Unreal

THE BAD:
Graphics weren’t great
Main story took a while to complete

SUMMARY:
Besides Doom, this was the first FPS game I played. I played through the main story mode and didn’t really find it that interesting. Then I noticed an option to fight against bots in a death-match style game. It was at this point I became hooked on the game and played it for ages until Unreal Tournament came out.

The main storyline in the single player game is that you are a prisoner on board a ship that has crashed on an alien planet and you are the only survivor. You then have to battle your way off the ship and kill these aliens before they kill you. There are many levels and eventually you get to the Queen who is a massive creature with powerful weapons. But the real fun of this game (and Epic Games obviously realised this because they would release Unreal Tournament next) came from fighting computer controlled bots to try and get the highest number of kills.

There were many levels you could choose from, including one completely in the dark where you had to use a searchlight at all times to see. This was my favourite level and was disappointed there weren’t more dark levels in. A couple of the levels you will see in the later games, like Curse and Deck 16 if I remember correctly. Most of the weapons you use are in later games as well. There’s the basic pistol, but then others like Enforcer (which becomes your first weapon in later games), Minigun, Rocket Launcher, Sniper Rifle, ASMD Shock Rifle and GesBio Rifle. All of these weapons have primary and secondary modes of fire. For example, the primary fire of the Shock rifle is a beam of energy that impacts instantly but the secondary fire is a slower moving ball of energy. For this weapon only, if you hit that ball of energy with the primary fire then there will be a larger, more powerful explosion. This is true of this weapon only, and in all the subsequent games with this weapon in. You could change the difficulty of the enemy bots, allowing people of many skill levels to play this game.

Various items are around to pick up to help you survive in a death-match. There are types of armour available as well as a Shield Belt and health power ups. The armour takes some damage when you’re hit, but so does your health. The shield belt takes all the damage when you are hit though. The health boosts your health but only up to 100. Health viles and Big Keg o’ Health take that total up to 199. Keep an eye out for these things. There is one level where there’s a secret compartment with a super shield belt which gives you way more armour, but that’s only on one level.

The graphics in this game weren’t the best in the world to be honest. Having top of the range graphics isn’t the most important thing so long as you can easily tell what is what. The animation for the rockets and other weapons was pretty basic, although keep in mind this game is a few years old now and things have advanced a lot since then.

If you played this now you’d notice a lot of things lacking compared to other games, but when you consider that this was probably secondary to the single player story mode then I think they did a great job of the death-match mode and the bots. Epic games certainly learned from this game and made the next tournament-based games much better than this one. I found myself fighting against bots for ages and got probably hundreds of hour’s worth of fun from that alone. While Doom had been the game to launch this genre and had an amazing story mode, this game got me into the multiplayer aspect of FPS games, and I’ve since went on to play online in Unreal Tournament and UT 2003, mainly thanks to this game.

THE BAD:
The lighting.

SUMMARY:
Ah, yes...Unreal. Truly is a fun FPS, it's got loads of enemies, plenty of weapons to take them out with. And it can be difficult at times.

Well the story is as simple as any other alien FPS...you have to get through a whole bunch of levels and get to the big boss of the aliens and kill it. Not to complex.

The lastability is one of the great aspects of this game. So many levels makes this one a long game! Some levels you'll breeze right through...but they get increasingly harder, and take longer to beat. But that's a good thing IMO!

The graphics are pretty good for it's time. Nothing like PS2, Gamecube, or X Box...but still good.

Music...at the beginning the music really sucks. But by the end it gets to a Techno/New Age beat! It's really fun to kick some Skaarj Warrior @rse with techno in the background!

The enemies are very cool. They're not crappily made or incredibly stupid looking. They're cool for once! And the names...those are just weird. (Where the hell does "Skaarj" come from?)

Well, let's get down to the bad part of this game. It's too damn dark! The only way to get through this game is to have like, 50 flares on you so you can see where you're going. But it's not too much of a problem....if you don't play for a straight hour of levels.

The conclusion, very fun game. Not a GREAT game...but a fun one.

THE BAD:
Graphics are very dated.

SUMMARY:
This game may be old, but there is some fun to be had with this game. If you are someone who wants good graphics in a game, then you should avoid this one. When it came out, it had some of the best graphics, but now they are very dated. If you like one of the levels in the game, you can copy it over to Unreal Tournament and you will have the level with some improved graphics.

Now back to the game. I won't tell much about the story line since it is all in the instruction booklet, but I will talk about the gameplay. If you've played UT, then you will adjust to this game really quick. You will have most of the same weapons. The only difference is that you can't get the good weapons from the get go. You will eventually get them all though.

Bottom Line:
Get this game to go back to UT's roots or if you just want a classic FPS.

SUMMARY:
Absolutly great!
buy it if u r thinking of it!

THE BAD:
Bad? That word is not in Unreal Gold's vocabulary unless you run this on a PC with less than 300 mhz and a OpenGL video card.

SUMMARY:
Basically Unreal Gold is Unreal, with the Mission Pack. For ummm... Five bucks! Epic installed the Unreal Tournament user interface at startup, and that simplifies almost everything; letting you customize like mad.

If you wanna know something, you should pick this game up for it's gameplay in single player. The story to my opinion is okay, and sort of cliche-ish. But for five bucks... you'll at least play this a good 5 hours, if you like First Person Shooters. Multiplayer is improved, so that's good.

Now go buy this if you don't own it yet! But don't pay more than five bucks!