The Stack

I’ve been toying with Unreal Engine lately — I figure that even if I never make a game with it, it’s good to understand what it does and how it does it. And after poking at it for a while, my thoughts drifted to the FPS it was initially made for. The original Unreal is not on the Stack — I played it to completion many years ago. But I have its little-regarded immediate sequel on disc.

(If I didn’t have it on disc? Oddly enough, both Unreal and Unreal II: The Awakening are available on GOG and Steam, but not on the Epic Store, even though Epic is responsible for their existence. As far as the Epic Store is concerned, the series starts with Unreal Tournament. I wonder why? My guess is some kind of contractual thing.)

Before I get into Unreal II, for comparison purposes, here’s what I remember about the original Unreal:

• It was more about environment than story. Your initial situation, escaping from a prison ship after it crashes, is just kind of forgotten about once the ship is out of sight.
• For all the coarseness of the meshes, the visuals were lovely and weird. All alien environments with with highly effective use of colored light sources and well-integrated particle effects.
• It basically alternated between exterior and interior scenes. You’d get a sequence where you cross a ravine or climb a mountain or whatever, then go into a large building or tunnel to reach the next biome. I liked that; it gave a nice sense of progression.
• The main enemy was aliens called the Skaarj, which look a bit like the Predator. Their main novelty was that they could dodge-roll like a Dark Souls player, and tended to do so whenever you pointed a gun at them, forcing you to aim twice in rapid succession.
• There was a weapon that shot razor discs that ricocheted off walls and made a huge chaotic mess. It was pretty obviously inspired by the disc guns that were a popular toy at the time.
• There was another weapon where the primary fire was a beam and the secondary fire was an exploding projectile, and the most effective way to use it was to shoot the projectile with the beam, creating a far more powerful explosion. This, more than anything else, characterizes the Unreal experience for me.
• There was a sort of overcharge device that turned the basic zap gun into the most powerful weapon in the game for a limited time. It was clearly intended to be used, and used up, near where you found it, but it was possible to hoard it, and use it to make the final boss fight downright trivial.

Now, my first pass at Unreal II, nearly two decades ago, was short. I didn’t even really get into the game proper, because it was failing to meet my expectations in the intro and mission briefing sections simply by having intro and mission briefing sections. Before you get into the action, you have to engage NPCs in choice-based dialogue, which struck me as sullying the purity of the thing. Perhaps we can blame the involvement of Legend Entertainment, a company founded to make adventure games.

The visuals are definitely more technically advanced, with lots of smooth curves where the first game would have sharp angles, but at the same time less inspiring, more typical of the FPS genre, more beige. This extends to the characters: where Unreal made you an escaped prisoner (and never stated what it was you were imprisoned for), Unreal II takes the default route and makes you a space marine. Or technically a former space marine, now working for something called the “Colonial Authority”, which to my mind puts you on the wrong side of history. But accepting it on its own terms, this is a story where the good guys are humans and the bad guys are aliens, unlike the first game, which took place in a totally alien environment where both the good guys and the bad guys were aliens, and anything smacking of human authority is best avoided lest they put you back in space prison.

In short, my basic impression of Unreal II so far, after playing through the first sequence of levels to a major cutscene break, is just that it’s disappointingly typical. The first game was something special and strange and this one isn’t. But I’ll keep playing it.