While it more commonly happens in the PC space on the Steam platform, on occasion you’ll see games on the Switch as well that simply don’t feel like they’re complete. Whether it’s due to their looks, their overall play, or just a permeating lack of refinement, some games just don’t feel like they’re ready for prime time. While Unturned could have some appeal for the right kind of fan, on the whole it just doesn’t leave much of any impression of polish, and that makes it tough to enjoy.

Essentially looking, and in many regards playing, like a zombie apocalypse mod to Minecraft, Unturned will pretty unceremoniously drop you somewhere on a map and leave it to you to survive. You’re able to play solo locally or join up with people online hoping to try to evade detection as much as possible while you try to gear up, and then slowly take things on, being careful to know your limits. In terms of online play, checking in numerous times it seems that unless you have friends you’re planning to coordinate play with you can’t rely on there being many, if any, viable options other than creating one yourself and hoping for the best. One thing that’s at least pretty cool is that in general the map is pretty large, featuring a variety of small towns and even some things like military bases for you to seek out some good loot from, but you’ll need to be careful since there are generally zombies hanging around everywhere. With some luck you’ll be able to find a vehicle to roam around in for a bit, helping you to more efficiently get around and scope out some places to grab some gear from.

The thing is, there are absolutely issues here. The most noticeable thing is the generally unpolished state of just about everything. It’s not just a problem of still having blocky characters in this day and age, or of how difficult it can be to tell what objects are lying about when most of them look roughly the same until you inspect them. The problems then continue when you pick things up and try to equip or use them as well. Since there’s no meaningful in-game guidance you’re mostly left to suffer through experimenting but I can’t say that anything felt at all intuitive. Then there are the elements like combat that are realized in a laughably poor manner, making it hard to tell if you’re even having success until your enemy simply drops dead. Also, if you’re planning to try to drive it’s a great convenience, but good luck with how poorly it controls and will tend to stutter along even as slowly as the vehicles tend to move. That’s before even getting into the crafting system which is also not well conceived from an interface perspective.

No matter how you cut it, this really doesn’t feel like a game that has been put through a proper vetting and refinement process, it feels more like it was simply released “as is”. This sort of experience isn’t unusual to see on Steam, perpetually stuck in an Early Access state, but it really isn’t something you’d expect to see on a console system where the prospect of seeing meaningful updates in the future is probably quite poor. It’s nice to see games coming to the system that aren’t quite like anything else out there, but that doesn’t excuse coming to the party with something in such an unrefined state.