Unreal

The Good
There is a lot about this game to like. It was hailed as one of the first of the Quake Killers. The reflective surfaces and plasma effects were stunning and created several breathtaking environments.

The ambient sound and music was extremely well done. Sounds indicate where the baddies are. The music is well done, with an alien feel to it.

The friendly Nai Pai added a touch of involvement that was missing from other shooters of the time. You'd see them being beaten mercilessly by the Skaarj and you'd try to protect them. In return, they'd help you with secrets.

The logs fed in to the story as well. They provided hints to solving puzzles and clues about paths to take. If you didn't read them, you could get stuck.

The enemies were tough and challenging. Several unlikely beasts came after you, each with a special set of skills and strengths.

The weapons were well balanced and effective if used against a specific baddie.

The Bad
Some of the levels went on forever, and took great timing to get through. In certain spots, the enemy would come out of nowhere and turn you in to diced meat.

The occasional nonsensical level design that defies logic.

The Bottom Line
A classic example of a powerful engine with a pretty good game developed on it. The first of the great FPS.

The Good
Thanks to the wonderful contributors to archive.org who've uploaded scans of some of the PC gaming rags I used to love reading as a kid, we can review the state of the gaming press circa 1998 and draw from it some useful insights.

Having been in development for a very long time, Unreal was touted as being a Quake killer. Then it slipped past 1997 and Quake 2 had come out, then it was hyped as the Quake 2 killer. Then Unreal finally did come out and there was much rejoicing. Then, Half Life came out and then Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament came out and Unreal started its journey to becoming what it's known as now: a series of game engines, rather than an actual game.

I remember when the game came out. I was ten years old. My friend and I were hardcore Quake goons. He had a friend who was lucky enough to have a PC that was capable of actually running the game well, equipped with a much-coveted 3DFX Voodoo2 and it gave him a chance to play the game. When I quizzed him about his experience with Unreal, he told me he didn't like it. "You just run around these big open spaces half the time," he told me. "There's nothing to do. It's boring. The graphics are good though."

You see, the idea of Unreal being the Quake 2 killer was never anything more than a narrative conjured up by the gaming media. At a glance you could see why. They both had coloured lighting and a gun on the screen and you run around and shoot stuff. The gaming magazines went on about the interesting and unusual guns and the enemy AI, and the graphics too of course. Did you know that the guy that made the Reaper bot for Quake worked on Unreal's AI? There was deathmatch too, with bots. Gee whiz, how cool. Well, honestly, I'm not being too sarcastic there. All that stuff is genuinely very good and competent for the time, best in class in some aspects, but that's not the meat of what made Unreal special. Indeed, if it had only succeeded on the usual PC games magazine review criteria alone, it certainly would be a very forgettable game today.

It was several years later that I finally had the opportunity to sit down and experience the game myself from beginning to end, and the second I started playing, Unreal ensnared me and it never let me go again.

Taking a look at the readme file included with one of Unreal's leaked betas gives away the design goals of the game, describing the experience as "100% action and exploration." Epic games did not set out to make an id Software-styled adrenalin rush of an FPS. The experience of playing the game is often more akin to an Elder Scrolls game than Quake. No, you're not traipsing around from town to town to get quests from NPCs or clicking on Cliff Racers until your index finger falls off, but rather it slows the pace down and lets you take a nice, long breath.

Put simply, it's Unreal's ability to provoke awe in the player that is unmatched by any title that came before it, and no other title in the FPS genre would come close to matching it, arguably until perhaps Halo, released three years later.

As Prisoner 849, you awake battered and broken in the bowels of your crashed prison transport ship. You slowly creep out of your abandoned cell block, the halls echoing with the distant screams of the dead and dying. You emerge from an air vent and arrive at the bridge, cloaked in gloom but for a few dim flickering lights that cast their glow on the corpses of your former captors. Down below, you see a hallway leading into the darkness, where untold potential for horror, or freedom, beckon. The first note of music thrums through your chest with a single kick of a drum, and it should be immediately obvious right with that note that Unreal is going for something very different to every other FPS before or since.

