This review is based on only a couple hours of gameplay. Some people will claim that you cannot accurately review a game without playing the entire thing. If you are one of those people then this review is not for you. But for those of you who know whether you like a game or not before you actually finish the entire thing, this review may contain some content of interest.
Furthermore, this review is by definition an expression of opinion. If I make a statement along the lines of "this game sucks", that this is an expression of my opinion rather than a statement of fact should be obviously implicit. Since I am aware that some people inference-impaired I have decided to include this paragrapgh which changes said implicit nature to explicit nature. Having made this point please understand that I am not necessarilly interested in your opinion. Especially if your opinion is fueled by anger over my opinion. So if my opinion starts to piss you off, instead of openning up an e-mail and proving the severe limitations of your mental accuity, kindly soak your head in the nearest toilet bowl. Continue said soaking until the undesirable condition (conciousness) goes away.
The biggest downfall to Unreal2 weapons is just how ordinary they are. Part of the reason they fall flat is because we're already used to the alt-fire concept introduced in Unreal. That's exactly the problem: Unreal set the bar on this really high, and Unreal2 not only fails to move the bar higher, it also manages to fall short of the point it's already set at.
That's not to say the weapons in Unreal2 are bad. They're decent weapons, effective, even fun. Firing what amounts to a napalm grenade can mean good times. They're just slightly disappointing, and well short of stellar. Instead of feeling like you set up an amazing shot, you end up feeling like you hit the broad side of a barn. I 've had my fill of pummelling the great big bad guy with super heavy weaponry and winning because I had copious ammo. Give me a last minute combo any day, or a flak cannon alt-shot that leads and takes down a skaarj at distance. The feeling that a great deal of skill turns an otherwise clumsy weapon into a precision instrument of instant death is what the Unreal weaponry was all about for me.
Another problem with the weapons is that the terran weapons all look pretty much the same. The basic weapons have such non-distinct profiles that it's genuinely hard to tell them apart. While this isn't an unusual problem for FPS games, it's a totally new problem in the Unreal franchise. Every other game in the franchise avoids this problem by providing very distinct looking weapons.
The enemies fit right in with the Unreal1 enemies. They hit the mark dead-on. There are a number of nods to the original here. Notably: the first live victim you come to being killed on the other side of a door (sort of), and your first fight with a skaarj being precipitated by a series of lights being shut off in sequence while you sit trapped in an enclosed area.
The skaarj fight much as they do in the original, firing an energy weapon at distance and dodging your return fire, and closing in to kill with their wolverine-style claws. They also sound like the original. Their look is very intimidating, but perhaps a little too beefy. What, were the skaarj on Na Pali malnourished? They really are better suited to a slim frame, but that's a minor point.
The other enemies fit right in as well, showing a nice range of behavioral difference. The one thing which I've found to be a real fault in the enemies in Unreal2 is how they borrow from Unreal in ways that seem illegitimate. What I mean by that is that it seems some monsters were borrowed from the original but are presented as "new". It's almost as if the people at Legend either didn't know their history or think their target market is stupid.
I'm not a big fan of having combat allies in single player games. I prefer my allies in these games to play roles like my allies in Splinter Cell: offering support information mid-mission, providing extraction, that sort of thing. But if I have to have combat allies I want them to behave the way they should. A battle hardened marine is not going to rush forward in the middle of a firefight and position himself between me and the enemy. And even if this battle hardened marine did something that stupid, he'd be the one in trouble when I shot his back and not me. That's just stupid. I found fighting side by side with these guys frustrating and not unlike playing Unreal Coop with first-day-newbies. Train your AI up if you're going to place it in roles like this. The implimentation, as is, totally ruined what would have otherwise been a really fantastic and exciting level (meeting the marines with the first artifact, accompanying them to extraction, and waiting for extraction with them).
First of all, running is slow. I've heard the argument: you're wearing gobs and gobs of armor, carrying tons of weaponry and ammunition, so of course you move slowly. While I understand such a sentiment, I just have to point out the title of the game. Unreal. This is the wrong game to introduce realism that impedes fun. That sort of realism doesn't belong here.
Second of all, dodging. Not only is this a hallmark of the Unreal franchise, it's a significant differentiator between Unreal and every other FPS game. Dodging is disabled by default, and even if you turn it on it is identical to a normal strafe jump. This is bad and irritating.
