Unlocked - Podcast Rankings and reviews

The show was great but ign has recently started placing adds throughout their shows and unlocked in particular has trouble with these adds. The adds mess with the timestamps and run time and usually cause the audio to time skip towards the end. Usually it jumps backwards and you relisten to content you just heard, but sometimes it skips forward and you miss a big chunk of the discussion. Either way it's not enjoyable and makes listening to the show a bit of a hassle.

I’ve been listening since the Mitch Dyer days, so I’ve seen my fair share of hosts cycle through. Ryan is a fair mediator and host who’s a pillar in the Xbox community at this point. Destin is good for a change of pace and wholesome, dad-joke humor. Khalif has been a great addition to the show in Miranda’s hiatus. But I’ve officially had enough of Stella. She mains a PC and rarely knows what’s going on in the Xbox ecosystem. She’s constantly making missteps in her comments involving games, dates, and the basic facts. She’s a poor host when given the opportunity in Ryan’s absence. I’m sure she’s a nice enough person and Apex player but maybe it’s time to cycle in some new faces in her place.

Podcast Unlocked used to be an absolute must-listen podcast for me for a looong time, even back in the dead xbox one years. But it feels to me like over the last couple years something has been lost. No longer are the panel members actually knowledgeable of xbox games or are even xbox fans.

Ryan McCaffrey is still an absolute treasure in the Xbox community, but for some reason he’s chosen to surround himself with some panel members that truly do no know xbox games. Instead these members will wax poetic for minutes saying seemingly nothing substantive just to fill podcast minutes, and we’re missing the interesting takes and deep knowledgeable dives into xbox history and speculation that we were given regularly for so many years. Even though these panel members are very nice people (and I do truly mean that), nice doesn’t get me to listen to the podcast every week.

Kind of interesting that as we exit the dark era of xbox we’ve entered a lull in podcast unlocked. I hope this too shall pass and someday we’ll have rich informative discussions regularly on Podcast Unlocked again.

I like this show a lot as it is the main way I get news on the world of Xbox. My big gripe with it is in the editing. The ad reads are mid conversation, and sometimes even mid sentence. That, combined with all the swoosh sounds that interrupt a speaker drive me nuts. The editing needs to be better for me to tolerate the ads/interruptions a bit more if they weren’t taking me out of a conversation the team is having. Put them at the end of a topic, not right smack in the middle.

The amount of ads littering this podcast is ridiculous. I like the podcast, but am giving up on it due to all of the interruptions.

I enjoy the podcast most of the time, but dude has a serious hard on for Avowed and it gets a little sickening. Like a little kid that is too excited, gotta hear him say it every 2 seconds. The rest of the cast gives great insight into the Microsoft side of the game industry.