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Unreal 2 Review February 23, 2003 Tom Chick |
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Summary: Completely immune to the game review philosophy that big-name games automatically deserve lenient scores, Tom Chick has seen fit to tackle the mighty Unreal II and bring the giant down to Earth. You know what they say: the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Yet Tom himself seems to not returned unscathed, pained as he is by the sight of Wheel of Time developers Legend Entertainment stumbling. Read on, and find out why all the drama!
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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.
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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.
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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.
SIDEBAR: It’s interesting that the commando team is called Force 10. Usually ‘Force’ designations are for naval task forces, such as the famous Force H operating out of Gibraltar during World War II.
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In space, no one can hear you yawn
Unreal 2 tries to hold all this stuff together by making John Dalton part of a crew. Between each of the game's disjointed missions, he goes back to his ship and chats with the rest of the crew. At least that's how the developers would have liked it to go. In reality, before you can start a mission, you have to initiate a briefing with the chesty Aida, who will lock the door until she's done. I found this out the hard way. Once I realized the missions were entirely linear and there was no need for me to sit through this chick's exposition, I tried to leave as soon as she launched into some yarn about a scientist who needed rescuing or a secret base where they're studying alien artifacts. I just want to get to the shooting, but she had cleverly locked me in. Pretty smart for a woman who can't even pronounce her own name. Of course, maybe in the future 'Aida' really is pronounced 'Ida'. Maybe in the future tough military women wear their hair in sorority girl ponytails on top of their heads. Maybe in the future they also go on long mixed-gender interstellar voyages with their breasts all but hanging out.
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For comic relief there's a little blue guy who speaks poor English, sort of like Balki from Perfect Strangers, but little and blue. Then there's the weapons guy who describes the alt-fire for all the guns as they're doled out over the course of the storyline. This is helpful for people who don't know what a manual is. This guy's backstory is that he's an alcoholic, which isn't really surprising since he chain smokes like a fiend and sounds like he's had his share of recreational chemical indulgence. For some reason, the Mysterious Alien Artifacts that Control the Destiny of the Universe are just left lying around on a table in his room. Very clever, since the merciless corporate spies and bloodthirsty aliens would never think to look there. As the artifacts accumulated on this guy's desk, I had an uneasy feeling that they were eventually going to be assembled into some sort of fruity superhero costume that I was going to have to wear by the time the game ended (thankfully, I was spared that fate).
Kicking ass and soothing psyches
These sequences might have been more successful if they weren't so poorly written and if they didn't feel like filler. In lieu of camaraderie, there are lame jokes and bad dialogue that's just earnest enough that you can't enjoy it on a Max Payne level. You never get to play as any of the other characters and they don't even go on any of the missions with you. Half way into the game, each character suddenly develops a backstory, as if you cared. John Dalton tries to patch up everyone's haunted past with a few 'chin up, buckeroo' pep talks and even a dash of pop psychology about not blaming yourself. These are pretty funny, since our hero seems to be patterned after Vin Diesel. Which means he can't deliver a convincingly spoken line to save his life.
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It's not until the very end of the game that you understand why the developers went to all this trouble to try to simulate camaraderie. The ending works nicely, but it's a lot of work for an unconventional payoff. After all that time chatting with the crew, moving from the briefing room to the weapons locker to the hangar, there isn't even a mission set on the ship. It's all in the service of a final manipulative punch line before the credits roll. Half of me wants to admire the developers at Legend for trying this, but the other half really wishes the whole process hadn't been so clumsy and ham-handed.
SIDEBAR: Great Naval Battles-series of games were the most famous World War II naval combat simulators.
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Get to the shooting already
Okay, storyline and settings aside, gunplay can rescue a game like this, can't it? After all, Unreal Tournament 2003 looks great, so you'd think Unreal 2 would measure up as an excuse to shoot a lot of fancy weapons at a lot of tricky bots.
You're only about 15% right. Most of the gameplay is dull running and gunning, one room or hallway at a time. The AI is the sort of canned stuff that lets you snipe a guy while his buddy stands around staring at a wall. Toss a toxic grenade at a pair of guards with their backs turned and if it doesn't hit them square on, they'll just stand there until you do the right thing to activate them. The AI's cleverness appears limited to its ability to switch weapons; if you get close enough to someone with a rocket launcher, he'll whip out a flamethrower or maybe try to smack you with his rifle butt. And, of course, in the two levels with Skaarj, they exhibit their infamous gymnastic rolls to the left and right as they charge you. The most memorable monsters are packs of hooting space monkeys in the first part of the game. By the time you're facing the dreaded bio-mechanical super evil aliens at the end of the game, you'll fondly recall what it was like to shoot at things as animated and vivid as the hooting space monkeys. Hooting space monkeys, we hardly knew ye.