As you finally find your first gun and make your way to the escape hatch, you arrive on the planet's surface and the lush vista of Nyleve's Falls greets you.

While Unreal has core FPS mechanics that are solid and carry it through without significant worries, it's these moments that leave the lasting impression on you. Unreal is permeated with moments that wash over you with a sense of wonder, fear and mystery.

As described in Kaitlin Tremblay and Alan Williamson's excellent in-depth analysis 'Escape to Na Pali', it's not just that you see a very big chasm rendered accurately in the game's engine that is worthy of note, it's the sense of the sublime. You walk up to the edge of the cliff and see at the base of the titanic waterfall, its cacophonous roar of rushing water filling the canyon, a small hut perched on the ground way below you. You want to find a way to go there, but the drop is enormous and will surely reduce you to a red smear if you dare to jump. The birds circle overhead. The strange fauna scamper around at your feet. Fish swim in the water.

This world is MASSIVE. It's so much bigger than you and it doesn't care if you live or die. As you move from one location to another, reading the stories left by others, Unreal conveys the sense that you are nothing more than a speck in this gargantuan universe, and that's where so much of the moment-to-moment drama comes from. Unreal continually reinforces the notion that you are an alien, that you do not belong here, as you travel across the planet's surface through valleys, canyons, villages, mines, tech bases, towers, floating islands, crashed ships, temples and many other varied locales.

You'll find the game tends to alternate between romps across the countryside and through denser areas, which are often indoors or underground. While Unreal's technical qualities may age like milk (as any game engine will), the artistry throughout has aged like a fine wine. The maps are distinctive and vibrant, full of colour, mood and variety.

It sounds strange to say, but if there was a single word I'd use to describe the general mood of your journey through Unreal, it would 'majestic'. Were it not for the mantas trying to clip your head off or the Skaarj who are all too happy to fillet you with their enormous retractable blades, Na Pali would be a beautiful place for a holiday.

This is to mention nothing of the music. Unreal's soundtrack, composed by Alexander Brandon with help from Michel van den Bos, is, in my very humble estimation, the best musical score ever composed for a game. It is one of the earliest examples of where the music can switch between moods dynamically depending upon where you are in the map or what is happening, but it's the lush, almost mournful, ambient stretches that stick with me. The music utterly completes the mood, conveying the sense of the mystery, romance and solitude.

On that note, this seems like a good time to mention that, broadly speaking, Unreal's campaign is not something that you should experience for the first time while streaming on Twitch or listening to podcasts, and while cooperative play is fully supported, the game's mystique can only be fully appreciated when you play the game alone, allowing yourself to be totally immersed in the world of Na Pali.

Alright, have I made my point that Unreal has good atmosphere? Okay, let's get down to brass tacks.

Level design is generally solid. It's clear that there are some levels that were very meticulously planned on paper before being built, and then there are levels that have been designed by the seat of the pants, but these levels act as breathers and are usually wide open and quite straightforward. Conversely the interior maps, such as Terraniux, the mines, the ISV-KRAN and the game's closing levels tend to be dense and interconnected.

The Universal Translator, found at the beginning of the game, is usually used to communicate to you an idea of what you are trying to accomplish and where you should be going next, without outright telling you straight up. In addition, it does some wonderful storytelling via the personal logs of the folks who came before you. There are several characters whose trails you will follow and even come to know to a certain extent, in particular the fate of Kira Argmanov, an officer on another ship that crash landed on the same planet, and her comrades who set out to rescue her.

You need to keep note of the translator messages, because you will likely find yourself lost if you neglect or miss an important message.

It can be easy miss these vital hints when you're being chased across the map by enemies powered by AI which is, on the whole, extremely impressive. While some foes like the basic Brute will happily charge at you head-on, other monsters are keenly interested in their own self-preservation and will dodge, flank, snipe, ambush and retreat if they are taking too much damage from you. The pathing is also very good for a game of this era, with enemies and the occasional friendly Nali being able to navigate around large portions of complex levels without issue. Compared to other games of its ilk, Unreal's monster counts generally are not too high. Instead, combat with your foes is more of a dogfight than a slaughter, with the thrill of the fight being in the acrobatics as much as the gunplay...

