Clive Barker's Undying

The Good
Undying is a great shooter, packed with a great pace, and lots of imagination. The levels and enemies are original and truly scary, and they are all rendered via the Quake3 engine, which means they all look impressive too.

At it's worst, Undying is merely a decent, plot-based shooter. But at it's best Undying is a truly scary experience. I have never in any other shooter experienced the kind of terror that this game provides, which comes in the form of "jack in the box" scares as well as some clever creature and level designs. More than once I found myself screaming as a howler sneaked on me from behind, or as I frantically tried to shoot a pack of enemies that dodged all my attacks. And this is were Undying nails it, when it puts you in desperate nerve-wrecking situations, thus you find yourself in some situations clearly out of survival-horror titles, were you find that you are outnumbered, outmatched, and out of ammo, and where you just have to hold on to your hat and run for it!

I haven't felt a feeling of desperation like this in a game for a looong time, but as always, it is so nerve-wrecking that sometimes you have to take a break from it, and sometimes you need to work up the courage to face the game again. This is, of course, excellent. Nothing deserves my admiration more than a game that doesn't pull it's punches, and Undying goes at it with gusto.

The Bad
Even though the entire interface, menus and music, etc. are all specially themed for the game, I found the in-game interface to be quite off the mark. In game, you have a series of brightly-colored "user friendly" icons representing your spells, weapons, etc. and... well, it sort of kills the mood sometimes! I don't understand how this ended up as this since the other menus and screens in the game are very moody and inspired.

But well, that's minor nagging really, the thing that really kills this game is the lack of value. One can't help but feel a "Now what?" sense of emptiness after finishing the game. Sure, it's a great experience, with a good storyline, and great moments, but it's totally linear, and though that could also be said of Half-Life, that game had multiplayer and user-made mods support. Undying has nothing! Not even alternate game modes, (a thing which has helped other horror games, like Resident Evil, extend their longevity) so in all I can't really see how EA expects one to dish so much cash for a game that has so little to offer.

The Bottom Line
Undying is an excellent horror plot-based shooter. It deserves all of my praises and recommendations, but I'm not sure if it deserves my cash. Other games offer much more extensive and lasting experiences for the same price. EA figured that since they were the only horror-oriented fps in town, they could get away with doing a half-assed effort, and well... let's just hope you learned the lesson EA, because I would really like a fully-loaded Undying 2, or even an Undying "Gold" or GOTY update.

The Good
- The FPS gameplay was based on the Unreal Tournament game engine; suffice to say it works pretty well. The horror themed graphics and textures are good enough and help create an atmosphere.

• The music and sound effects are sharp. The voice acting is okay.

• The game difficulty is more than acceptable; it's possible to beat it even if you play on the highest skill. It has some tense fights.

• The plot is hooking. There is an intriguing story which get unraveled at a decent pace while maintaining the gamer's interest. The four (or maybe five) Covenant siblings are distinctive personages with a dark backstory. The quests to hunt each sibling have their own perils, puzzles and monsters. The enemies are also distinctive and could require to think in different strategies.

• You get some cool weapons, both conventional and mystical; some weapons have different modes and modified ammo available. You also get some very cool original spells, with aggressive or defensive power; the magical energy, or "Mana", unlike other games alike, regenerates itself, so you won't need to worry about getting magic flasks (although you can get items to boost your Mana and improve your spells).
  
  The Bad
  - The uninspired level design can make the game get old and linear. The unevenness of the quests makes it seem deformed (the last quests feel rushed). Also, the puzzle solving aspect gets tiresome (I'm sick of the usual "get the key" solution).

• The difficulty is not consistent. Some levels, particularly at the beginning of the game, can be really hard to pass, while others, some in which you even get to fight bosses, offer little challenge. Besides, at some point in the game, and from then on, they started making the typical mistake of providing the player a ridiculous and excessive amount of ammo and health items. Some enemies (like the monastery monks for example) are unrealistically tough.

• Unfortunately it has AI glitches. While the enemies are diverse, most of them are quite stupid and can get stuck unrealistically.

• Some plot points are poorly explained. The ending leaves you confused and wanting to know more.
  
  The Bottom Line
  If you like horror themed games and FPS, you should check this out.

