The Stack

Sometimes Unreal II: The Awakening feels like Quake and sometimes it feels more like Half-Life, but it never really feels like Unreal.

Admittedly, that’s a pretty mild criticism. Also, to be fair, it does have some things tying it to Unreal. It’s still got Skaarj. It still has a weapon that ricochets chaotically, even if it fires energy blasts rather than discs. And, after a fairly mundane beginning setting a bad first impression, the environments may be getting weirder and more alien as it goes — the third mission takes place on a planet covered with a single organism that gives it the appearance of magnified skin, complete with hairs. We’ll see how it goes from there. There’s probably more Unrealisms to come.

But at this point, I’m thinking that I’m enjoying it the most when it’s more Half-Life-y. When there’s an emphasis on set-pieces, environmental obstacles, huge machinery, and sub-goals with more variety than just getting from point A to point B. There’s one set-piece that I thought was particularly effective, and it plays a lot like those defense sequences from Half-Life 2 (which was still in development when this was released, so maybe the influence goes the other way?): waiting for extraction for five minutes straight in the dark of night while fending off waves of baddies, with the help of three ultra-macho space marine NPCs. I’ve seen space marines in games criticized as cribbing their design heavily from the movie Aliens while entirely missing the point of them there: that all their tough-guy swagger was useless when the xenomorphs came. Nonetheless, this scene, with its sense of tension enhanced by poor visibility, was an excellent portrayal of “Aliens but the space marines win”.

The more I think about this, the more I start to wonder if Half-Life was the main design paradigm for the whole game, like if the project lead was a big Half-Life fan and thought that obviously the best way to improve on Unreal was not to build on its own strengths but to make it more like Half-Life. Such things happen in the games industry. Or, if not the whole game, then at least the second mission is really extremely Half-Life-inspired: it takes place in a weapons research facility where an experiment went wrong, you spend a certain amount of time crawling through air ducts, and the main enemies are small leaping arthropods. That’s enough similarity to elevate it from imitation to homage. If I try, I can convince myself that mission 1 is similarly based on Quake or Doom, in architectural style if nothing else. But how this pattern extends to the hair-covered hills of mission 3, I have no idea.