Unreal II: The Awakening

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
Requisite statement: whoo boy, these are some really nice graphics. All sarcasm aside, they are pretty good, although since the levels themselves are so plain the sharp visuals occasionally fail to impress. One level in particular, set in a laboratory, has this one room, see, that's like, all melted and stuff, and there's this laser, right, and it's like, reflecting off everywhere. And it looks good, and stuff.

The Bad
I think this may be the plainest game I've ever played. It's not outstanding in either direction - not great, not bad, not even really good - it's the digital equivalent of Jell-O. I rushed out and bought "Unreal 2" after having starved myself of FPSes since the mostly excellent "Aliens versus Predator 2." I didn't really know what to expect, since I had not played any incarnation of the "Unreal" franchise before, but I hoped that it would at least be fun in a cliched way.

It's definitely cliched, that's for sure. Normally, I don't slam games for this sin, since most don't aspire to impress with their plots. You know, save the universe, rescue the chick, ad infinitum. However, "Unreal 2" slathers the plot on thick. In between almost every mission, you have to wander in your ship, talking to their teammates and learning about their pasts and why they're so fucked up. They're actually not bad teammates - I especially liked the funky alien pilot. Nevertheless, the story is quite dull, and it's made even more so thanks to the monotonic delivery of the main character. His voice is as flat and boring as the game's weaponry.

Boring plots and linear levels are mostly venial sins for FPSes. Boring weaponry, however, is a truly cardinal crime. "Unreal 2" features some real snorers, starting with the standard issue popgun (lame), then moving on to the standard issue machine gun (oh, it shoots, like, radioactive splinters? Count me in!), complete with the standard issue rocket launcher, grenade launcher, and the now-standard issue flamethrower (which does sport some nifty graphics boy-howdy). We've all seen these weapons countless times before, and they've been done much better. Really, rushing a group of Imps in "Doom" and gutting them with the shotgun still gives me more thrills than coring the enemies in this game with any of its tired weapons. The programmers must have realized just how 1990s their arsenal was, so they attempted to spice it up with "innovations" like the spider gun. Yes, you heard me right, the spider gun. What does the spider gun do, you ask? It shoots a little spray of biomass that produces lots of little lifeforms that swarm onto whoever you aim your cannon at (yeah, it's a little like fucking). What do the little spiders do? They piss off the enemy. I was ecstatic as I watched the bad guy I just shot angrily swat away some spiders before he pulled out his shotgun and corpseified me.

The Bottom Line
A really disappointing don't-bother experience.

The Good
The graphics are nice.

The Bad
The gameplay is BORING. The actors are BORING. The music and sound are BORING.

The Bottom Line
Well, well, this is the successor to a game that wanted to revolutionize the genre from within and partially succeeded. The hype was high on this one, and it got pretty good ratings, but is it really a good game? Depends on what kind of gamer You are. The casual gamer will like the easy gameplay, linear level design and not-so-deep immersion. The games player will like the graphics and soon turn to something else. The hardcore gamer will probably turn to something else 6 hours later after he played through U2 once.

U2 is very light, it features some great graphics and environments, and it also offers a plot. That's all I can say neutrally.

The plot is boring, the characters are so superficial that the helpless try of giving them depth through conversation is in vain. The hero is quite strange, and hard to identify with. The story is very linear and the enemies You encounter a pretty faceless. The infamous Skarrj appear only rarely, the boss enemies are mostly huge, and the weapons are pretty unimaginative.

Conclusion: nice to see, but it has no identity.