The Bad
...which is fortunate, because the gunplay sucks.

Okay, maybe that's a bit extreme. It's not that the guns are poorly balanced or ineffective, they just don't feel very destructive in your hands. In particular, the initial release of the game in 1998 came with very weak weapon and explosion sound effects. A later patch to the game came with a whole new set, courtesy of Digital Extremes, that improved the sounds considerably, but in general, the guns just feel weak.

Some fare better than others. The hitscan weapons like the automag, rifle and minigun feel solid enough, and we cannot forget that Unreal introduced us to the legendary flak cannon, a gun that would be revised to near perfection in Unreal Tournament but already makes a strong initial showing here. The thunk of a flak shell slamming into a foreign body is present, and its primary fire mode, a shotgun-esque spray of jagged metal that strips flesh from bone and reduces strong Skaarj to looking more like something thrown up by my cat, is well-known in gaming folklore.

But really, you would think that it should be pretty fun to use a gun that can fire six rockets at a time, right? But it's not. For one, the gun plays a firing sound for each rocket launched, so firing six rockets plays the same sound effect six times at once (argh, my ears!), and the resulting flurry of explosions tends to simply bounce enemies around more often than it kills them. You've also got grenades that almost never find their target, have a small damage radius and are generally not very effective.

How about other series mainstays like the shock rifle (still referred to as the 'ASMD' in this game)? It's a gun that shoots a moderately powerful burst of energy in a hitscan beam or projectile ball (the latter of which you can shoot with the former to create a powerful boom), and its sizzling arc of electrical death looks like... a series of little blue ripples. Seriously, what is it with games in the 90s and their obsession with ripples? Again, while powerful, when you hit a bad guy with it, he'll bounce about the joint like you're smacking him with a gym ball rather than something designed to maim and kill.

Then there are the guns that clearly have use cases in mind, that are almost never the best tactic. Enjoy trying to hit an enemy with the slow-moving projectiles of the razor jack, or running around lobbing big toxic boogers at them with the GES Biorifle. There is a reason that the Navy Seals in real life do not use guns that fire toxic boogers, just putting that out there.

And then there's the dispersion pistol, your pew pew energy gun that fires slow moving bolts that you'll be falling back on when your other guns run dry. Especially if you're playing on higher difficulties, expect to find yourself running out of ammo more often than you might assume, because enemy health scales up with the skill level you choose.

On the hardest difficulties, enemies turn into absolute tanks, and whatever shots a Skaarj doesn't dodge, he'll just soak up instead. The dispersion pistol doesn't have unlimited ammo, but rather a finite supply that slowly recharges, so when you hit zero, you'll have entered a war of attrition as you wait for your ammo count for this extremely wimpy gun to recharge from 0 to 1, fire it, then repeat until your enemy is dead. Fun! It's clear that the item placement in the game's levels wasn't balanced around the higher difficulties and you'll just have to deal with it.

Ammo problems aside, despite their very impressive AI, there are some minor quibbles that pervade most encounters. Mercenaries have shields that render them immune to all damage for a time, which they deploy at random. Until the shield comes down again, there's nothing you can do but wait, so this mechanic ends up only leaning on your patience rather than your wits or reflexes to come out victorious.

Likewise, the extremely nimble Skaarj can dodge your projectiles, which is very cool until you notice that the dodge is based on a dice roll rather than reaction time. Either they won't dodge at all, or, more likely, they will dodge the very millisecond you fire, meaning you're stuck with either using hitscan guns or exploiting their total inability to dodge grenades or flak shells (due to programming oversight) to avoid wasting copious amounts of ammo for your other weapons.

And of course there's our shy native friends, the Nali. These guys can often open secret doors for you, as long as you keep them out of harm's way, by which I mean, you let no ounce of harm come to any single one of them in any shape or form. As soon as one receives so much as a nick, every Nali on the map will become afraid of you and refuse to help, so get ready to pass up that secret stash of much-needed ammo due to the Nali who could have opened it having a freak-out because his mate on the other side of the map ran in the way of your eightball launcher 45 minutes ago.

