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Written by [t0rc]
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The long awaited debut of the flamethrower in Unreal.
When the long awaited release of Unreal 2 finally occurred, people
everywhere rushed to buy the game. Much to their surprise, instead of
the superior all-around exceptional game that was expected, they had
purchased a mediocre dose of the Unreal world. They found no
multiplayer, laggish/slow gameplay at times, bad monster graphics, but
good enviroment and human graphics. The guns are plentiful and creative
and theres a great sound system set up to immerse you further, level
design is pretty well done, in a flowing style, which lets you get
lost, but easily find your way to where you need to go.
Lets begin with graphics, a large factor in most peoples decisions on
game purchases. There are two conflicting graphic types in Unreal 2.
The great, and the not-so-great. For example, the enviromental graphics
on nearly every map are exceptional, including the lighting. The
graphics of the human characters that you encounter are pretty well
done also, but certain beast/monster graphics don't meet those
standards.
That screen shot looks great, the water in the ocean moves during the
game and flows pretty realistically. Although the conversion to *.JPEG
did smooth out a little bit of pixelation found on the fringes of the
largest moon. Here are a few people images along with some more
examples of the great enviroment, and inside ship and building details:
Moving on from graphics, we come to weapons. The weaponry is massive and plentiful. Tech sniper rifles
from the future, grenade launchers (in above picture with flameing
pipe) that shoot 6 types of grenades ranging from toxic gas to
concussion, rocket launcher, a magnum, and many other various weapons
of intense pain and destruction. There is only one con that I found in
the weapons category, and that is the black hole gun. It's just too
powerful. There are monstrous alien war-demons that you have to fight
and they are a 1 hit kill with the black hole gun. You get a ton of
ammo, and don't even have to aim at the opponent. Just close and it
will suck everyone inside. The release of this game marked the coming
of the Flamethrower. The flames look exceptional during the game, and
the alternate fire is the fuel for the flamethrower being sprayed on
the ground. As the manual states, the fuel is so unstable that it soon
spontaneously combusts. So you can use it to set traps and lure your
enemy into the fuel.
That marks the debut of the best flames I've ever seen in a game. If
anything in the game deserves an award, it would have to be the flames.
The flames, as you can see above, even have correct lighting effects on
the surrounding objects, as you hear your enemies squeal in pain and
run around trying to extinguish themselves.
Proceeding into gameplay you find once again a grab bag of quality. The
AI is sometimes moronic, just standing there with their back turned to
you, waiting to be fragged. Yet at other times it pursues you with
ferocity and startles you from the shadows of a pipe your blindly
crawling through. The game, at times, especially during the cutscenes
and cinematics, gets rather repetitive and boring. The lack of being
able to skip most of the movies is another downfall. Constantly you
will visit the loading, standby, initializing routine, especially
during the longer levels. As for difficulty, it's pretty explanatory,
I.E. easy is pretty easy, medium is medium. But the Unreal difficulty,
I didn't feel was challenging enough. For the game-hardened fraggers,
it's not that challenging. The levels in the game are well designed and
I have no complaints on that aspect and the included level editor is a
great addition. But the lack of multiplayer really kills this game. It
would've been a great success if the multiplayer aspect was integrated.
The storyline is of better than average quality, but not exceptional.
It doesn't really get interesting until the end of the game.
The sound, well that just has to be heard in person. The 2nd mission
you go on, that takes you to a swamp during a thunderstorm is a prime
example of great effects. You can hear the monsters coming behind you,
to your left, to the right, you can hear the rain, the lightning,
everything. On the 3rd level, with all the arachnids, you can hear them
crawling around on the pipes, and then right above you, right before
they burst through the ceiling to attack you. Sound is a great aspect
of this game, and is perfectly in sync with everything. The only
problem is the voices during cutscenes, where it sounds really choppy
and sometimes odd tone variations.
Overall, I give the game an 81. It's definetely better than average
quality, but it just doesn't stand up to the reputation, hype, and what
you'd expect out of an Unreal game.
Pros:
Cheap as of now; good graphics for the most part; nice varying level
design; a plethora of weapons; great sound; flames are exceptional;
good replay value for the most part.
| Cons:
Mediocre story line; graphical issues with some creatures; cutscence
voices are choppy; gameplay slows down in some areas and gets boring;
cinematics are boring for the most part; no extremely new mission
concepts; no multiplayer.
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