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> Results: Unreal II: The Awakening
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Awaken me when it's over...
It's been five years since we crash landed and fought our way off Na Pali in Epic's Unreal, and that's a long time between 3D shooter titles. Since then we've had to content ourselves with the excellent Unreal Tournament multiplayer combat series. Epic Games hired Legend Entertainment, who made a name for themselves with the Unreal: Return to Na Pali expansion pack and the underrated Wheel of Time computer game (based on the works of author Robert Jordan), to come up with Unreal II: The Awakening, and the result is fun and frantic, but also short and uninspired.  The original Unreal cast you as a prisoner who, through luck (good and bad) finds himself free but marooned on an alien world. He's sort of a messiah figure to the four-armed natives, but other, scarier, natives want to kill him. It ends with a cliffhanger that this game does nothing to resolve because now you're part of the Terran Colonial Authority, and you're a space Marshal on the good ship Atlantis. You also have a partner that would make Pamela Anderson Lee blush, but she doesn't stick around very long. This is good because, you know, you wife, mother, or girlfriend might walk into the room and get offended. So, without your buxom partner you have to solve problems in a universe connected to the first game, but only tenuously.  The gameplay and mission design isn't bad, but it does feel amateurish and uninspired. At the very least, it doesn't quite live up to its pedigree (and that isn't saying much). The real problem is that Legend has taken such a conservative, almost minimalist approach. They've made a tight game that takes full advantage of Epic's state-of-the-art graphics engine and delivers solid, if uninspired, shooter gameplay, but they did so at the expense of anything that would set the shooter apart from the crowd. The result is a game that can be finished in about 10-12 hours, and features no multiplayer to extend the game's life. Here's what does extend the title's life. Long, very long, really very long... too long... load times. Unreal II's best feature comes from its lush graphics engine. It's state-of-the-art and all the locations (which range from bizarre alien worlds, to bizarre worlds based on the film Alien). All human and alien characters are well animated and rendered but have a cartoonish exaggeration that works against the game. The "look" is juvenile and forgettable. Photo-realism wasn't the goal; the designers were instead going for ﾑcomic-book cool' here, which explains why the women look like blow up dolls with bare midriffs and the men have hulking muscles on their muscles. The monsters, too, ripple with strength and menace in a way that looks more like a splash page than a real-world threat threatening your virtual life. This style will no doubt please some people, but is less effective than similar titles. At least this art direction is consistent throughout the game. Unreal didn't have cutscenes. Well, it had one at the end... anyway, Unreal 2 has a lot of cutscenes and they're all almost universally horribly written, acted, and conceived.  Unreal gave us monsters that ran, jumped, crouched, and dodged. It gave us scripted sequences before Half-Life came out. Unreal II ignores all that and simply sends its beasties running straight at you and into incoming fire. Gone is the feeling that you're being stalked by a Skaarj or dueling with a multiplayer quality bot dressed in mercenary clothing. The bottom line is, you could do better than Unreal II when looking for a new shooter to play, but, by the same token, you could certainly do much worse. One hopes that Unreal II: The Awakening awakens Epic that they have a more valuable franchise here than they're treating it. This is the sequel to Unreal? The game that gave us the four-armed Nali, the Skaarj, and some of the most startling scenery ever put to hard drive? Amazing. Kid Factor: Shooters by their nature aren't good choices for kids and poorly made shooters with uninspired design and nothing but pneumatic titillation and violence are even worse choices. Even if your child is old enough and you feel comfortable with getting him or her a shootin' game, you're better off grabbing almost anything else off the shelf. Reviewer's Recommended Ages: 15+ ESRB: M-Mature 17+ Developer: Legend Entertainment Producer: Atari 
Shooters by their nature aren't good choices for kids and poorly made shooters with uninspired design and nothing but pneumatic titillation and violence are even worse choices. Even if your child is old enough and you feel comfortable with getting him or her a shootin' game, you're better off grabbing almost anything else off the shelf.
Kid Factor by Andrew Bub
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