Bennett Ring had high hopes for the sequel to the awesome Unreal. . . silly boy.
The original Unreal was a revelation to first person shooter addicts around the world. Who doesn’t remember the involuntary release of a couple of trouser nuggets during the infamous hallway scene, complete with lights slowly blinking out, or the awe of exiting the cramped tunnel network into a vast outdoor area, with a crashed starship and giant waterfall setting the scene? Memories like these are what gaming is all about. Compared with the corridor action that the Quake series presented us with at the time, Unreal was our first foray into worlds that didn’t have walls running down either side of the screen. Can Unreal II live up to the high expectations that were set by the memorable Unreal?
Thanks to the use of the Unreal Warfare engine, Unreal II is a stunning game, but it’s not quite as impressive as UT2003. Maybe it’s because we’ve already seen the UW engine in action in both UT2003 and America’s Army that we weren’t totally blown away this time around.
Massive open areas integrate seamlessly with highly detailed interiors, and there are more flashy special effects than you can shake a pixel shader at. However, most of the open levels are devoid of detail, with a very sparse look to them, and half of these levels are very foggy. The use of fog is a surprise, as later levels prove that this engine is very capable of displaying long viewing distances. Another problem is that the levels contain almost zero interactivity -- apart from the occasional gas tank to blow up everything is constructed of magically indestructible material.
You’ll need a PC brought back from the year 2007 to get Unreal II to run well -- it managed to bring our 2.7GHz Pentium 4 and RADEON 9700 PRO combo to its knees, usually during crucial battle scenes. And that was at a resolution 1024 x 768, with many of the details set to medium. Animation is for the most part quite nice, but it does occasionally suffer from the old ‘running on the spot’ syndrome, with enemies seeming to slide over the ground instead of actually making contact with it.
Gameplay is your standard first person shooter fare -- clear the level of all enemies on your way to the exit and try not to get turned into soggy gibbage on the way. . . and that’s about it. In between each mission you’ll return to your humble little space ship, where you can walk around and talk to one of three different crew members. There’s the obligatory hot chick who supplies you with mission briefings and occasional glimpses of nipple. Then there’s the obligatory cyborg tough-guy who supplies you with new and interesting weapons as the game progresses. Finally there is the ‘alien who speaks broken English’ -- we’re still not sure what he’s doing in the game, other than being damn annoying.
There is almost zero problem-solving involved throughout the game, and each level is very linear. There are a couple of awesome levels that revolve around setting up a rigid defence with laser fences and sentry turrets, but these brief moments of utter coolness are the exception rather than the rule. Doh. We played on the medium difficulty level and managed to complete the game in around 10 hours. A co-operative online mode could have been awesome, yet the developers, in their infinite wisdom, included absolutely no multiplayer aspect at all to the game. We could have understood that they’d prefer to leave the multiplayer to UT2003, and instead focus all of their efforts on Unreal II, but considering the game can be completed in a mere 10 hours it’s a disappointment to say the least. Once you’ve completed it, you’re not likely to play through again, as there aren’t any secret sections to discover or extra tidbits to unlock. Obviously the developers have never heard of the word longevity. Not good at all.
To round out this rather mediocre package, Unreal II has a distinctly unfinished feel to it, in a buggy kind of way. One show stopper of a bug forced us to reinstall the game to get it to run again -- thankfully our saved games survived this process. In other sections, sounds would get stuck in loops; when you consider that we were using the most popular sound card on the market -- a SoundBlaster Live! -- this is almost unforgivable.
While there are a lot of things that irk us about Unreal II, it’s not quite as bad as the sum of its parts. There are a couple of memorable sections, and overall it’s quite enjoyable. Unfortunately it doesn’t come close to the game that we expected it to be, and if you’re after a game that will keep you going for months, or even weeks, don’t concern yourself with this.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012