Unreal was released in summer 1998, as it was hyped as the Quake killer. Well, the release date was delayed several times, so actually it made its debut after Quake II. Many of the gamers say that Unreal beats every 3D action games with its excellent graphics engine and everything, and many say that it was a boring 3D adventure with lousy guns and some nice looking graphics. In my opinion Unreal isn't as good as Quake2, maybe it's the cool weapons that lifts Quake2 above Unreal, and that's only my opinion. Aside the stupid "world greatest 3D action game" -war and we can get to the review itself.

The thin storyline goes like this: you're some kind of a criminal, obviously because you're in a transport ship, which carries , err... criminals. Of course something terrible must happen and

You'll start your game with bare hands, cool.

this time the ship wrecks onto a mysterious planet, you wake up as the only living person in sight and begin to search for an escape from the ship. The first mission is the most interesting mission in the whole game, but fortunately the mission really is something very atmospheric, it's very short though. Especially few of the last levels really annoyed me, it just kept going on and on, other reason was that I simply had to complete the game in hurry, cause I got Rainbow 6 rented and Unreal was taking all of the disc space. Later missions aren't as innovative or exciting as the couple of first ones. It sucks when the game developers use all the best ideas in the beginning of the game and the ending becomes boring, this is exactly what happened in GoldenEye 007.

After you escape from the ship, the storyline doesn't offer any cunning stunts or other twists anymore, which would have kept the story interesting. I had this "not very official" version of Unreal, so I don't know were there any cut-scenes, which truly would have helped picturing the simple storyline, probably there aren't. At least you should read all of the messages, which are provided by the allmighty universal translator, which translates all of those ancient runes (truly outstanding achievement of technology, considering the race is completely new and unknown). Exploring a totally new planet and the races living there would have been an

If I remember it right, this is from the first level.

excellent idea for a storyline, but somehow it doesn't approve to be too exciting, nevertheless it still knocks every other 3D-shooter's plotlines out (though I actually liked the plot in Quake2, somehow, don't ask why). Thank god the character isn't a space marine or something, but the thing is that it just doesn't feel like you're being a criminal, as your character doesn't seem to have any kind of personality. As you advance in your task of escaping from the planet, you meet these kindly acting and timid aliens, calling themselves as the Nali. The game starts to reveal it's storyline by telling, that an evil race called Skaarj (or something, I forgot those names) have enslaved Nali, for mine-working. As you would expect, it's your mission to save the Nali from being enslaved for the rest of their lives. Pretty original story, which is definitely a good thing, but just wandering through the planet in pretty temples and spaceships

The engine produces lights with different colors.

doesn't create a feeling you're being lost in a huge planet all alone, with only a bunch of Nali as your friend.

The levels are very, very large and sometimes you find yourself lost, strangely I didn't get stuck in any of the puzzles in the game, well maybe a few times but you'll get over them quickly enough to keep away frustration. When I finally found some kind of a pistol, it was time for some killing, but I jumped to the ceiling when I saw that the first enemy was a giant bear wielding two rocket launchers! I mean, doesn't it sound a bit goofy, that you have a little puny pistol and enemies are putting a pair of rockets heading for your head? Enemies are a bit too rare and they really can , which means simply less but much tougher enemies. It seems that enemies do have a bit action in their brains, which isn't too usual in 3D-shooters, sometimes they tend to give you a real resistance and sometimes they just rush towards you. You can also shoot using secondary fire mode with the pistol side on, wow, real gangsta-style. I'm not the kind of person who gets "kicks" by shooting with a bunch of polygons on a monitor, so the slight feel of powerless guns didn't bother me too much, it's a minus though.

When I got off the carrier ship, a huge wide area opened in front of me, kicking some framerate-ass. Yeap, that's true, but I think the real problem might be in my computer: massive P133 with mind-blowing amount of RAM of total 48 megs, and a 8-meg Voodoo2 3D-accelerator. You're probably wondering how could I even play it, well, despite the "tiny" seconds per frame-problem in some larger areas, the game worked incredibly fine, a lot

You won't get far from that creature when it gets close, at least with that gun.

faster than I expected. Unfortunately framerate drops always when there was more than one enemy in sight, so gunfights wasn't all that great experience, but that's my computers fault, so if you own a "kick-ass" computer you shouldn't mind that. In a repay the graphics look tremendous, enemies are modelled well and move smoothly. Most of all, there's absolutely no fogging or pop-up, there are a couple of places where you can see a pair of pixels moving and when you zoom your view using the sniper rifle you'll notice that it's an enemy wandering around unaware of your presence. What could be more fun than to shoot the poor alien while he's trying to get away from more bullets, great fun I'd say, too bad there's only a couple of situations where you can actually snipe enemies. Or, if you prefer shooting enemies at 10 meters distance with a sniper rifle.

The sounds are nothing sort of special and can get boring at times, but it's forgotten when you hear some of the songs, you won't find better music in any other game (except for Wip3out,

Besides right or left side, you can choose to keep your gun in the middle, Doom-Style.

which has the coolest soundtrack in games ever). But if we get back to the sounds, which aren't nearly as well done as the visual part of Unreal. For example the gun sounds are no match for Quake 2, Half-Life or any of the best 3D-shooters for that matter: they just don't sound the way you would have expected by the looks of them. Backround sounds are OK, but you rarely hear any monster owling or any other scary noise, which flattens the atmosphere a bit, so music had a big job fixing the atmosphere. If sounds aren't very atmospheric, music fits perfectly to the dark temples and caverns, there wasn't a single moment I would have wanted to shut the music off, it's that great. The music style is

Now this level was the scariest, true alien design.

something between ambient and classical aboriginal theme, I know it might sound a bit dafty but you have to hear it yourself before you can pull any conclusions out of it. Don't blame me if you don't happen to like the style, but I liked it a lot.

Unreal didn't quite satisfy my expectations which were pretty high, although I always knew Unreal never could live up to all it's hype. Awesome music and kick-ass graphics didn't fix all the problems and despite it was probably mean't to be more of an adventure game, it sure would have needed at least a little more action.

Gameplay: 4/5
Graphics: 5/5
Sounds: 3/5
Lastability: 3/5

Overall:


Reviewed by: Janne "Blizzardic" Mankila

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