Unreal
Digital Extremes / Epic Megagames

But All is not well:

Aha, the brunt of the review, the gameplay, well again it’s good, BUT.

Yes, but, well let me explain. The single player missions are good and strung together well but I have heard several friends complaining about a trivial thing, you have no clue what level you are on, although this is really a pointless complaint. Now as I mentioned earlier the levels are big and interesting but a little void of bad guys in the early levels. Now I am a bit of a Nostalgic at times and I long for the days of Doom, well actually like most people I long for the feeling you got in Doom when you went into a room full of badguys, you pulled out your favourite gun and started blasting. At the end you stand alone in a room full of bodies and almost out of ammo but it felt good, you had just beat twenty creatures all by yourself.

Now since Quake came out all this has changed due to the nature of 3d characters instead of sprites. In Quake it was one or two at a time, same with Quake 2, Jedi knight managed three or four sometimes, Unreal manages 5 to 6 (as far as I have got that is) but it’s still not the same, but one day it will be. Another problem is the levels are sometimes too 3DFX’d and it gets a little annoying at times, and again lens flares make a (rather large) appearance. Also the monsters have as Epic say "advanced A.I. Routines" and also how "they are the most advanced enemies ever" this is not quite true. Now don’t get me wrong the enemies are better than most other games but advanced they are not, and their method of avoiding can get irritating at times.

The Skarrj Warrior seems to be the one who they put the most effort into. He side-steps dives, pounces at you and sometimes even disappears over your head and attacking you from behind, he even runs away when he gets to injured. This sounds wonderful but it also causes problems, I have had a Skarrj Warrior begin to run away after taking to much damage, and where does he run, yup straight into the lava or back to where he started (which happens to be a dead end. Sometimes when trying to avoid a shot too he will leap out of the way, and end up falling off a cliff to his doom, still it’s better than most. A final option if you get board of the normal missions is Botmatch where you can face up to 15 A.I. Bots on any multiplayer map, good practice and good fun, although the A.I routines here just involve lots of side-stepping, actually it’s too much side-stepping. This is a very nice function though and a welcome edition.

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