Unit 4 is an ultra-challenging platformer where the difficulty arises from a constant need for precision, and that’s the kind of game that I can really sink my teeth into, having recently discovered that I’m better at such games than most other reviewers; apparently Unit 4 is a 10+ hour game (according to the developer, at least), whereas I finished it in something like 5-6. That having been said, I’m not 100% sure that I’ve truly completed it; after the third boss fight, no more worlds were available to explore, and my save was labeled as “post-completion,” but no credits ever rolled. Instead, I got a short cutscene that seemed to hint at some greater evil being out there. Was this a sequel hook? Perhaps a hidden area that requires obtaining every coin on every level? Despite Unit 4 being out on PC and Xbox One since May 24th, 2017, there’s almost no information out there about this or anything else. The only reason I’m confident that there’s no more available content is that there are no achievements for defeating any more bosses, and that’s honestly a relief; the thought of slogging through every stage all over again to unlock a hypothetical secret ending, grabbing tricky coins while constantly hurtling into pits because of the imprecise mechanics, is a painful one. That says it all, really.

Unit 4‘s pop culture and gaming culture references are the story

When you first start a game, a text crawl explains that there was recently a war and somebody stole something, but none of this matters. At the end of the day, a villain has stolen a MacGuffin, and your playable squad of 4 characters—each possessing a unique ability—are the only ones who can get it back. To be perfectly honest, Unit 4 barely has a story, instead being focused almost entirely on its mechanics. It wouldn’t be wholly inaccurate to say that it doesn’t have a story at all. Still, it gets credit for its sense of humor and halfhearted attempts to justify its gameplay.

The galaxy is made up of a bunch of different planets, but you can only access a third of the map when you first start the game. Each third of the galaxy has a planet with a series of levels that make up the bulk of Unit 4‘s gameplay, and the only way to unlock the next third is to beat the boss at the end.

There are far more than just the 3 worlds containing all of the game’s traditional platforming levels, though. Some planets have minigames on them that provide you with extra coins, others have traders that sell you different outfits for your 4 playable characters or furniture for your ship, and still others exist as a series of one-off jokes about everything from Brexit to the dull monotony of No Man’s Sky. These little jokes aren’t overly ambitious, often consisting of just 2 screens of text, but they impart a certain sense of charm to the experience that somewhat makes up for Unit 4‘s generic and mostly absent story. The writing is bland, then, but has occasional upsides.

Each of the 4 playable characters has their own unique special ability

Before delving into the nitty-gritty of the mechanics, it’s worth talking about Unit 4‘s central character switching gimmick. The short explanation is that you’re playing as 4 color-coded characters in one, which means constantly swapping between them like in the Trine series or Shantae: Friends to the End in order to make use of their unique abilities. Blue can perform a double jump, Green has a grappling hook that allows him to latch onto hard-to-reach spots, Red can lunge to defeat (some) enemies and knock over/break the environment at certain points, and Yellow has the ability to become intangible and walk through (some) enemies and projectiles and stage hazards. Character switching is primarily accomplished with the ZL and ZR buttons, which scrolls between them, but it’s not a very intuitive process. Despite having beaten Unit 4, I couldn’t tell you which way to scroll to get to a specific character, and combining the powers of characters 2 button presses away is unfeasible thanks to how fast the game is.

Video can’t show just how awkward Unit 4‘s underlying physics are

I made sure to record a ton of video of various physics and control-related problems, but these mostly just look like a failure to jump at the correct time or whatnot. Take Blue’s double jump, for example—all characters have their special ability mapped to the X button, whereas the normal jump button is A. That means that you have to press A and then X if you want to pull off a double jump rather than being able to tap A twice. It gets worse, too: pressing X while on the ground doesn’t do anything, so if you’re trying to perform a double jump right before hitting the ground and accidentally brush against it, you’re likely to walk into an enemy while the game gleefully ignores your input. All characters have issues like this. Green’s grappling hook audibly connects with a wall at max range, but doesn’t always hook for some reason. Sometimes using it as a weapon results in Green getting unexpected momentum that can launch him into a nearby pit. That’s not always the case, though, and this speaks to the biggest underlying problem here—inconsistency. Unit 4 demands consistency and precision from the player, but sports unpredictable mechanics that often kill you through no fault of your own. This is a game about careful movement where maneuvering is a total crapshoot.

