The Unholy War

I do not know if The Unholy War holds up, and honestly, I am a little afraid to find out. Some games are not hidden gems because they are secretly perfect. Some are hidden gems because they found you at the exact right **** me, The Unholy War was one of those games. I grew up in a trailer park, where everybody’s house was close enough that multiplayer was not an online feature; it was somebody yelling across the lot. We played this game constantly. I remember the strange fighters, the weird powers, the feeling that every character had some ridiculous trick you had to figure out or get wrecked by. It may have been my first real arena battler, and this is probably a hot take, but my memories of it are warmer than my memories of Power Stone. That does not mean it was better. It probably was not. But The Unholy War had a strange identity that made it stick. It was part arena fighter, part tactics game, part creature-feature nonsense, and entirely the kind of oddball PlayStation experiment that could only exist in that era. It was rough, weird, uneven, and memorable.I doubt I would recommend it today as some lost masterpiece. But as a childhood multiplayer game? It mattered. It was one of those games that became great because of where I played it, who I played it with, and how much fun we had tearing into each other with bizarre monsters before we even had the vocabulary to explain why it worked.

A really great game that is so unbalanced. Fighting mechanics are fun but they aren't really skill based at all. Unholy War in the future would be great as a MOBA if they ever decided revisit the IP.