First post, by F2bnp
- Rank
- l33t
Any Unreal series fans out there? How were you introduced to the series? What are your thoughts on it?
I started out with Unreal Tournament which was included as free game in PC magazine here in Greece back in 2002. Man, was that game fun. I was only 8 or so at the time so I only played Single Player 😁 . The final battle with Xan was very memorable, I remember playing in turns with my brother until we beat it. Good times 😀.
I got to play Unreal 1 a few months later, when the same magazine offered it to tag with the Unreal 2 review. I didn't play it much back then, in fact I only REALLY played Unreal 1 about a month or two ago. Each time I tried to play it I would only get as far as the sixth or seventh map and get bored afterwards.
I then got Unreal 2 which wouldn't run on my then crappy PC (I think it was a Celeron 900 with some SiS integrated GPU 😜). I finally ran it a year later I think, when I got a better PC (still quite crappy though, early 2004, Celeron 2.4 and GeForce FX 5600 XT, yuck, but hey I was 10!)and gave up on it, because it didn't really seem that good and because it scared the living crap out of me (dismembered bodies and Skarrj 🙄 ) xD.
I skipped on UT 2003 and moved onto UT 2004 which was amazing back then. It looked amazing, it had a relatively light footprint, had a TON of game modes and was just so much fun to play. I think it probably is the best game in the series, although I prefer UT 99 for sentimental reasons.
I waited for Unreal Tournament 3 (or 2007 as it was known back then) for what seemed like ages and when it was released it left me with a bitterwarm taste. It had some fun additions like the skateboard, but overall it wasn't different enough on the gameplay and it looked so bland (typical 2007-2010 look with a lot of brown and bloom effects). It also seemed like I was playing a spin off of Gears of War 🙄 .
A couple of months ago I felt like playing the singleplayer games and beating them, because I always felt I shouldn't have ignored them. So I sat down and played Unreal. While it had its moments, I certainly was expecting something much better. This was a transitional period for FPS games and it really shows on this game. It tried to add some story elements (the whole datapad thing) and it created a powerful atmosphere for the player, but it leaned on the graphics and sound design to achieve this. The graphics haven't aged terribly well, but obviously they're don't at all create the gripping atmosphere they did in 1998, while sound design is still is pretty good (some awesome music by the king - Alexander Brandon *worships - plus fantastic sound effects). What I think really destroys this game is the level design itself. Unreal has some really open levels that are not that enjoyable for me because you often have to find a switch of some sort to proceed and most of the time you're running around doing nothing. The more "linear" levels work much better in my opinion. Other than that, fun game, certainly had its moments, but I'd never play it again!!!
Finally, I moved on to Unreal II. I expected a bad game and in some points I was right. The game has a handful of problems ranging from TERRIBLE A.I. and some nasty collision detection (keep in mind this game was developed by Legend, creators of Return to Na Pali, not Epic themselves) and pretty generic gameplay. Despite that, I found it a guilty pleasure, you know it's not really a good game, but you're still having fun with it. It's much more story based than the first one, which is a good thing, although the story doesn't really make a ton of sense in the end. What is interesting about the game, is that the game designers create a bond between you and your crew. It's not really deep but I appreciated it in the end. I thought the ending was really powerful by the way, although I'm not going to spoil it (besides, you can watch in on youtube if you feel like it 😜).
So that's pretty much my story on the series, hope it wasn't too long to read 🤣 . What's yours then? 😀
EDIT: Damn, I really don't know how to make this huge wall of text better looking than it is 🙁
