Unreal II: The Awakening

"It's like halo... if you last played halo drunk and wearing miittens.. ok.. it's just a bad fps with vehicles."

First of all, I'd like to say, I'm a big fan of the Unreal franchise and I've been playing it on my pc for years. I even love Unreal Championship for Xbox, despite it's cumbersome interface, but this game was a huge let down.

Graphics: 2/10
Don't get me wrong, the landscapes are pretty nice, however.... Models are extremely blocky. Halo models blow them out of the water and Halo was a RELEASE game! I know that not every game is Halo, Halo was a ''Game of the Year'' but.... So was the original Unreal Tournament. To let the franchise fall this far is pathetic. But that's not the only bad thing about the graphics. There is no light sourcing. Repeat, NONE. No shadows either. What does that mean? Unless something is a light color, it's effectively invisible, and let me tell you, when they made this game, they had a fetish for dark corridors and corners. There is no flashlight, no night vision, and not even firing energy weapons or grenades into a dark corner will light it up. When I first started, I got lost in a dark hall for 5 minutes because I couldn't tell whether I was walking into a wall. Don't be fooled by your guns, they are detailed and animated and appear to reflect light, but rest assured, the don't.

Control: 0/10 or 4/10
The ugliest game can be saved by good controls. Unfortunately for Unreal 2, it doesn't have them. There are two kinds of customizable controls in games. Fully customizable, where you can set any button to any button, and Presets. Presets are usually a disappointment, exceptions being in games like Halo, which has a large number of presets with wildly different designs. Unreal 2 has... 4. Four presets. A, B, C, and D. A and B are nothing more than presets with Primary and Secondary fires swapped.
If you use the Legacy preset in Halo, this scores a 0. With any of the 4 presets you're going to play worse than if you'd never touched an FPS before. No southpaw presets either. Sorry lefties, sucks to be you. If you use the Halo default controls, the game is playable, but still extremely limited. You use the same button to open doors and reload, but unlike other FPS games, you ''use'' things a ton, and there's nothing worse than trying to open a door while shooting, and stopping to reload because you weren't quite close enough to the door. Jumping is pretty limited as well, to jump over most objects you have to be standing still. Crouch is set to a cumbersome button as well, ''down'' on the D-pad. And like all unreal games, you can carry a bunch of different weapons, however, in Unreal2, you can only cycle one way, that means if you are firing your machine gun, and switch to your grenade launcher, if you have a lot of weapons, you're going to be wasting several seconds trying to get switched back.

Sound: 3/10
The background music is unremarkable, nothing to write home about. Explosion and gunfire sounds are unrealistic, and feel dampened. The one saving grace is voice acting on par with Halo.

Story: 1/10
Ok... so.. like.. if um.. one marshal can like... destroy these massive invasions of aliens.. why not like...station a marshal at each of these obscure mining camps instead of sending the same one to each camp over hundreds of light years. It's weak, it's tired, and an insult to the intelligence of anyone with the brains to operate a light switch.

Gameplay: 1/10
Ok, here's one of my biggest beefs. And maybe I've just been spoiled by Halo, BUT the levels are *tiny* tiny tiny. and the load times are... well, the time it takes to load a level is an appreciable fraction of the amount of time it takes to complete a level. And you're going to be loading a lot. So... Fight for 10 minutes, fighting with the controls, laughing at the graphics, and running into walls that are apparently made of dark matter, then start loading a new level. Go to the bathroom. Check to see if its loaded. Grab a drink. Check to see if its loaded. Watch a movie outlining your next mission (that you'll skip since it gives you a 25-word-or-less synopsis to look at for the 5 minute load time) THEN it loads the level and 5 minutes later you finally get to play the game.

Overall: 2/10
This game is just.. bad.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 05/01/04