Unreal II: The Awakening

The Good
Sure, looks count. When a game is as pretty as Unreal II, you forgive it a lot. I plodded on to the end merely to see one more beautiful alien planet. Occasionally, this visual splendor almost becomes compelling. When a planet infested by a huge spongy organism erupts in angry green spouts of acid, it's a money-shot moment, even if the effects are all decorative and irrelevant to gameplay. I also liked - gasp! - the story. If you persevere until the end, you're in for a satisfying conclusion. Rarely do game narratives rise above the level of idiocy; this one, after plenty of dross, finally does. Nice voice acting, too.

The Bad
Everything else is terrible.

Let's start with player movement. There are two speeds: creeping and crawling. Seriously cramping the range of available tactics, this hobbled mobility reduces fighting to a series of repetitive pot-shots. Mind, enemies aren't slow. Only you are.

Although level design is pretty, it's also painfully linear. The highly-skilled designers have created the illusion of broad, expansive landscapes. But it's all superficial, as they've squandered the graphics engine's power by making you stick to a narrow path no more divergent than, say, the one in ten-year old Quake. Frustratingly, you even come across features in the landscape that you can climb or jump in some areas, but not in others.

Enemy AI? Forget it. Enemy character design? Pfffft. The tiresome Skaarj are back doing their goofy somersaults, joined by (shock!) spiders, (amazing!) weird aliens, and (omigod!) humans in armor. This colorless, uninspired work is instantly forgettable. You never feel menaced - annoyed, maybe. Partly that's also the fault of the designers having no sense of rhythm, drama, or pacing; long stretches of the game are inexplicably unpopulated. And when they do bump into something successful - for instance, using friendly AI soldiers to protect you - they quickly drop the idea. You can lead a game designer to green alien acid pools, apparently, but you can't make him drink.

While I appreciated the finale, the story is filled with cliches borrowed from more successful games and movies. Expect no originality. Five minutes into the game you're given to understand that celebrated female military heroes in the future will dress like Hooters chicks, and it's mostly downhill (or downbra, you might say) from there.

The Bottom Line
With the commercial and critical failure of Unreal II, this great-looking game can be picked up for a song (I paid $10). Though highly polished, it's about as dull as it is beautiful. This is corporate design in all its safe, cliched, derivative, formulaic glory, with a heavy dosage of hack work substituting for creativity: step right up and be relieved of your imagination.

The Good
I have to admit - graphics are mostly great. The scale and the variety of the levels is amazing, especially landscapes. Skies look extremely cool - being on a satellite of a gas giant with huge rings across the sky is a beautiful experience.

Sound is adequate. Nothing mindblowing, mind you, but decent.

The Bad
The game process. The story. The interactivity. Everything that constitutes a game. The levels are extremely linear. In fact they are so linear, you would remember Wolfenstein 3D (the original) with nostalgia. To add insult to this injury, the sriptwriters decided to constantly instruct you what to do next in the lamest possible way. Imagine constantly being assigned new objectives (such as "heal a survivor") before you realise the situation (in this case see this damn "survivor") or being instructed to find a way around a barricade before you see this stupid barricade.

Next. The story has every cliche from the last 8 years of FPS games. Imagine looking at an apparently "surviving" human being dragged under the door which breakes right after that on almost every level. Like we never saw this in Unreal 1, or AVP2, or anywhere else. Then you have voiceovers of your main character and other random people constantly telling you "it is safe"/"there are no more bad guys"/"that was easy" exactly 5 seconds before some more enemies are jumping at you. That is unbelievably lame and boring.

Now the story. There is none. You basically ran straight through the levels killing everyone (with pauses for level loading every minute or so). There are some random people/objects/objectives that you don't really care about. The only character that you might care about is your female friend. And the only reason you might care about here is that she is actually female and has boobs. BTW, she is not pretty. Not even for a 3d game character. She is actually quite ugly...

Next, interactivity. There is none. Forget cutting-edge stuff from Duke Nukem 3D. No more breaking glass. No more nothing. The levels are made in one single piece. There is basically nothing you can interact with, except meaningless buttons and switches. Imagine having 3 (THREE!) switches in an elevator... And to again insult our intelligence, all such buttons and switches are highlighted on the screen so that you do not spend any time actually thinking about where to click. On one level they have 3 or 4 "laboratories" that look exactly the same. And it's not that they look like laboratories either. Forget Half-Life level design. Think "Quake 2"-style laboratories, i.e. empty rooms with boxes. And the lamest thing is that there is a voice-over like "entering biological laboratory," "entering some other laboratory", etc. Like one can actually give a shit... Yeah, whatever.

A game is something that is both interesting and enjoyable, as opposed to things like masturbation (enjoyable but not interesting), reading a physics book (interesting, but not enjoyable) and work (neither interesting, nor enjoyable). Unreal 2 is neither. I must conclude that it feels very much like work, except you are not getting paid.

I was so frustrated and angry that I actually threw the game into trash can and I am a much happier person now. I would recommend everyone, who wants to play a good FPS, to get Quake 1, download an engine mod (like mhglqr6) that updates graphics to a really cool level and enjoy fun and excitement. [Sorry, I know it is agains MobyGames policy to compare old games with new ones] I did just that and I can say that graphics are good enough and the gameplay is lightyears ahead of Unreal 2.

The Bottom Line
1) Nike of PC games. Pay 50$ for a brandname 2) Gameplay from a lame 1980s arcade game (think Jungle Jill) in a brilliantly rendered 3D environments 3) A technology demo 4) Something that makes AOL CDs look useful in comparison

The Good
Graphics - probably best for pre-shaders era game. Storyline - unusual, with personalities and epic drama(c). AI and AI Coop/Counter/Defense missions. Universe and planets - not much, but detailed. Music - one of rare games with dynamic music system using DirectSound patterns. Yes, Unreal has good tracker music, defining new level of demoscene integration, but that doesn't matters with only battle/non-battle stances of, in Unreal 2 there is from 3 to 5 "heat levels" for music intensity, scaling with action intensity. The music style mostly same, but technically rendered to patterns, from other hand, lower system resources required. Sound - yes, also one of rare games with EAX HD support. Universe - more explanation for player with protagonist stories(expaining to NeBan).

The Bad
Length - Unreal 2 was planned as real set of series(like: one planed=one game with own set of missions), but was cut down and merged to current form. Bugs - many crashes without patch, broken graphics and intro(stucks) on some of systems including most of modern. That was never fixed, same with EAX HD - often crashes on any hardware, even with software emulation, the solution is only to turn off EAX and surround sound at all. Closer to "reality" - you run slow, your heals is low, you aren't inhuman like in Unreal 1, also, that slows down gameplay.

The Bottom Line
Thats not Unreal game you can start with. Its only for those, who completed previous games and bored of being alone human in the da... At the planet. From this point - you will be entertained enough being marshal, acting in unreal worlds and meeting unreal creatures till unreal unhappy ending.