If you climb up to a hidden area to obtain extra coins (which seem to exist solely for the sake of purchasing cosmetic upgrades), the jump back down is guaranteed to be a blind one—if you don’t remember where the pits are, you have no choice but to leap blindly and hope that it doesn’t kill you.

In fairness, death only returns you to the last checkpoint, and this is maybe 45 seconds of gameplay at worst. That’s a small consolation when you get stuck at the very end of a section and keep having to repeat the same 45 seconds, but it can be rewarding to iterate on a previous attempt and finally overcome a tricky section. That doesn’t mean that it feels any better when you die for reasons that have nothing to do with your skill; no one tells you which objects Yellow can pass through while intangible and which still kill him (normal enemy bullets and lasers go through him, flamethrower fire and asteroids kill him), so you have to experiment to know.

Most of the time, though, your deaths will be the result of the unpredictable physics. Picture this: you’re running along at full speed (which you ramp up to almost immediately), only to jump up onto a spring. A normal person would assume that your horizontal speed is retained when you’re shot upward, but that’s not how Unit 4 works. More often than not, you lose a little bit of your speed. That becomes a problem when you factor in enemy hitboxes, which are insufferably rectangular rather than corresponding to their sprites. If you land on their head at an angle, you’ll often be killed rather than them. Sometimes, you’ll both die as Unit 4 gives up on determining who got the better of who. This could be worked around if you had the ability to fine-tune your positioning while in the air, but midair momentum feels like it operates on a bell curve where your first correction attempts don’t do enough, only to be followed by a massive overcorrection that ends with you flying into a pit or enemy projectile.

This could be remedied with some changes, but it won’t realistically happen

Between the 4 shoulder buttons and Y button (which awkwardly switches you to your last used character), there are 5 buttons used solely for character switching. If Unit 4 did away with mandatory character scrolling and instead took a Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse approach where all of your abilities are assigned to different buttons, the gameplay would be immeasurably improved. You could still have the sense that 4 different characters are on an adventure by swapping between them whenever you use their abilities, and there would be no more panic-stricken scrolling whenever you need a split-second character change. This would also allow Blue’s double jump to be mapped to the normal jump button and circumvent a lot of needless context-sensitive issues, and with the X button newly liberated, there would be 6 buttons to map 3 abilities to. The physics could also use a rework, but none of this stuff is likely to happen; Unit 4 has been out since 2017 and user reviews have clearly pointed out all of its problems, and yet the Nintendo Switch release doesn’t fix any of them. For better or worse, this is the game that Unit 4 will remain.

Unit 4 has occasionally unclear pixel art and a great soundtrack

About halfway into Unit 4‘s first auto-scrolling level, I couldn’t figure out how to get past what looked like an impassable wall blocking the way forward. That was actually part of the background blending in with the foreground, though, and I found myself making a handful of mistakes like that because of how unclear the pixel art is at points. Worse, enemies and disappearing/reappearing platforms don’t have many frames of animation, so it’s easy to get caught off-guard when they randomly make a 90 degree turn or disappear under your feet (and some platforms simply disappear without any warning, which is especially maddening during the final boss fight). Unit 4‘s soundtrack, on the other hand, is fantastic and upbeat, at times sounding like a combination of a Mega Man and Donkey Kong Country soundtrack. However, there’s no music when you finish a level and return to the level select screen, which creates a strange disconnect between areas with music and those in silence.

Story: 1.5/3 Gameplay: 1/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1.5/2 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ – 5/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

Unit 4 Review Screenshots

*A Nintendo Switch key was provided for the purpose of this Unit 4 review

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