And for all the harping on I did about Unreal's wonderful sense of pace, that only applies to the levels, not so much the overall plot. Around midway through the game, it will dawn on you that you are just kind of ambling from one mesmerizing locale to the next, with no idea of why you are there. "Thank you for completing this level, but the next plot beat is in another castle."

Plot threads are set in the opening levels and then remain untouched till near the end, and while it is always interesting to finish a level and wonder where you'll end up next, the lack of context to your journey can rob it of some significance and there are a few things that get alluded to but never resolved. The game could have used a story editor.

The Bottom Line
After finishing the game, you'll also have the expansion pack Return to Na Pali to play through, and there is of course the multiplayer which you will likely never touch. After all, if you're looking for Unreal multiplayer action, there is Unreal Tournament, which is predictably superior to Unreal's multiplayer experience in every way.

But when that's done, we'll probably never know what ever became of Prisoner 849. Unreal 2 came along next, very much removed from the original in story, setting, characters and spirit, and its lukewarm reception more or less killed the prospect of Unreal as a single player franchise. And that really bums me, because even though Unreal has some rough edges in its mechanics and narrative, it's just such an intensely special experience for me.

It's probably a subjective thing too, because it was something significant that I experienced in my formative childhood years, so if you weren't around to get caught up in the hype of 1998, then you might not see what I see when you play this game. But I'm not the only one - check out the OldUnreal.com and UnrealSP.org communities for a bunch of people who share that feeling and some incredibly well put together original campaigns that easily rival and sometimes even surpass the polish of the base game (I recommend Xidia, 7 Bullets, Operation Na Pali and The Tower of Shrakith'a for a start).

While it's not the number one game of its era for mechanical polish, not every one of its off-the-wall weapon ideas panned out, and its multiplayer was overshadowed by its own spin-offs, the Unreal engine is alive and well, as we all know. As I write this, Epic is demonstrating its fifth major iteration of that engine, which looks as thoroughly amazing as the original did to me back in 1998.

And if there's one thing that I wish they'd do with that engine, above all else, it would be to send us back to Na Pali, one more time.

The Good
Some of the best music ever to be composed for a game (mostly thanks to Alexander "Siren" Brandon), with such memorable tracks as Dusk Horizon carefully placed inside an exceptionally beautiful and an intriguing alien world that was, at its release time, the most detailed ever seen in a game make for the experience that is truly Unreal. The world is believable and you as the story unfolds a little bit at a time you find yourself anxious to find the next piece of information.

The Bad
The game is excessively long and it may be hard to keep yourself interested during a few of the maps that leave room for improvement. The story is only carried through the aural translator messages and doesn't really get that deep at any point. There's nothing special about the ending. The shooting gets a little repetitive at a point as it often tends to in first person shooters.

The Bottom Line
At its time, Unreal had the engine that for the first time surpassed id software's 3D-engine technology. For that alone it is worth a look by any serious gamer. It is one of the most beautiful and atmospheric games I have ever encountered and is able to completely immerse the player inside the world that combines alien and mythical elements. I tend to look at the shooting in Unreal as somewhat irrelevant and would probably advise anyone only now finding it to stick to the easy difficulty. What makes Unreal so great is something different, something that gives me hope the first person shooter genre is going to eventually evolve into something less mechanic and violent.

The Good
The atmosphere of the game is pretty cool for '98 graphics. But what makes this game are the guns and the enemies; guns are very unique and are all useful in different situations and against different enemies, and the AI is really good at dodging and shooting, makes the combat engaging and not dull at all, very fast paced for sure. Multiplayer is pretty cool too, very very fun to play, especially coop. And finally, the music is GOOD.

The Bad
The dodge mechanic, you double tap to dodge, which can lead to some involuntary jumps and deaths mid combat. Not that it's completely useless, but a dodge button would have been easier to use. Aside from that, don't play "Return to Na' Pali", it sucks.

The Bottom Line
Atmospheric 90's first person shooter with really good enemy AI, and cool music.

