Unreal II: The Awakening

The Good
First and foremost, the graphics. The quality of the artwork is superb, lovingly crafted and easily surpasses that of the original Unreal, which was more of a mixed bag bar the skyboxes and the lens flares. The static mesh detailing ranged from OK to excellent, and the architecture was one of the best for its day. A great deal of variety of different environments and worlds also means you'll never get bored of looking at this baby.

And the variety of weapons on offer is certainly worth writing home about. After all, you get a grenade launcher with several varieties of grenade to use as the situation requires, and the sniper rifle is one of the best you'll ever find in a first person shooter. The rocket launcher packs a punch, and the spider gun is worth checking out for curiosity's sake, but otherwise I wouldn't bother using it as a primary weapon.

The Bad
The extremely linear gameplay and the ever so short maps. Most of the map is dedicated to environmental detail, which is a waste, and means that multiple maps are required for the one 'level', requiring frequent map loading, which is a pain in the bum itself, as even on modern machines things take forever to load. As a result of these seemingly short maps, the player moves at a snail's pace. Grrrr!!! ADHD is not compatible with this game, sadly.

Also, the game is somewhat unreliable, even with the latest patch, and has crashed several times on me, much to my frustration. The programmers who worked at the now defunct Legend should be summoned and shot for their blatant negligence, because this is one of the least reliable games out there.

And don't get me started on those flippin' cut scenes. It's not so bad when you're playing the game for the first time, but if you want to play it again you have no choice but to sit through them. Very annoying. The people who made this game didn't think this one through. If they ever made a patch fixing this (fat chance now, I might add) as well as the bugs, I may just forgive them.

The Bottom Line
It is worth playing, but only just. Had they made the game more stable and included an option to skip those darned cut scenes, I could quite easily overlook the linear, multi-mapped levels and the loading times that seem to take decades.

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
After the impressive track record of the somewhat predictable but hugely entertaining Unreal series of games one can only assume that Unreal 2 is going to be utterly huge and while in a couple of ways it is, that assumption is largely a mistake. The latest version of the Unreal Warfare engine drives this game and it's looking better than ever with unprecedented detail on all counts. Grass waves, each little metal bolt and rivet actually sticks out rather than just being a texture and shadows bend convincingly over the surroundings. The best feature of Unreal 2 by far is the level editor. With a strong basis to create mods and scenarios, an ambitious team could do wonders with this and designers are given some real power to play around with. Best of all since the game is based on Unreal Technology if you've ever had any prior experince editing an Unreal game then you'll feel right at home here. Unfortunately the other good points of the game aren't really that great. There are some fun scenarios such as defending a base and leading a squad of marines as well as some nice, if a little generic weaponry but...

The Bad
sadly these things are not enough to take the game to the same level as the graphics engine. The sad attempt at a story is sloppily put together and as thin as water. Even the attempt at interactive conversation trees is unfounded because at no point can the conversation be taken in new directions. All the player can do is simply exhaust all possible options until the characters shut up. The gameplay is very generic and strangely unplayable largely due to ridiculous accuracy from some enemies coupled with slow sluggish movement. Your character also has the (dis)ability to jump-dodge with a double tap of a direction key which sounds good but more often than not it results in him performing an unnerving leap to certain death over a cliff because you were trying to strafe in bursts.

The Bottom Line
This game is a senseless waste of technology. What could have been a ground breaking and stunningly well realised game has turned out to be nothing more than a glorified tech demo covered in a thin shooter wrapping. Mod authours will no doubt take full advantage of the engine and create add-ons that far outstrip the original but until then we're left with a very meger offering indeed.