Chris Unarmed is a new Xbox 360 indie game currently in the final stages of development with a release date expected to be around the late November mark. The developers were kind enough to send me a preview copy of their game to play.
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Chris Unarmed is a platform game in which you play the character of Chris. The world is being overrun by the evil Mango and his monsters and until now Chris has managed to evade them. Chris has had enough and decides to embark on a journey to Mango’s lair and put an end to his shenanigans.
Along the way you will encounter various enemies which you must avoid by any means available. Chris has no weapons, so old fashioned platform jumping and avoiding enemies is required. Enemies come in a few guises such as those that will hunt you down by following your character and bouncing enemies that must be timed to avoid.
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The level designs are great and are split over various locations to give some variety. There is a good balance of traditional platform gameplay including tricky platforms to reach, moving blocks to jump or avoid, puzzles and coin collecting. Something which is not often found in platform games is that in Chris Unarmed there is usually more than one route to make progress in the stage, some routes are more challenging than others with the reward of more coins to collect.
Unlike most platform games Chris Unarmed does not have a lives system, if your character dies it will respawn at the latest checkpoint. This may make the game sound much easier to play, but thanks to the great level designs which some can easily take several lives to perfect, you will be thanking the developers for using unlimited lives 🙂
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I can be very fussy with platform game controls and they seemed to be spot on in this game. Tapping the jump button will perform a small jump, holding it longer will perform a higher jump. Your character can perform wall jumping to climb upwards, it works very well thanks to the game automatically turning you character, so all you need to do is tap the jump button when needed. Music and sound were not fully implemented in this build of the game but they will be present in the released version.
The game was fully playable in the build and there were no major issues to report. Some elements remind me of the classic Rick Dangerous game which require patience and careful character controlling to navigate tricky sections of the game. Chris Unarmed is shaping up to be a decent platform game and one that I very much enjoyed playing.
You can find more information and screen shots on the developers blog here.
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