On the plus side they added "mantling", which is basically the ability to pull yourself up onto surfaces higher than you can jump. Think of it as a limited but fast climb, and you've got the idea. This adds a little something.
But back to the negative side ladders are horribly implimented, you get stuck on them, it becomes hard to figure out how to step off, and it's just plain annoying. If you can't get ladders working then don't use them. Duh.
The bottom line on movement is there isn't much movement to speak of. You can't move well, you can't jump more than a foot, and you can't dodge out of the way of enemy fire. This means the only tactic you can take in a firefight is to tank it. And the problem with that is it's a needless limitation to gameplay. The choice of how to play a shooter should be up to the player, not the game designer. By taking this choice out of the players' hands the designer has effectively limited the amount of fun available to the player.
Loading times in Unreal2 are unacceptable. What game designers need to understand is that we don't want to look at a loading screen. It doesn't matter how pretty it is, we don't want to see it. It yanks us out of our immersion in the game and reminds us we're playing a game. It makes us look at the clock and say, "shit, I should go to bed." Loading screens are bad.
That said, loading screens aren't always avoidable. A game engine has to be designed around the idea of dynamic loading, and not the other way around, so some leeway must be given if we expect expansive and detailed levels from our games. But efforts can be taken to reduce this sort of problem and eliviate the aggrivation it brings.
Progress Bars have been around a long time. They aren't new technology. Apparently no one at legend has ever seen one, that or none of them has the two brain cells it takes to figure out what a progress bar is for. Let me shed some light on this: a long wait can seem shorter if there is feedback to show how close the wait is to being over. Conversely, without this feedback the wait seems longer.
But it gets worse! Don't get up and use the bathroom or grab a soda while the next level is loading, because when that unjustifiably long wait is over the game will immediately start moving without prompting you. So if you go away to pee, you may come back and find yourself dead. You know what that means: you've got to load a saved game, and yes, yes, now you have to sit through that loading screen again. Duh.
And now for the dingleberries that are the topping on Legend's shit sundae of waiting. Excess load screens. First you sit through a loading screen that lasts twenty seconds in order to see a cut scene of your shuttle flying up and docking with your ship. Then you sit through a two minute loading screen in order to see the inside of your ship and say, "yes, start the damn mission already." Don't get your hopes up, because now it's time for another twenty second loading screen so you can watch a cut scene of your shuttle leaving your ship and flying down to the planet. Finally, just what you've been waiting for: a ten minute loading screen. Oh, and yes, that's followed by your mission. Only you don't know if it's going to be a one minute loading screen or the ten minutes it's actually going to be. So don't go for a bathroom break, because if you die your saved game is near the end of the last mission, which means you've got to go through all these loading screens again... but not until you've sat through the loading screen of the last mission in order to step through the end of that mission and start this whole process over again. Pure genius.
This is an area where Legend excells. Every title of theirs I've played, despite numerous and attrocious shortcomings, has had levels that are at least nice to look at. The architecture from location to location does a good job of looking distinct. Structures are very detailed and look like they are what they're supposed to be.
The score here would have been 10/10 but I'm deducing two points for the unacceptable bug of locations that trap a player and force a reload to continue. While user made maps can get away with this sort of flaw, a commercially produced map should never have this kind of problem. This is indicative of a project lacking a real QA cycle.
The lighting in Unreal2 is well done. It sets the mood appropriately for the given area of the map and does a good job of looking appropriate for the light sources. On the other hand it falls well short of even the mood setting flicker of lights in Doom. Yes the technology is newer and prettier, but the understanding of how shadow plays it's part in sci fi horror is missing.
Another little thing that got to me was lighting on Skaarj. Sometimes a skaarj out in the bright light would be a sillouette instead of lit up. I don't know if this is a bug in the engine, or a bug in the level, or some tweaking done to make the skaarj look more ominous. It just looked dumb. Nerrrr.
I am so very tired of linear single player maps. It's a design decision, and it's a traditional one for shooters, and even traditional for Unreal. But I feel the day of the linear level design has overstayed it's welcome. It needs to go. Our immersion in these games gets better and better as the game engines get more and more powerful, but this tired tradition of leading the player by the nose continues to test our suspension of disbelief. Why not just say the player's armor suit is a train and run tracks through every level. Then we won't need any confusing movement buttons, just the fire button.