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But the 15% of the shooting that stands out are about a half dozen sequences where you have to hold off waves of attackers. At first, these are rigidly scripted. You're running around with some autonomous friendlies fighting battles that should have played out like Halo, except for the fact that Unreal 2 doesn't have half the personality of Halo. Eventually, these defensive missions throw in some tactics by letting you place turrets, walls, and friendly marines. Most of these missions are timed, ostensibly so you can protect some soft unarmed little dude trying to accomplish a repair or hack a computer.
Keystone Kombat
These little flexible battles stand out from the rest of the game, but they're not as good as they could have been. The engine is really pushed to its limits when you get more than five or six characters firing their dynamically lit laser bolts and whatnot at each other. Framerates go way south during these sequences. And unfortunately, the AI doesn't exhibit any of the ersatz cleverness you'll find in Unreal Tournament. Instead, friendlies and enemies fumble around, bumping into each other, setting each other on fire, and generally just getting in the way of a good gunplay session.
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SIDEBAR: I wonder what kind of life could exist in a one-dimensional universe? There would be no time, no shape, no thickness to anything. Everything would be straight lines, but the lines, lacking a second dimension (ie, thickness) would be completely invisible.
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Dish guns
Then there's the fact that the gunplay is about as dishwater dull as you can get without going back to play Doom 2 again. Your arsenal includes -- stop me if you've heard this one -- a pistol, a shotgun, an assault rifle, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher, a flamethrower, a sniper rifle, a rail gun, and a BFG that you only get to use at the end of the game. Okay, so there is a nifty spider gun that covers your target in spiders. But like the flamethrower and concussion grenade, it's not very practical since you can't quickly switch to a more lethal weapon to finish off your distracted target; instead of a single key for each weapon, each number key cycles through a list of weapons a la Half-Life, making it hard to quickly swap guns. Your arsenal is doled out over the course of the plot, so by the time you get nifty little toys like the laser-shooting flying orbs from Star Wars, you hardly have the chance to use them.
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A then B then C
The level design is entirely linear, offering no sense of exploration, but an occasional sense of frustration when it's not clear where you're supposed to find the button to unlock the next area. The environments tend to consist of the same old industrial sci-fi hallways we've been fighting in since Doom, only the poly counts are upped considerably. The geometry in Unreal 2 really shows off the engine, sometimes to the detriment of the framerate. There are some impressive wide open areas that seem to be thumbing their noses at the indoor limitations of id's engines. Some of the levels do a good job with atmospheric fogging effects and sound design. However, there are some disappointing shortcomings in the tech, such as inconsistent use of the rag doll physics and some really wretched water effects. There are also some annoying driver problems, generally associated with sound support, that remain unpatched almost a month after the game's release.
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One of the most disappointing things about Unreal 2 is the lack of multiplayer support, which really hurts its longevity. This is a game entirely without replay value. Legend would have had to do a fair amount of work tuning the weapon balance and AI, but some of the content might have gone over better in a deathmatch environment rather than the canned bot battles that comprise the game instead.
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SIDEBAR: Just by looking up eat flaming death in the jargon dictionary, I also learned about the evil of EBCDIC and connector conspiracy. Ain’t life grand?
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PROS
Engine
Although it's hell on framerates, the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine does some amazing level geometry
Defensive missions
There are flashes of flexible gameplay and replayability in these set piece battles
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CONS
Level design
Strictly linear and heavily derivative
Weapons
They've all been done before...and done better
AI
Apparently there weren't many CPU cycles left over after the graphics, because there are precious few signs of intelligent life here
Writing
Bad dialogue and a bad storyline wouldn't hurt Unreal 2 so much if it didn't rely on them so much
No multiplayer
The last possible hope for this game has gone AWOL.
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SIDEBAR: Tom doesn’t seem to have enjoyed his Unreal 2 experience very much. At least it didn’t have him gnawing his own hand in frustration, as Daikatana did with me.
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