The Good
Unreal was a sizeable hit, and is one of a handful of games to have been in development for ages, and not be terrible. Announced shortly before the release of 'Quake', it took three years to be released, to mixed reviews. On the one hand, everybody agreed that it looks fantastic - the 3D engine seemed to be only slightly modified for the recent sequel, and the water effects are unsurpassed - but on the other hand it's not as much fun as, say, 'Quake 2'. The sweeping levels are impressive - combining 'Delta Force'-style distances with polygonal graphics effectively, and the soundtrack, although often descending into Jean Michel Jarre-esque cheese, fits the game well. There's even a go at having a plot - it gets forgotten about quickly, but it's nice to see that 'Half-Life' didn't spring from nothing.

The Bad
Despite looking the bee's knees, it's actually very disappointing as a game. The game seems extremely empty, and the huge size of some of the levels makes it seem very impersonal. The creators seemed unsure as to whether it should be a Quake-style out-and-out blaster, or something deeper, a semi-RPG exploration game, and it falls between these stools - there are long sequences in which you meet no monsters, whilst reading small, dull text messages that outline the 'plot'. The monsters, when you find them, seem out of place - they look cartoonish, and dive around like frantic ants. Furthermore, when you try to shoot them you realise that your guns are astonishingly weak. For example, later on, you are attacked by wasps that take two hits from a laser pistol to kill. It doesn't help the atmosphere at all. Worst of all were the bugs - only half-finished on release, the original game required an extensive series of patches before being playable on anything other than a basic 3DFX Voodoo 1 card. As a multiplayer game it was unplayably slow, which seems odd nowadays, given that 'Unreal Tournament' is fantastic.

The Bottom Line
A graphical showcase, albiet a dull one.

The Good
When I started Unreal for the first time I was stunned. The intro, generated by the graphics engine and with a great musical score, made me enthusiastic about this game in no time. And after playing a few levels, I thought Unreal was a game that had it all:

• The best graphics gamers had ever seen; this game was nothing but a visual breakthrough! A couple of years later Unreal still does not look dated at all. The detailed textures make even the most basic corridor look good and the lighting in this game is simply fantastic. Notice how a flare, a flashlight and a searchlight all create a different form of light.
• Great music that actually changes when a big battle is about to happen. Many games promised “dynamic sound”, Unreal actually delivered and this adds suspense to the game. The grunts and screams you hear have the same effect.
• The smart A.I. of the Skaarj makes them worthy opponents. This made dueling them exciting; when you see them duck a rocket and jump at you, you know you are in trouble.
• Nice variety of weapons, all weapons have two different ways that you can use them. Some of them are your standard FPS stuff (rocket launcher, pulse weapon, sniper rifle); others are original like the Razorjack, the Flakcannon and the GES Biorifle. The weapons may take a little getting used to. My main problem with the weapons is that they don’t sound very impressive, but Epic solved this with the release of a patch.
• Level design, another good feature of Unreal. There are indoor and outdoor levels, medieval Nali levels and high-tech Skaarj levels and I like the way they are linked together. You enter spaceships, temples and castles and the levels feature big differences in height and distance. All the levels are somewhat mysterious and there are a lot of them. I mean this game is big. Unfortunately a lot of the levels are rather dark, which becomes annoying after a while. I admit that cheated by summoning a searchlight every now and then.
• The controls are completely customizable and modify almost everything in the “Advanced options” section.
• Botmatch! Because of the decent A.I. of computer opponents, Unreal provides an enjoyable deathmatch experience to those who don’t have Internet access.
• The use of scripted events to create some memorable scenes. For example, when you enter Dark Arena you know something bad is gonna happen. A sweaty mouse was the result. I especially liked the tense finale.

[added later: I recently took Unreal of the shelf again and downloaded two of the mods that are available; Serpentine and Unreal 4 Ever. Serpentine replaces the standard weapons with real-life ones and hence turns Unreal into a game which emphasizes strategy & tact instead of fast reflexes. Unreal 4 Ever's weapons are completely bizarre and cause total mayhem. Both mods really add another dimension to Unreal's gameplay and are a lot of fun, especially when you play a BotMatch. Although Unreal Tournament has been out for a couple of years, Unreal is still a reasonably popular multiplayer game. I had no trouble whatsoever in finding a game to join. Although I didn't like the deathmatches (too frantic & fast-paced) I must admit that it all worked very smooth (with the 226final patch). If a game was played, using a map I had not installed on my hard-drive, I even received the map automatically. Because Unreal is a popular game there are also a lot of custom-made maps available. So there are plenty of ways to expand the fun you can get from Unreal.]