The Good
Patrick Galloway started investigating the occult as an easy way of making a profit out of superstitious and gullible rich people. In Ireland, at the beginning of the 20th century, it was a fine business.
However, the more Patrick delved into the occult, the more he started to believe there are things beyond our understanding. Things no sane human mind should be in contact with.

Then the great war started, and Patrick was called to serve. He almost dies in an incident against the vicious Trsanti, but Jeremiah Covenant, captain of his unit, saved his life and left him at a hospital.

Years passed, and one day Patrick received word from Jeremiah, asking for his help to restore order in his estate. Patrick owed his life to this man so he wouldn't even think about declining.

At the fastuous manor of the Covenant family, the air is thick with premonitions. At the entrance, Patrick receives a vision, one of the Trsanti corsairs has been hanged from one of the nearby light posts, at some point in the past.
In the middle of the manor, a black tower with the appearance of an edifice older than time itself, rises defying. Mysterious lights flash on top of it.
Something evil can be sensed all over the place, lurking in the shadows, hiding inside the walls, watching from the other side of the windows.
Inside the manor, Patrick receives another vision. A ghostly man, dressed as a rich gentleman greets him. Suddenly he disappears and some hideous creature whose skin seems totally peeled-off, with chains hooked all over his body, stares at Patrick.
There is death in the air.

Jeremiah is no longer the strong and determined man he was at the war. He looks —and sounds— like a pathetic shell of a man, waiting for death to come for him... before something even worse beats it.
His words for Patrick are eloquent enough: "My siblings are dead, Patrick... but I don't think they're gone..."
***
Five Covenant siblings. One ancient damnation. There is work for the spook-hunter.

Despite the rather compelling STORYLINE —one to be expected from a product with the signature of Clive Barker all over it— backed up with a sheer amount of text and dialogues, Undying is nothing more than a first-person shooter (FPS).
Along with a number of more-or-less typical weapons you get to use some magic spells (both offensive and deffensive), each of which can be progressively enhanced, but the game is still far from a RPG or anything like that.
The story is more of a cosmetic resource to glue the levels together than anything else. Patrick will talk with the characters himself with no choices to make for the player, and the whole journey is a pretty linear ride. Even in the manor with all its labyrinthic structure, the only doors that will open are the ones you need to get through.
Soon enough, you will notice the game has an unspoken structure: you can tell there are several different levels, each one of which is ruled by one of the demonic Covenant siblings.
Anyway, don't take me wrong. We are talking positive here: the game HAS a pretty compelling story. I specially enjoyed the storytelling, the way the story is presented. Every time you start a level you will definitely know who you're up against, but along the way you will be fed information on someone else, letting you know for sure that there's much more to come. Along the way, through conversations and all kinds of text fragments, you will be fed information about the secret that hides behind the Covenant family, the manor, a circle of stones in an island nearby, an ancient monastery, and even a connection with Patrick's own past...

One of the strongest points of the game lays among the INTANGIBLES: it's the atmosphere. Every single one of the locations where the game takes place is conveniently horrifying.
The sheer-sized manor is of course a haunting place —specially with all those lightnings during night storms. So are the catacombs underneath the family mausoleum. Then you reach some surreal and twisted otherworld which looks just as haunting. Then you get back to the manor, and you go out, and even the daylight looks eerie somehow. Then you go to the ancient monastery, which has been abbandoned for centuries, yet not unhabited...
You get the picture.
Every now and then a cutscene suddenly fires off, the camera pans with long shots that really take their toll on your nerves, and then something happens.

CHARACTER GRAPHICS are pretty good, as it's the concept behind them.
The regular monsters are the most neatly designed creatures I ever saw in a video game. All the unhuman creatures are incredibly well done. They are gross, they are ugly, and they REALLY look menacing.
As for the Covenants, every single one of them has a strong personality and will introduce him/herself in a way that will make you think it twice before running heads first towards he/she. Even the poor Jeremiah will have his good 15 seconds. Every one of the siblings deserve being the main villain in their own story.

BACKGROUND GRAPHICS are a mixed bag: For one thing, the texture resolution is pretty low, so you can see clear texture blurs when you come close enough to a wall, a window, and what all not. On the other hand, not only the atmosphere isn't ruined at all by this, but also the design of the locations is really good. Both the real (such as the manor) and the unreal (like the wacky dreamland of Oneiros) places show a great work from the designer's part. Fine art and rich imagination, full force ahead.
On top of this, there are LOTS of fancy effects to enhance the atmosphere: foggy corridors, heavy-pouring rain, thunders that crack illuminating the manor with creepy flashes and deafening sound, et cetera. Later in the game, there is a given breed of creatures that stings and poisons Patrick, distorting his perceptions for a few seconds... you have to see the way the world looks for those five seconds. And try to aim and shoot while thus stunned, too.

