Unreal II: The Awakening is a follow-up to the 1998 surprise hit, featuring all-new characters while set in the same Unreal universe. Like its predecessor, Unreal II sports a terrific graphics engine and non-stop action. It was developed by the now-defunct Legend Entertainment.
You play as Dalton in first person mode through a series of missions on various planets and also back on your ship, the Atlantis. While on board, you will interface with your intelligence officer, Aida, your engineer, Isaak, and your pilot, Ne'Ban, each coming equipped with a background story. Prior to each mission, Aida briefs you on the mission details, while Isaak explains your weapon load outs. Meanwhile, Ne'Ban is there to provide a few chuckles. You have some control over how much detail you get in the briefings, weapon descriptions, and backstories by using a menu-driven dialog tree.
The settings are very futuristic, often alien, and always well-rendered and detailed. You will find yourself in large outdoor environments such as tropical jungles, icy tundra, and even a planet that is one living organism. The depth of your visibility is quite amazing in some of these locations, allowing you to seemingly see for miles. There are also caves, ships, mining facilities, and bases to explore, and none of the environments seem redundant. Other than opening doors, pulling levers, and the like, you won't be able to interact a whole lot with your environment though.
The music and sound effects are well done and set the mood for the game, while not becoming tiresome. The voice acting ranges from very good to decent. No big name actors here, but the results are better than most games.
Your enemies vary somewhat by mission, but there is some redundancy to them. Some of the baddies take cover under fire, while others blindly charge at you. They come at you often, but not in large waves ala Serious Sam. Be advised that there are quite a few "make you jump" moments as well, similar to the classic Half-Life. Some of the missions feature a tough boss battle at the end.
You will have quite an arsenal of weapons to use on your enemies, especially toward the end of the game, and some of the weapons are fairly original. The standard shotgun, machine gun, flamethrower, rocket launcher, grenade launcher, sniper rifle, and pistol are present and accounted for, but you will also accumulate new weapons for each new mission and some are quite unique. Ammo needs to be conserved in this game and picking up weapons from your vanquished foes is often critical.
The missions themselves are usually quite linear. Most of the time, there is a set way to go and only one way to get past an obstacle. Stealth can be used, but this is really a game for people who like to go in with both barrels firing away. I enjoyed the variety to the missions as they did an excellent job of keeping things fresh, especially compared to many shooters. There were no "find the key" runs thankfully and very little backtracking was needed. The biggest problem with the missions is that many of them are somewhat short and there really aren't that many of them (maybe 12 depending on how you count them). Basically, the whole game can be finished in a weekend.
Unreal II features standard FPS game controls that can be remapped to suit your taste. It has a quick tutorial mission that can be skipped if you've played enough shooters before. You are allowed to set the difficulty level to one of three degrees, which makes the game well-suited to most players' skill levels. You can also save the game anywhere and there are plenty of save game slots. One big negative was the long load times when starting missions or restoring a saved game. These could last as long as a minute or two.
Unreal II is a solo-player-only game as the multi-player aspect was dropped prior to its release. The developer was later commissioned to do a free multi-player add-on, called XMP (expanded multi-player). This was released in December 2003 and is still unofficially supported even though Atari has since shut Legend down. I have not tried XMP, although you can check my links to download it.
Overall, Unreal II was a very enjoyable FPS that was over a little too fast. The action is fast-paced, the graphics are terrific, and the story is decent for this type of game. If you get it at a bargain price, it is well worth picking up.