Furthermore, I'm tired of the door that closes behind me shutting off half the level permanently. If you're going to do that, at least provide some unmistakeable visual queues so I can run back and pick up any armor/health/ammo I was saving for later. But even if that concession were made this is just a tired convention of the genre whose day has passed.
On the lighter side, the levels provide a good mix of fighting environments, z-axis opportunities (though always in favor of the enemy for some reason), and environmental hazards. This part is well done and it's a shame what is otherwise a fantastic success has to be so thoroughly ruined by adherence to stupid traditions.
Pickup placement is ok. For the most part I had the ammo I needed, but had to use it conservatively if I wanted my prefered weapons to stay available throughout. Occasionally ammo falls well short of what is needed for the prefered weapons, forcing the player to switch to a lesser prefered weapon. This is good. I'll call this approach above average but short of great. For pickup placement to be great there needs to be an observable reason why each ammo, health, and armor pack is where it is. If the enemy is aware of me and preparing to ambush me in the next room, would they really leave this cache of weapons, armor, and health sitting right there to make the coming battle easier for me?
Enemy placement is great. They usually seem to be doing something, and with the enemies themselves seeming realistic it's easy to project intelligence onto them. That wasn't an enemy spawn trap, that was an enemy ambush. You get the idea.
These are the pieces of the game that aren't quite part of the game but are foisted on the player for better of for worse. In some cases they worked out fine, in other cases they are symptomatic of profound retardation and raging homosexuality.
The cut scenes, as they are, are ok. They bring the story together, telling parts of it you wouldn't see otherwise, and do a good job of adding immersion. On the other hand they often introduce extra loading screens. No thanks.
Well, if it weren't for one instance in particular, I'd give this a pretty good score. But one thing ruined it for me for the rest of the time I played the game.
If, at the beginning of the game, you opt to go down and go through the training exersize, part of that course will include a HUD tutorial. And that's when they really fuck this whole bit up. The guy explains that the interaction options (the things you choose to say) are provided to you by your suit.
Um, what?
Now lets pretend, just for a moment, that the multiple choice rpg interaction convention were a difficult one that people don't understand the very first time they see it. If we pretend this is the case, then these new players probably have less than a 50% chance of even getting to the tutorial since running the tutorial requires the player to pass through one of these interaction scenes in order to get to the tutorial. And if we stop pretending then we have to accept that this convention is completely transparent to every literate computer user on the planet. In short, the people who need to have this convention explained to them also need help putting on their pants, need to be taught to read, and probably don't have an attention span long enough make it through the installation of the game, let alone the first two loading screens.
There's no reason to include this explaination because those who need it aren't going to be helped at all by the tutorial. And there's every reason not to include this explaination, the most siginificant of which is that it breaks the third wall and paints the player as a brain dead idiot.
Legend, you fail.
The voice acting is average. At the very worst it fails to be irritating. At the very best they almost pronounce "Skaarj" correctly (according to the pronounciation key that used to appear on the front page of unreal.com): they at least know the "j" is silent.
Legend owes me money. I've bought two games by Legend, one of which was Return to Na Pali. These titles have been bug ridden and poorly supported. So this is the section where Legend's horrible treatment of their customers in the past affects the score of their new title. By including this subsection in the lightest-weighted section of the review I'm better able to let go of this issue and not have it directly impact the scores in the other subsections of the review.
This is pretty simple, Gameplay is far and above the most important aspect of any game. If it's not fun or it's irritating, then any other success falls short. So Gameplay carries a 3x weight, or 50% of the score. Level design comes next in the scheme of things. A player can get past poor level design and still enjoy the game if gameplay is there, but level design is not able in return to overcome abysmal gameplay. Level design is still important. Level Design carries a 2x weight, or ~33% of the score. Finally, baggage is just that. It's little nagging things that can drag a title just little further down, or be the icing on the cake of a perfect game. Therefore Status Quo Baggage carries a 1x weight, or ~17% of the score.
| Gameplay | 3.6 |
| Level Design | 7.2 |
| Status Quo Baggage | 2.75 |
| Total | 4.7 out of 10 |
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