The Stack

The anticipated fourth defense mission was exactly as expected: a combination of all the defense missions seen previously. You command marines and place turrets and force fields to repel attackers on a rooftop before they reach and murder Dr. Meyer, a scientist doing important stuff in the radio room so you can escape. This is preceded by getting Meyer to the radio room from the lab where he was held captive, and that involves crawling around on some perilous ledges to reach the rooftop where the defense sequence takes place. This part is basically an escort mission, except I’m not sure Meyer is ever in any real danger. Mostly he hangs back until you’ve cleared an area of enemies.

The main thing that’s striking about this whole sequence, both the escort part and the defense part, is how abrasive Meyer is. That’s definitely deliberate. He’s arrogant, impatient, and above all ungrateful that you’ve showed up to rescue him, and his periodic interjections become more and more outright insulting as the story goes on. (To be charitable, he’s under a lot of stress.) The player character, Dalton, expresses a desire to kill him, but of course can’t do so without losing the mission. The punch line comes at the conclusion of the mission when, in another reminiscent-of-Half Life moment, a remote commander actually orders Dalton to kill all surviving scientists at the site to keep their knowledge out of enemy hands, and Dalton refuses to do it, proving himself the better man.

Which, of course. He has to be a better man than Meyer in this sort of story. Meyer is a civilian.

That’s really the core of the ethos here, the glorification of — not really even the military, exactly, because commanders can be unethical and insubordination is shown as sympathetic, but of the soldier, the people making unappreciated personal sacrifices, forming a found family with their brothers-in-arms, and shouldering the moral burdens of warfare together. The only reward Dalton ever wanted was to be reinstated in the marines. And while this attitude is hardly uncommon in FPS games, it is (once again) a far cry from the first Unreal‘s air of alien mysticism.