Does this look familiar? Aside from the wooden animations, of course. This is Unearthed: The Trail of Ibn Battuta by Saudi Arabia-based Semaphore, and even this Uncharted copy won’t be playable on the Xbox 360.
Unearthed has versions on everything else it seems: PC/Mac, iPhone/iPad and Android, and PlayStation 3. The game follows fortune hunter Faris Jawad from Morocco to Damascus, Alexandria and Dubai, searching for the treasure of the famed Muslim explorer Ibn Battuta. Evil treasure hunters stand in Faris’ way.
Yes, it’s easy to bag on this. It may not be what folks in the west would buy (or what Saudi gamers themselves would choose to import), but the country is new to games development, and they’ve got to start somewhere.
Still, if it’s going to be so … inspired by Uncharted, couldn’t it have picked a word with a different prefix for its title?
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