I think I did things in backwards order: I bought Unreal Tournament 2003 (and love it!), then bought the actual one-player Unreal 2. Thank goodness for that mistake or I'd never have purchased another "Unreal" product again.
It's easier to say, "What
isn't wrong with Unreal 2: the Awakening?" than try to bring up its flaws. Let's start with the positives:
The levels look pretty.
Yep, that's about it. The levels look pretty.
I can see what
Epic Megagames, the creators of Unreal 2, were trying to do: when Unreal came along, it was called the "Quake Killer". It shook up the First-Person Shooter ("FPS") world by putting together a gorgeous graphics engine and fast-paced gameplay. Not only did it run pretty well without having to have a top-end system, it scales up with your hardware and still looks pretty good today. The Unreal engine's technology went on to power some pretty gorgeous follow-up games, like
Alice and
Clive Barker's Undying, without needing an overhaul. Graphics was their standard, and everything else rallied around it. Times change, and just offering a "jump-in-and-shoot" game isn't enough for a single-player FPS anymore. That's what online multiplayer games are for. So the creators of Unreal 2 tried to add more depth to the game. You have some breathtaking cinematics. You get to see who your character is. You interact with other people and from time to time you choose how to talk to them.
Unfortunately, the concept just doesn't work here. You feel like you're in an RPG when you have to talk to people (picture a conversation in
Neverwinter Nights), and the cinematics (which I can't seem to skip) waver between "pointless eye-candy" and "goes on way too long". Example: when you start the game, you see your ship enter a planet's orbit. Then fly through beautiful skies. Zoom in on its destination. Watch the ship dwindle away from you in the distance. Now see the building...it has a tall metal staircase on one side. There's a tiny form walking up the flights of stairs. Zoom in and wait while he climbs to the top. Later on in the game, your small ship goes through an approach and docking sequence in orbit, only to pull away and fly off again without actually docking. The dialogue informs you that after all the trouble of taking off you now have to go right back down to the planet. Nothing else is really imparted to you, but you watch the whole thing anyway.
The backstory to Unreal II is that you're part of a group that patrols the galaxy. Things are mostly boring, and your character is itching for the action of the Space Marine Corps, but it's not happening. Suddenly, you're sent in to answer a distress call from a remote colony. Your ship flies there, and you use a landing craft to go down to the surface for your missions.
In between missions you're introduced to your shipmates. You talk to them, and they tell you your mission briefing, what your weapons do, and if there's a new weapon, how it works. Despite my love of immersive, interactive games, I got to where I couldn't stand listening to any of them yammer any more--no wonder your character's itching for action! Hopefully they don't talk as much in the Space Marines.
There are all sorts of doors and rooms to explore in the ship, but every single one of them contains dead-ends: all your equipment magically appears on your body when you start your mission, and I have yet to find any "goodies" hiding in the ship. Familiar objects like your weapons are all over the place, but no matter how you try, you can't pick anything up while you're on the ship.
And now for the gameplay. The good part is that you can now "vault up" onto objects: how many times have you played a gun-blastin' bad@$$ who can clear a roomful of heavily-armed enemies...but can't climb on top of a waist-high metal box? Just hold the jump button, and faster than you can say, "
Lara Croft", you'll climb up. Unfortunately, this is as good as movement gets: the rest of the time you move
really slow. I'm beginning to think this is a deliberate trend on the part of game-makers to make their games harder...cripple your character and you have less chance of getting through a level (see my review of
Halo for the PC -
http://www.epinions.com/content_124923645572 ). It's not a performance issue: your enemies can jump, hop, and sprint all they like. I guess your apathy is weighing you down.
And...speaking of gameplay, performance issues, and moving sluggishly, get this: Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal 2 perform like night and day. I play Unreal Tournament 2003 with a high number of bots, high resolution, and high detail, and it runs gorgeously. With Unreal 2, the performance is absolutely horrible. I have to turn everything off, run it on minimum, and hope for the best. I've tried patching and re-installing. And of course I make sure my hard drive is unfragmented, but...no change. It simply runs terribly. It's almost as if a whole different team of developers, using a whole different engine, built each game. Even things common to both games, like the grenade launcher, can get unwieldy and hard to manage in Unreal II. I also tried turning "ragdoll" effects on, just wanted to see what it looked like, but...nothing. Enemies would keel over, paste themselves to the map, and then quickly disappear.