**The Bad**
For some weird reason this game is not addictive at all, I guess there simply is not enough action. The levels are often empty and there is a lot of time between the battles. I think the pace of the game is not high enough. Of course not every game needs to be like Serious Sam, but if Epic wanted to make more of an action-adventure/exploration type of game they should have worked on the story line. Why not add conversations with the Nali and other characters or make the player the leader of the Nali resistance. These simple text messages you get every now and then don’t do the job. Also I thought the gameplay consisted too much of turning switches, opening doors, pressing buttons and deactivating forcefields.

**The Bottom Line**
Unreal is a game with many great features, so it is hard to explain why I’m not too enthusiastic about it. This game was on my Hard Drive for almost two years before I finally finished it. Sometimes months would go by between the completion of two levels. Even though the game bored me long before I finished it, I still think it deserved to be the hit title it was.

The Good
Unreal is what I call the perfect game. It was released in '98 and even though "Half-Life" topped the charts, it didn't give you the awesome feeling of being in a colossal world, the big change of environment, the stellar graphics, the great replay value, as huge enemies, as awesome soundtrack, and as great final boss. Now I've played Half-Life. I love the game, I even bought the complete pack in Steam and I've looked at both games and Unreal simply stands out as being the better game. Anyway, in Unreal you get to play through gigantic maps with many incredible weapons. You fight your way through a place called Na Pali to save the peaceful inhabitants called the Nali from their evil overlords called the Raj. Depending on what difficulty you play it can take you weeks to finish this game.

The Bad
Some weapons you can't reload and is sometimes very necessary because you don't know how much ammo is left in a clip.

Too much to read. You get a translator witch picks up messages from all kinds of places, you don't need to read them but can be very helpful sometimes. Some times it will feel like there's a message to be read every 5 meters.

The Bottom Line
A must play game!! You can pick up the Unreal anthology very cheap these days. Out of all the old-school fps games you need to play this one the biggest priority. It can't apply to all gamers but for you who love old Sci-Fi games you need to play this.

The Good
Epic MegaGames have been known for developing platform games such as Jill of the Jungle, Xargon, and Jazz Jackrabbit. Around 1997, the company decided to change direction and develop a first-person shooter called Unreal, to capitalize on the success that was Quake II, as well as show off their new engine.

Instead of treating us to a demo, the developers gave us a sneak peek of Nali Castle. The preview may have showed its exteriors, but when I finally reached the castle in the actual game, I didn't want to stop exploring it. It houses almost everything a castle should have (dining room, study, chapel, etc.) The castle itself was taken over by the Skaarj as it was extended to include prisons and torture chambers.

What's interesting about the prison ship is discovering dead corpses with books besides them. This is a nod to the System Shock series, in that the books are actually logs detailing the person's moments before they are killed. Also, early on in the game, you pick up a translator which is a tool useful for decrypting the alien language seen throughout the game.

You do all your exploration on a planet called Na Pali, which is the planet the prison ship Vortex Rikers crash-lands on. The planet is inhabited by the Nali, a peaceful tribe consisting of four-armed humanoids. Also on the planet are Skaarj, brutal reptilians who have boarded the prison ship and killed everyone on board except Prisoner 849, who manages to escape onto the planet's surface.

As for the Nali, you see them walking around, praying to their God, or just levitating. Some of the Nali motion you to follow them so that they can help push a few switches here and there. If one of the Skaarj is in their vicinity, you are supposed to protect the Nali from them as they will be attacked. If you attack the Nali yourself, they will refuse to help you, instead telling you to go away and leave them alone. What I found funny about them is how they walk backwards while facing you, as if they are doing the moonwalk.

