Upcoming boss rush looter-shooter Unyielder just released a combat demo, featuring a couple of bosses and weapons for players to try out.

Unyielder describes itself as a title that “ingeniously merges the best elements of Looter-Shooters, Movement FPS, and Character Action Games into an infinitely expandable Roguelite,” which is quite a claim and something we’ll put to the test today.

The game is set to release at some point in 2025, so there’s no better time to check out its combat mechanics and how the game works.

The first thing players will notice about Unyielder is how weirdly the game renders. There aren’t many graphical settings aside from view distance and anti-aliasing, which don’t seem to change anything when interacted with.

The lack of graphical settings means that players trying out the demo will have to deal not only with a heavy motion blur effect but will also play the game from the perspective of someone with astigmatism. This seems to be a common Unreal Engine thing, as Crime Boss: Rockay City also had a similar blur effect, which unfortunately could not be turned off.

Unyielder is an incredibly active first-person shooter, so the lack of visual clarity is one of the things that hurts the experience the most. I can only hope the game features a good amount of graphical settings once it releases, since it’s currently unbearable to play as this character with greased-up eyeballs.

We don’t get to see much of the looter shooter aspect of Unyielder during this demo, as bosses only drop health, ammo, and different perks to choose from. What the actual itemization will look like in the game remains to be seen, but we do get a few weapons to try out.

Before selecting a stage, the player can pick up six different weapons, being able to equip three at a time while the others stay in the inventory. These weapons range from pistols and shotguns to grenade launchers and even something that looks like a railgun.

The weapons all handle great and feature secondary firing modes when aiming down sights that give them slightly different functionality. One of the revolvers becomes a one-shot, laser-charged weapon while the shotgun rapidly unloads all of its ammo onto the enemy.

The combat demo features different “levels” to choose from, which are in reality combat rooms where we fight different bosses. These bosses seem to be random, which makes it annoying to try and learn specific fights.

The bosses have flashy movesets and are fun to fight but also feature incredibly easy encounters, mostly being trivialized by the counter/parry system. The game makes a distinction between counters and parries, with counters being performed by shooting at the enemy as soon as they start performing a move and parries following the same rule but being triggered by melee attacks.

It’s somewhat easy to luck out and counter the boss frequently during fights, since you’ll always be shooting them and the window is pretty forgiving, but the added damage that comes from parries does make it so the system rewards you for taking a risk and getting close to the boss as soon as they start winding up for an attack.

Overall, Unyielder‘s demo shows a good amount of promise, as we do need more games inspired by Ultrakill, although the roguelike aspects feel tacked on. The perk system is barely felt, having pretty useless upgrades that don’t change how you play the game, and for the moment we don’t have any insight into how the loot system is going to work.

The demo also features secret bosses, who show up after defeating the others as fast as possible. It’s pretty easy to go through the demo and completely miss them since the game doesn’t necessarily hint towards their existence. The secret bosses are better and harder fights, having a lot more HP than the other three and featuring more challenging movesets.

Unyielder is satisfying and smooth to play but desperately needs graphical tweaks and balancing. The blurry visuals are beyond rough to deal with right now, and most bosses were pushovers. If Unyielder manages to fix those issues, then it can find a pretty good niche as a first-person spectacle fighter, as long as it sticks the landing with its roguelike mechanics.

Unyielder is set to release at some point in 2025 for Microsoft Windows (through Steam).