Seriously, everyone hates elves. They’re pretentious and douchey and they have terrible hair. Tolkien-style elves of course, not Santa’s elves. Without Santa’s elves we wouldn’t have Elf Bowling after all, and that would be a damned shame. But one of the most irritating things about elves is that they live for thousands of years and are functionally immortal according to most mythology. This is where Eternity: The Last Unicorn comes in.
Eternity: The Last Unicorn is a Brazilian action RPG made by Void Studios and released this month. You’d never know it was made in 2019 though, because pretty much everything about the game screams early 2000s PC game in the worst way possible. You play an elf named Aurehen who is chosen to save the last unicorn for the elves for some reason. Apparently the gods gave four unicorns to the elves because they’re special or something and the (I gag to say this) unicorn magic is what makes elves immortal. Unfortunately for the elves, all the unicorns but one have mysteriously disappeared. That last unicorn has a broken horn and because of it, all the elves are going to…um…become mortal I guess? Sad, that. But hey, a questing we will go to save the last unicorn! Not to be confused with The Last Unicorn, beloved animated classic from 1982. Nice way to capitalize on name crossover, Void Studios!
Anyway, back to Eternity: The Last Unicorn. It looks terrible. Truly terrible. The art design is all right for, oh, 2002. Some of the character art looks pretty good, at least it would if it were someone’s deviantart page and they were in community college. Suffice it to say that nothing in the game will wow you visually, certainly not the fixed camera angles that are often weirdly awkward. And definitely not the irritatingly sparkly things that you can’t interact with until you find an object or item to utilize them, even though they’re sparkling away like mad. Grrr. And definitely not the cheap as hell enemies that swarm you in a way that makes it difficult to dodge and, oh wait, you can’t jump away because you can’t jump at all. But you can roll and sometimes sort of dodge. That counts right? Graphics. Right.
So graphically, Eternity is basically over a decade old, with atrocious texture mapping and bad camera angles. It’s ostensibly based on Norse mythology but I’ve rarely ever seen anything that feels less Norse, honestly. Episodes of Stargate SG-1 are more Norse than Eternity, and (SPOILER!) the Asgardians are aliens in that show! Gameplay doesn’t fare much better, with the fixed camera angles making combat difficult, and lock-on required to do any real damage in combat. Even the easiest enemies can kill you fast and if you aren’t paying attention, they’ll kill you before you realize they respawn while you’re exploring, just as irritatingly as a NES Mega Man game.
The story is so generically fantasy that it was hard to even pay attention. Eternity: The Last Unicorn basically makes you not give a crap about the unicorn you’re saving or anything else, even when you manage to unlock the second playable character, the Viking warrior Bior, who has his own backstory. It just…doesn’t matter. You know you’re in trouble when you’re actually wishing for some Elven ethnic cleansing and even the Vikings are sad. Eternity is literally a throwaway shovelware game that isn’t fun. Void Studios even tried to shoehorn a rudimentary crafting system into the game, where you gather a bunch of items and then go talk to a Treant to craft things by…wait for it…holding a button down. Cool. Great idea guys.
And the AI is cheap too. Enemies will swarm you and fast. Even the weakest enemies are easily able to slaughter you with little difficulty, leaving you to go back to the checkpoint and get swarmed again by the same enemies until you make it past them and encounter another group of enemies and the process starts all over. Since you can’t go back and save without respawning the enemies, you’re pretty much screwed anyway. In fact, the only remotely enjoyable parts of the game are the boss fights and even those are both few and far between and moderately frustrating due to the radically crippled combat system.
Essentially, Eternity: The Last Unicorn isn’t worth playing. It isn’t worth buying. It’s not fun, and no one that has a PS4 should be buying anything like this, especially not for $20. You’d pretty much have to have so much free time that you’d exhausted every other title available for the system and simply be desperate enough to play anything that was available. You can honestly get games for free that are more fun than this hacked together trainwreck of a game, so you should probably go do that. Don’t buy Eternity: The Last Unicorn. In fact, publicly shame people that do buy it, in the hopes that nothing this bad ever gets made again. You’ll be making the world a better place.
This review was based on a digital copy of Eternity: The Last Unicorn provided by the publisher for free and I still feel ripped off. It was played on a PS4 Pro.