All throughout the game, you always do battle against the Skaarj using a variety of weapons, which can be easily accessed with your mouse wheel. Of these weapons, my favorite is the Eightball Launcher, since it can fire more than one powerful rocket at enemies. The Skaarj's artificial intelligence, particularly the SkaarjWarrior, is amazing. They are capable of timing your shots at the right moment, and roll out of the way to avoid them. It takes several hits for the Skaarj to be killed, but when they are killed, flies appear buzzing around the corpse, a nod to Quake 2.

Unreal's music is excellent, and it is right up there with some of their other games like One Must Fall: 2097, in the way that the composers used the module (MOD) music format to create the soundtrack for the game. Dynamic music is used for certain events such as scenery changes and boss battles. There are a few pieces that I had to listen more than once. I like the support for CD audio tracks; you can listen to music by your favorite artist if you are getting sick of the in-game compositions.

The graphics are really breathtaking. Most of the game takes place outdoors. I looked up at the sky and see one or two beautiful moons surrounded by millions of stars. And on the surface, there is a fair bit of vegetation including ponds that you can see through. More often than not, there are secret passages hidden in them, and they often lead you through to hidden places. Then there are the locations. I like exploring the temples, castles, ruins, and the Skaarj mothership. The best one was the Nali castle.

I noticed a neat feature when I installed the 226 patch. When a new map is loaded, some information is displayed at the top telling you what game it is, the map name, and author. This stuff is not found in any first-person shooter that I played. This feature is useful because by taking note of this, you'll be able to tell which author made the best maps for the game.

When I finished the game, I decided to have a go at Botmatch, which pits four computer-controlled opponents against you. I was amazed at how aggressive the bots were. The Botmatch mode is ideal if you can't find any multiplayer games to join. The idea of playing the game this way wasn't present in any first-person shooters before it. Botmatch was popular enough that it got carried onto both Unreal Tournament and its successors.

There are quite a few puzzles in the game, but this is really a matter of pushing buttons to access new areas. that you find a button. The puzzles don't appear early on in the game, because you spend your time getting used to the game first. I found that proper exploration is the key to solving puzzles in the game, because the solution to them is often revealed in dark areas.

Epic was generous enough to include UnrealEd, which is the level editor for the game. Users can edit existing maps or create brand new ones, and there at at least several CD-ROMs with Unreal levels, but most of them are focused on deathmatch. With each major update, it has been used to create maps for future games that use the Unreal engine.

Finally, the game is quite violent, even as one rated 15+ by most game rating organizations. All throughout the game, you see the Nali nailed to crucifixes, struggling to break free, as well as other forms of Nali execution. I just felt blasting them just to put them out of the misery. Then there are some parts in some locations like the Sunspire Tower where you see your reflection through floor tiles, and watching one of the Skaarj troopers attack your character, a girl, is quite unpleasant.

The Bad
Epic could have shown us something else other than Nali Castle. There are no speech throughout the game, but listening to speech being read out every message could have enhanced the experience. When you save or load a game while music is playing, that music cuts to the beginning instead of continuing on.

The Bottom Line
While I was still in high school, one of my buddies tried this game out and said to me "Unreal is unreal!", and I can see why. The game features a brilliant soundtrack as you explore quite a few breathtaking environments. During the game, you do battle with the Skaarj who have amazing artificial intelligence, and come across some interesting logs from someone who has met their unfortunate demise. The puzzles are not too hard to figure out, and there are some interesting stuff elsewhere. Although starting off as a tech demo, it transformed into something that most fans of first-person shooters will definitely enjoy.

The Good
Back in 1998, Unreal looked like no other game anyone had ever seen. It surpassed Quake II visually, and it was one of the few "Quake 2 killers" to turn a few heads. The engine was brilliant in its design, it ran silky smooth even on older computers and looked good regardless of quality, this tradition is continued today as each iteration of the engine looks great and plays great even on slightly dated computers. The tech was always the best part of this game.

The music is nice too, while the galaxy sound system sounds relatively dated in range, there are a few catchy and weird tunes in Unreal.

