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Now with more talking, less shooting

Unreal 2 is one of the most criminally bland shooters you'll ever play. It tells a story cobbled together from nearly every first person shooter cliche in the book. It doesn't really go anyplace interesting, it doesn't give you anyone memorable to shoot, and, worst of all, it doesn’t give you anything terribly thrilling to shoot them with. And at times, it simply will not shut up. It manages to take the considerable power of the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine and squander it on derivative and uninspired gameplay. All told, it feels like a budget title built from AAA technology.

Hooting space monkey

More hooting space monkeys

Stop, drop, and roll

Unlike its predecessor, Unreal 2 is very story driven. The first Unreal was about, as near as I can remember, a prison ship that crash landed on some planet where the Skaarj, whose dreadlock hairstyles were clearly inspired by Predators, had enslaved some poor four-armed guys who ran around saying things that sounded like a cross between African native languages and words Frank Herbert made up for his Dune novels. Some of the four-armed guys were nailed to asterisk-shaped crosses, which I guess was kind of edgy in a 'what if aliens have Jesus, too?' way. Then there was a big ship at the end with lights that turned off and invisible monsters you had to fight. Something like that. At any rate, it's a testament to Unreal's lack of story that most people are a little fuzzy on everything after the appearance of the first Skaarj. You probably do remember that part. The long hallway, with the lights shutting off section by section, and the Skaarj rushing you in the dark? Yeah, you remember that.

To boldly go where everyone has gone

So now five years later, Unreal 2 rolls around and decides to have a prominent storyline. You play John Dalton, a galactic marshal stationed on the TCS Atlantis, which is on a -- stop me if you've heard this one -- routine patrol. The ship gets a -- stop me if you've heard this one -- distress signal from a remote mining base and decides to investigate, at which point Dalton finds a -- stop me if you've heard this one -- mysterious alien artifact. From here, you go on a series of missions gathering the rest of the alien artifacts from colonies, research stations, and military bases on a variety of planets, featuring appearances by your favorite climates. There's a desert, a frozen planet, a jungle/swamp planet, another frozen planet, and finally a kind of alien world that looked a whole lot more alien back when H.R. Giger did it in the movie Alien.

Foliage, UT2003 style

That's Mr. Skaarj to you

A big headed Nali cow

Unreal 2 is full of these kind of derivative homages, but most of them are to games like Half-Life, System Shock, No One Lives Forever, Halo, Jedi Knight, and so forth. Unreal 2 has got it all. Crawling through ducts, battles among crates, shutting off valves to stop deadly gas, watching scripted scenes through unbreakable glass, rescued scientists unlocking doors for you, mutant spiders, organic biomass levels, aliens hatching from eggs, eavesdropping on 'funny' conversations between bored guards, a crashing ship with shifting gravity, boss monsters with trick solutions, jumping puzzles, friendly marines, insidious alien experiments, yadda, yadda, yadda. There's even a mission where you find yourself blowing up a dam for no discernable reason other than they did it in the movie Force 10 from Navarone, not to mention about a dozen first person shooters. If you're new to the genre, it might all seem pretty nifty. But most of us are going to be experiencing a lot of deja vu.