Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta - Episode 1 - Gold Edition

I went into this one genuinely hoping for a surprise. A third-person action-adventure set across Morocco, Damascus, Alexandria, and Dubai, built around the real travels of 14th-century explorer Ibn Battuta, developed by a Saudi Arabian studio pushing into a genre dominated by Western blockbusters. That premise is worth something. The execution is not.

What you get is roughly an hour of play split across cover-based gunfights, light platforming, a melee brawling section, basic environmental puzzles (think pressure plates and movable boxes), and a car chase sequence to close things out. The structure is clearly modelled on Uncharted, from the cinematic framing to the pairing of fortune hunter Faris Jawad with his archaeologist sister Dania. The problem is that every individual system feels broken or barely functional. The melee combat asks you to punch and kick with mouse buttons while blocking with the scroll wheel, and the collision detection makes every fight feel like a misunderstanding. Cover mechanics exist on paper. The key bindings use a first-letter logic that places takedown on T and grenade throw on G, which sounds fine until the heat of a firefight reveals how far those keys sit from your other hand. The camera drifts unpredictably during platforming sections, and framerate drops hit at the worst possible moments.

The Gold Edition label on this Steam release is meant to signal that the developer went back and patched problems from the original 2013 PlayStation release. Some technical rough edges were smoothed. The fundamental issues were not. Animations still snap and jitter in ways that undercut any sense of cinematic weight the game is reaching for. The writing has moments of charm, particularly in how Faris and Dania trade lines while piecing together Ibn Battuta's historical journey, but the voice delivery is inconsistent enough to pull you out of even the better scenes. The soundtrack is a genuine bright spot, with Arabic instrumentation that sets a convincing regional tone and occasionally makes the action feel more urgent than the mechanics earn. That contrast makes everything else sting a little harder.