The weapons are... erm, interesting to say the least. Unreal was one of the first games to really stray from the standard First Person Shooter arsenal, offering two triggers for each weapon and extremely strange functions. Many of the weapons are tweaked and reused in Unreal Tournament and are still being used, although others, such as the Razor jack, dispersion pistol, and 8-ball have been sitting out the last few games. The stinger made a surprising return in Unreal Tournament 3 though.

Along with its strange weaponry, the environments were highly immersive - for the time at least - and the game used a design that was new and interesting.

The AI is decent, and botmatches can be fun, but they don't hold up compared to the much better Unreal Tournament.

The Bad
The problem with Unreal is it simply doesn't hold up. While some shooters stand the test of time, others simply lose their charm or playability in the modern world. Unreal falls into the ladder category, and is not given much attention anymore, and when replaying the game 11 years later, its not hard to see why.

First of all, the map design is a bit haphazard. Maps are a little too large, lack complexity, and get redundant and repetitive. While the omission of key hunts and switch runs may please some people, the levels feel like they are on rails and after awhile, you will just want to get off the ride. Despite its bizarre weapons, it just isn't fun to shoot the monsters. Seeing as there are only 6, excluding the annoyingly creepy bug things and wall huggers, there isn't much to shoot at and it gets boring and repetitive only about an hour in. A shooter that makes the task of blasting monsters seem boring simply isn't worth playing.

The multiplayer world is empty, and not many people played it even before the titanic Unreal Tournament showed up, due to a hastily slapped on netcode that required patch after patch after patch to get working. Playing with bots is fun, until you remember that Unreal Tournament has much better weapons and much better bots to fight.

The Bottom Line
Unreal is a strange game in truth, the monsters are strange, the world is strange, the weapons are strange. The sad fact is though, Unreal just isn't that much fun. At the time, the game had great graphics and everyone was marveling at those pretty sights, but looking back on the game without the technical marvels reveals a mediocre, relatively by the book shooter with lacking design. Some may regard it as a classic, but in reality they are talking about the games much more accomplished offspring - Unreal Tournament. Unreal will leave on in UT, but the game will ultimately be forgotten for what it was, or rather, what it wasn't.

The Good
This game is just plain amazing. It's graphically the most beautiful game ever created (especially when you consider most games just two or three years older have less appealing prerendered graphics!), the music is simply unbelievable (go Straylight go!) and even the game itself is really good.

I can definitely appreciate the quality of the game, especially when you consider the fact that it was never intended to be released, only as a demo of their 3D engine. The graphics are even more impressive than Quake III: Arena's and the music/sound effects beat any first person shooter to date.

The Bad
The first thing missing in this game is an atmosphere; no claustrophobic hallways as in Doom, no frantic hate as in Wolfenstein 3D. While it does have some "andrenaline-rush" parts in the game the one-player game is continuously dull in atmosphere. The multiplayer game is also a bit slow, but still rocks.

The second problem are the insane system requirements - I couldn't run it on a Pentium 166 with Voodoo 2 at an acceptable level, and the framerate only gets an "OK" label on a P2-350 with Riva TNT (for a year-old game?!)... But hey, it's worth it!

The Bottom Line
Simply mind-boggling audiovisually. Even if you don't like the genre, you'll gawk at the marvelling beauty of this game more often than not.

The Good
The graphics on this game are amazing. The textures are great, the colors are vibrant, the environments vivid. The Unreal engine creates VERY immersive settings: drool inducing. But as many of you know, graphics don't mean a thing if the gameplay is horrid. And thankfully it's not. This game can be very cinematic at times. Getting trapped in a dark hallway, only to hear a growl come from behind. Moments like that make this game one of my favorite shooters ever (hence my nickname). Also, the weapons are cooooooool and some are very different than your standard FPS weapons. On top of that, the game has very good bots and some neat DM modes (Dark Match!).

The Bad
Sometimes it seems a little too old-school. There real isn't much there besides find the key and shoot. Also, when the game first shipped, the net code was broken disabling the possibility of playing online. Obviously, that sucked.

The Bottom Line
Unreal...while not being the "thinking man's shooter" that Half-Life is it's still a great game, and will influence and enhance many games for years to come.