But wait! There's more. As you're walking along the map, the scenery extends beyond your physical reality, and it's badly cropped. It's one thing to reach the edge of a map and just see a textured skyline: I've done that before. I understand the limitations. But here's a good example of how bad it is in Unreal II: in an early outdoor mission I found a metal slope that ran the length of the map. I climbed up one side and moved along it, hoping to pick off any enemies that emerged from that side of the map. Sure enough, one appeared in the distance. He stayed at the bottom of the slope, running along its base. Picking him off would be easy...except suddenly, as I'm moving along the wall, I start sliding down the slope! No matter how I push forward, I'm slowly moving to the bottom at an almost perfect 45-degree angle. And at the end of this angular line, here he comes, suddenly climbing up the slope! After I polish him off I start walking around the map. Sure enough, there's an invisible wall angling halfway along the slope. I simply cannot continue walking in that direction, although I can walk along its base all the way to the cliff wall at the end of the map. A ledge along the other side turns out to be the same way, too...I'm walking along the ledge, I can see the backdrop ahead of me, but I can only walk...not across the edge of the ledge, but halfway in on one side of the ledge. There's an invisible wall that lets me back away from the backdrop, but not continue sideways along the ledge.
There's also a place you can easily climb to that looks like a secret area: I'd expect to find goodies of some sort. Instead, I get halfway across it and just drop off, time and again. Not that this matters...apparently they don't grow 'em too bright in your neck of the woods: most bonus items are lying in the middle of the floor right in front of your face.
And despite the fact that I can nimbly run up and down ladders in games like
Enter the Matrix,
No One Lives Forever, and
Return to Castle Wolfenstein, I still fall off the ladders in Unreal 2 half the time.
The textures, colors and graphics look gorgeous: when I dive into muddy water, there's a cloudy haze of dirt in the water that makes it feel real. But then I resurface and discover that the plants I'm walking though are paper-thin and two-dimensional. Ever play
Max Payne 2? There's a funhouse level where you're the only real object and everything else is flat backdrops, moving back and forth but lacking any depth. Playing Unreal 2 feels just like that.
Despite the two-dimensional hangups and strange invisible barriers, the sound quality is pretty good. I have no real sound hardware, but the sounds seemed positionally placed. Voices were easily understood, music (what poor attempts there were at it) came through clearly, and sound effects seemed to sound about right for where they were coming from. In the first mission there's a voice coming from a speaker, and you easily find the source by following your ears. In later missions, when you fight alongside marines, you can find them by position: The noise of their weapons gives them away. Makes sense: since their voices are coming over your intercom, you can't track them by their speech. There's one scene in which you're running through a dark misty night and sound is about the only way you can tell friend from foe. It plays well, and it's chaotic and suspenseful, but I still take a massive beating. Weighed down by a chatty crew, crappy weapons, and random invisible walls, my frustrated would-be Space Marine is apparently constipated, too. Nothing's more aggravating to an FPS player than having your target sighted and having it walk right up to you, stomp you into the ground, and you're either breaking down your weapon for an impromptu cleaning-before-reloading, or you're blasting your feet because you can't get the gun into position.
As a whole, Unreal 2 is a real clunker, and it pains me to say this. I was really looking forward to a good game with maybe a weak storyline, but the same feel as Unreal Tournament 2003. I should have known by the fact that I bought it brand new for US$9.99 at CompUSA...and it came with a free copy of
Civilization II stuck to it (which currently retails for about US$9.99).
If you love FPS games, get
Unreal Tournament 2003 and skip this adventure entirely. If you're into roleplaying, stick with
Neverwinter Nights or
The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind. If you were looking for an interactive action game, you'll be better off with
Clive Barker's Undying or
No One Lives Forever 2.
Maybe this would make a good screensaver...
System Specs
I played Unreal II on a:
Dell Inspiron 8200
Intel Pentium IV, 2.0GHz w/400MHz FSB
1,024MB (1 GB) RAM
32MB nVidia GeForce Go 440MX video card
Crystal Audio sound
Windows XP Pro
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