The Fall Part 2: Unbound (Xbox One) Review

Mechanically, The Fall 2: Unbound looks and feels the same as its predecessor. While it has not taken any leaps and bounds in terms of pushing the limitations of what this series could take, it instead opts to give Arid's consciousness the main front of the story. Without a body to possess due to the not functioning exo-suit, Arid must combat the ever-growing virus that threatens to wipe her out by using her consciousness to manipulate the environment to regain control and defeat the virus.

Arid does this by "jumping" into android bodies and convincing them to work with her to help her achieve goals. At least, that is what Arid tries to do at the beginning. One of the things that The Fall 2 tries to do is create the idea of choices, to give Arid the idea that she could manipulate the host bodies in a multitude of ways. Instead, each choice-tree only has one real choice that can move the story on, whereas the other choices are merely there to show how Arid's consciousness and her evil desire to rid herself of the virus takes on a darkness. At this stage of Arid's journey, she has no real care for those around her, and merely treats them as tools to manipulate, without any sense of consequences for what happens to them afterwards.

One of the main knocks to Unbound is that the story requires a lot of concentration to fully understand what is going on. Cutscenes have a lot of jargon that, to the uninitiated, could mean nothing. While this part of the story is darker than the original, as it deals with Arid and her inner battle between two consciences to evilly manipulate the hosts to do her bidding, unfortunately the cut-scenes do not do a lot of justice to how it tries to tell it. Early on, it is easy to get lost in the dialogue without learning just what is at stake, or what exactly Arid is, or even what she is trying to achieve. Fortunately, though, the story does open and begins to make more sense towards the end.

The three hosts that Arid stumbles across are the Butler, One, and Companion, who are each stuck in their constant cycles of life. They each lie in three different sections of the world, with the Butler forever performing the same tasks for his dead masters, One is a fighting-android who has broken from the mainframe of the rest of the robots, while the Companion acts as a companion for the humans who require her services. Watching how Arid manifests herself into each of their minds and seeing her manipulate the three into performing tasks against their programming, but to help her achieve her goals, is sick and twisted… but in an effective way, as Arid knows that there really is no other way to beat the virus.

While the game presents different options as to how Arid can respond to different dialogues, effectively Arid's inner-self takes over and forces the dialogue option that Arid wishes to take. Seeing how the three hosts squirm in their minds as Arid takes over complete control of their selves is an interesting dynamic that stresses the subtitle of the game, that Arid truly is Unbound.

Fight sequences are a bit heavier, with Arid facing a series of gun fights against the viral elements that seek to destroy her before she can save herself. Using both left and right sticks on the controller to use her aim, while firing at them, is a simple concept. One's battles play out more like a rhythm game, as enemies run in from either side of him, and One must attack them as they reach him. An early attack stuns One, leaving him open to enemy attacks. Unfortunately, these fight scenes are not as clean as they could be, as figuring out One's fight sequences take getting used to, and even still, they can be a challenge due to the inconsistencies of landing attacks or being stunned.

Luckily, in the options the difficulty can be lowered to "casual" to lessen the toughness of the fight scenes and allow for The Fall 2 to be more of a puzzler. The puzzles on offer this time around are tougher than the first game, and not for reasons that are good. Where the first had logical answers to the puzzles, in Unbound some of the solutions just have to be stumbled upon rather than logically worked out. This is due to the absurdity of some of the puzzles and, even more, the chosen solutions make little to no sense as to why they had to be played out that way. This makes the game tougher to figure out, and it does not show the strength in the puzzle-solving elements that the first game did so well at.