Unreal

Review

by Michael L. House

Let's face it: Unreal is an amazing game; it's gorgeous and has a killer 3D engine. After all, it did take Epic Megagames almost four years to create. After all the hype surrounding this game, does it live up to the expectations and is it the Quake II killer? The answer, for the most part, is yes.

Let's look at the good things first. Unreal itself has a much better single-player game than does Quake II. In fact, the latter doesn't hold a candle. Unreal has some of the best-looking graphics I've ever seen in a PC game (next to Forsaken). The textures are simply beautiful and realistic, especially with 3Dfx. Unlike other games, the textures don't blur when players get close; they retain their look. Some of the lighting effects are painfully realistic and are just out of this world.

The level designs are brilliant as well. There are tons of levels to play through and they're all different (even though some remind me of Turok 2: Seeds of Evil for the Nintendo 64). The levels are big with lots of monsters to blast and items to collect. Thankfully, Unreal takes place in many outdoor locations with waterfalls, houses and huts, castles and caves, very much unlike Quake II, which used big, boring (and uninspired) military base levels. Variety is a definite plus. The Unreal engine is also quite stunning, probably being the best 3D engine as of its release -- which, at the same time, contributes somewhat to the game's problem.

The engine is way too advanced for its own good. Unreal is quite simply a beast when it comes to running requirements. The game only requires a Pentium 166 but, in order to get the most out of it, players will want to have nothing less than a Pentium II 200, a Voodoo2 3dfx chipset (the 12MB version), at least 64MB of RAM and 400MB hard-drive space. Anything less than this will result in choppy and slow gameplay, especially when fighting the uninspired monsters or walking through large areas. Many PC gamers have "low-end" machines and will probably experience degraded results. Fortunately, you can go into an advanced options mode and turn "high powered" things off to get better performance.

As I stated earlier, the monsters are a bit uninspired in their looks but the good thing is, they're incredibly smart and react differently depending on how you attack. The ambient sound effects are superb but the music is fairly lame (standard new age/techno soundtrack). The arsenal of weapons you are supplied with is adequate and feature primary and secondary firing methods for each weapon. There's a two-in-one grenade/rocket launcher, a bio-rifle and a razor jack that shoots blades, to name a few.

Unreal is an extraordinary game. It's unfortunate that it takes so much to run because it is the "Quake II killer" (for single-player gaming -- Quake II has it beat when it comes to the multi-player mode). This game is definitely Unreal and was certainly worth the wait.