The SOUND is very good. I'm not much of a soundscape freak —hell, I need walkthroughs to pass even the most silly sound-related puzzles— but this is one of those games in which the sound is definitely above average. Even I can tell so.
Both music and background sound effects enhance the suspense atmosphere to unbelievable levels. Several times I found myself ACTUALLY SCARED while slowly sneaking through certain lonely levels, with the background sounds, the eerie music, the distant howling, and what all not.
There is a given level in which, while navigating some dark catacombs, you will hear, somewhere in the distance, a harsh voice which can only come out of a corpse humming a lullaby. Enough said.
Voice acting is very good, each actor fits their character perfectly, they sound convincing enough and they all have a nice Irish accent: "Aeh owed hem meh life, though...", or something. Neat.

GAMEPLAY-wise, there is not much to say. Like I mentioned, the game is a typical FPS, based on the Unreal Tournament engine. This last bit, for one thing, assures smooth gameplay alright.
It's worth to mention that the combination of the traditional weapons and the magic spells (Patrick fires weapons with his left hand and casts spells with his right hand) can turn quite interesting sometimes, enhancing gameplay slightly. Not only you can use two different attack modes at once, but there are a few possible ways to combine magic and weapons so they complement one another. One of the coolest combinations is to charge the crossbow's arrows with the lightning spell, so whenever someone is hit in an open area with such arrows, he/she is immediatly struck by a thunderbolt coming down from the skies.
The effects of some of the spells are very imaginative, and amusing to watch, like the scrye spell, which distorts reality and shows things that are hidden to the human eye. Whenever there's something plausible to be scryed, you'll hear a spooky voice whispering "scryyyye", "seeeeee", "look aroouuund", or something like that. Brrrr.
Of course, among all the fancy spells, there is the always-praised resurrect spell, which brings dead enemies back to life to happily join our noble cause.

Finally, the game has a REPLAYABILITY ingredient in the form of bonus stuff that you can uncover through console commands, or by performing certain special actions in certain places.
Among others, you get to enter a shooting gallery, watch a disco coreography starring some of the game's characters (including a few monsters), get a huge scary monster to join sides with you through the whole game, witness a gigantic sheep coming out of a barn... go look around in the net for the cheat codes, some of these joke levels are really worth seeing.

The Bad
Like I said, Undying is just a FPS. Moreover, this is yet another game which at first sight makes you believe you got a lot of choices to make, but at some point —earlier than I'd have liked— reveals itself as the most linear thing. You will see lots of doors, but the only ones that will open are the ones that you need to go through in order to advance in the game.
In outdoor areas, a little wandering around will soon show you that these areas are not as 'open' as they looked like.
The game is indeed yet another FPS, and nothing more.
Even though it looks like there is much more inside at first sight, soon enough you end up finding out that it would be the same if all those cinematics, the diary notes, the kilometers worth of text, and the dialogues just weren't there. The game itself consists of running through that door that opened, kill everything that moves towards you, run through the next door that opens, kill some more stuff, run through yet another door, and eventually meet a boss character, and whack the beejezus out of him/her.
Rewind and start over. And over again until you see the credits roll.

The game deserved more from the developers. The strong storyline, the appealing characters, the haunting atmosphere —everything was there to make a way more ambitious project out of this.
I'd have loved Undying to be some sort of the early-1900's horror-story version of Deus Ex, so to say.

The Bottom Line
I think Undying is a great game.
If you enjoy horrors, and you can live with the fact that this is yet another FPS with little to none interactivity with either characters or background (unless you count beating up as interactivity, that is), you won't be disappointed by it.
I don't think you can possibly get bored with a game with such a strong atmosphere as this one. Every time you might think the ride seems to get too long, something will happen that will keep you interested.
And as a FPS, it's a funny game too.

I said the game deserved more work from the developers, but I also think it deserved more attention from the public. Apparently it wasn't well received, and official word is that the sequel (which the ending lets open doors for) will never see the light.
Another shameful unfair chapter in videogaming history, and counting.