilst you read text- because basic quality standards are a foreign concept to this studio, apparently.
For me the most notable part of the game doesn't even involve Will Smith at all, actually- it's rather when you happen across this one girl during her off hours and upon approaching her are forced into an excoriating music video whereupon this harpy croaks out the most AI generated drivel to make it out of the 2010's. As if sudden music moments in video games weren't awkward enough, as though I still don't have nightmares about Dragon Age Origin's Leliana singing purely in the backing track as she stares me dead in the eyes from two feet away- here comes Undawn to supplant that crippling phobia with something much worse. Bad singing in a video game. Oh, and this is justified as her 'quirky thing she likes to do on nights off', if you're wondering. Girl sings an entire hooky country ditty she cooked up her own brain-damaged noggin as a hobby. Maybe she should take up knitting- that way she'll only be in danger of harming herself.
But the craziest part about all of this- Undawn isn't even new. As I hinted at earlier, the game launched in the middle of 2023 and has only just been discovered now by a totally baffled public. Which might be why the game has already been internally acknowledged by Tencent as a flop generating a bit under 300,000 on a budget of... wait... hang on, a budget of 140 million? What the- look up screenshots of this game right now and then come back and tell me where that money went! Nah, I'm sorry this is a red flag to the IRS- this is clearly a cartel running a fake game studio to try and cover up their money laundering- ain't no way this is legit. You cannot spend 140 million on a game that looks worse then my spare-time learn-to-Unity projects; that just ain't possible. Undawn is a front for a burgeoning drug empire- I'm certain of it.
If the intention was to overshadow Will Smith's previous indiscretions with a disaster big enough to overshadow them- that probably backfired a bit when literally no one played or even reported on the game. And now it's just another curiosity of this ongoing period of turmoil which is the Smith dark ages, a perpetual valley of rakes that Will is stepping on time after time in his fruitless attempt to become a household name once more. Disgrace and disappointment that he was, at least there are worse and less deserving people out there willing to spend, can what I only in good faith assume was 139.8 million dollars, keeping the man employed. What nice guys these devs are, giving the starving artists of the world something to gawk out in pure disbelief as they finally succumb to malnutrition- good job, Undawn- be the nightmare you want to see in the world!
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