Unstoppable review: "May just bring enough to the table to get me to put my controller down"

I will openly admit that I have never been someone who has given much time to playing board games solo. Alongside my collection of the best board games are shelves of video games, saying nothing of my Steam library (I’m a sucker for a good Steam sale), so typically, whenever I get the urge to play a game, I opt for the digital variety, saving me from the setup time and space requirements that tabletop options require. Unstoppable from Renegade Game Studios may just bring enough to the table to get me to put my controller down.

Designed by John D. Clair, Unstoppable is a cyberpunk/sci-fi deck-building title where you and up to one other person work to fight off waves of enemies while trying to take down the looming and ever-present boss before either time or your life runs out.

At the start of your turn, you will draft a new card into your deck and utilize your hand to take out that round's line-up of enemies or prepare as best you can to absorb the damage of anyone you can’t take out. Much like games such as Star Realms, cards can be associated with various factions and building out a deck whose cards synergize with one another and can take advantage of faction bonuses, will help see you through and truly become unstoppable.

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The big twist comes in the form of Unstoppable’s card crafting system, where each card is composed of a core side - attacks, allies, resource generators, or other boons to help you out - and a threat side, which are enemies that are trying to kill you. Coming with a bunch of card sleeves, you will be putting both a core card and a threat card in the same sleeve as you play, with additional upgrade cards that can be purchased, slotting in between them. It really is pretty nifty.

Going solo

Being a part of Renegade’s “Solo Hero Series” line of games, Unstoppable shines with single-player, but does come with official rules if you want to team up with a friend, though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. The two-player rules feel more like a tacked-on afterthought included on the back of the box, as opposed to doing anything particularly exciting. You double the health points on the boss, but everything else plays out the same as if you were playing solo, with the only exception being that you can attack enemies on your partner’s side. That said, if one of you goes down, you both lose. The couple of times I tried it, having a partner almost felt more like a hindrance than an exciting addition.

I’m someone who loves deck-building games, with the likes of Dune: Imperium and Clank frequently coming off my shelf for game nights, and I even have a small-box copy of Star Realms in my car’s glovebox. Compared to those others, Unstoppable forces you into a much more offense-focused style of play. Unlike other deck-builders, where you have a draw phase in which you replenish your hand of cards, the only way to draw more cards is by defeating enemies, on whose reverse side are the cards you have previously drafted or that compose your starting deck. You can’t simply turtle up for resources here; you need to always be working out the best way to dish out the most damage you can in the most cost-efficient way, as each card you play has an associated action point cost. As I played Unstoppable, it almost felt more like a puzzle game than a boss battler, and certainly distinct from other card games like it that I’ve played.

To help you along in tackling your objective and enemies, you will need to upgrade your cards, done by slotting modifiers into the sleeves your cards are in. Cards feature cutouts, with upgrades filling those cutouts, such as allowing you to deal more damage or earn credits that you can spend on even more upgrades. But every upgrade is a double-edged sword, as each will not only benefit you, but also the enemy that appears on the other side of your card. More than once did I find myself cursing my earlier decisions as I got smacked for extra damage or made a particularly nasty enemy sturdier courtesy of an upgrade I bought and applied to it. Unstoppable does tell you what enemy upgrade is present on the other side at the bottom of the good side, so the information isn’t hidden from you, but it still feels like stubbing your toe - you have no one but yourself to blame, but it doesn’t stop you from wanting to shake your fist at the sky.

When it comes to the bosses your end goal targets, you have three options to pick from, including the Harbinger (your most basic foe, where you simply need to dish out damage before time runs out), The Triumvirate (basically a cartel of three gangs whose bases you need to take down before you can take the boss itself down), and Duomo’s Menace (which really changes things up, featuring a branching story deck you need to get through until you reach specific victory cards). While I certainly wouldn’t be against a couple more options, I really do enjoy how varied each of the three victory conditions is, and how they manage to pose vastly different puzzles to solve. It’s unfortunate, however, that the four characters you can choose from don’t rise to the same standards.

Chores

Saying that Unstoppable has characters to pick from feels a bit disingenuous, as outside of their own unique portrait cards, the “characters” themselves are just a set of three unique cards in their starting decks. These are fine as a jumping-off point and help direct you, but I enjoyed doing a sort of draft at the start instead, picking three cards from all 12 unique cards. This little bit of homebrew paired with the adjustable difficulty options is great for mixing things up and keeping the game challenging.

Some games, take The Lord of the Rings - War of the Ring board game, for example, have their theme and aesthetic so intertwined with what the game is that it almost becomes a component of the game’s design itself. Unstoppable falls on the opposite side of that spectrum, where its science fiction visuals never felt like more than set dressing, and you could swap out the guns and corpo cards for swords and brigands and have a high-fantasy version without batting an eye. This is a mechanic-centric game, and thankfully, Unstoppable’s mechanics are solid!

Perhaps the biggest mark against Unstoppable for me is the component management and, more specifically, the teardown process. Considering that a core aspect is slotting cards and upgrades into sleeves, that means at the end, you will then have to unsleeve those cards before you box up the game. I’m no stranger to putting cards into and taking cards out of those handy protective covers, being a TCG player, but it isn’t something I necessarily look forward to. Having that chore looming like a space creature peering over the box at me is more menacing than the boss itself, and has stopped me from sitting down and opening the box more than once.

Should you buy Unstoppable?

While I wouldn’t say that Unstoppable has turned me into a complete solo tabletop believer, making me want to take my consoles and handhelds to an e-waste disposal site, occasionally a solo board game will come around that manages to entice me enough to cause me to set down my controller. Even with the annoying unsleeving process at the end, I’ve found myself reaching for Unstoppable instead of a controller a couple of times now, but I found it to be a particularly good game to bust out during my lunch at work, thanks to its fairly compact box size and a game time of under an hour most times.

With a new addition focusing on the Dungeon Crawler Carl book series coming out soon, I’m excited to dive in and see how well Renegade designs the games to work with one another (if at all), and with the ample space in the box yet to be filled, it’s clear that the plan is for Unstoppable to be an expanding game system and not a one-and-done affair, and that does make me excited. Even with its blemishes (some of which could be solved with a digital version, just saying), I hope that Unstoppable is true to its name and doesn’t stop anytime soon, as it's one of the most unique deck-building games I’ve played in a long time.