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Review: Unreal - Part 2

© Dan Finkelstein

As much as I've swooned over this game already, I have not yet talked about Unreal's amazing sound and music. Unreal's music makes this game. While the sound effects are very, very good (the game takes advantage of the new 3D sound cards on the market now, providing very realistic sounds, from the buzz of your laser, to the dozens of ambient sounds such as wind and crickets), the music is out of this world. Unreal's designers stated from the beginning that the game's music would be totally different, and they were correct: the score is excellent, brilliantly combing together various forms of music, from orchestral to hard techno beats. The music is dynamic as well - as you emerge from a dark cavern, the music swells as you come out onto a large open cliff area, with the setting sun shining, stars barely glistening, and a waterfall tumbling down the mountain. And, of course, I couldn't forget the times where a slow, soft tune is violently interrupted by a fast techno beat as I rounded a corner and walked straight into a huge bad guy. In Unreal, music, sound effects, and graphics are all seamlessly interwoven - truly a mark of a great game.

And to think I haven't even talked about the "game" part of Unreal. In this respect, Unreal is very good, up to par with, say, Quake and Quake 2. Of course, when you have such amazingly constructed levels, it doesn't really matter where you throw the enemies and power-ups. Most missions are standard first-person-action-game fare involving killing bad guys, exploring the levels, pushing buttons, and finding keycards. As I stated above, some of these levels are huge, and at many times I found myself running around looking for a button to push. It can be frustrating at times, but, then again, Quake suffered from the same problems.

Talking about problems, I might as well get Unreal's other problems out now. First and foremost, all this amazing graphical achievements comes at a price: It takes a very, very, very long time to load levels and saved games. I don't know what the heck it's doing, but it seems I stare at the "Loading" plaque for minutes. Fortunately, the music keeps going as the hard drive chugs away. Secondly, while Quake and Quake 2 is known for it's multiplayer Internet play, in Unreal, this mode is horribly broken, for lack of a better term. Lag makes the games totally unplayable, although Epic is reportedly hard at work on improving this aspect of the game. Also, Unreal ships with a "BotMatch" feature, where you can stage a psuedo-multiplayer game with computer-controlled intelligent bots. Finally, the only other nit-pick I could take with the game was the lack of the ability (and necessity) to go back to previously visited levels to complete missions, as you could with Quake 2, making Unreal more linear in this respect. Of course, with the amount of time it takes to switch levels, I don't think I'd have the patience. And finally, unless you have a very high-end Pentium or a Pentium II, don't even think of trying to run Unreal.

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