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With every new 3D First Person shooter engine comes new special effects such as Coronas and Fogging and Light Sourcing and other such forms of Eye Candy. In fact, with every new 3D game in general it just seems that 3D Programmers are finding new and intersting ways to make top of the line systems automatically obsolete and increasingly unusable.

Enter Unreal. Unplayble on many systems, and barely playable on a Pentium 200 with a Diamond Stealth S220 using the Rendition OpenGL patch, the game enters into it's own level of playable when feed into a Pentium II 400.

On such a high end processor, even if your software mode is running on a Rage II based ATI 3D Pro Turbo with 8 megabytes of SGram, the game looks really nice. It's even very fluid at that speed.

Having seen it in OpenGL mode on a slower system, I'd rather take the raw speed vs. the hardware featuers. The prettier lighting effects and the smoother graphics do look much better, and under ideal situations one would have both a powerful CPU and a good graphics card, but in my case the Riva TNT that I ordered just hasn't come in yet, so for now it's just a Rage II and a fast Pentium II.

But all graphics aside, what really impressed me the most was the sound. I've heard every opinion on earth from "Unreal's Music is very drab and uncharacteristic" to "Unreal's sound effects are bland and don't compare to Quake" And to that I say "Blah."

About the music, the music is excellent. The use of Amiga-Style Mods as music is a nice replacement for the annoying CD-Tracks that are used so much these days, and the sound quality is on par, if not higher, than the most advanced midi around. Not only that, but being Modular allows the music to change with the action, and believe me, there are times in the game where there is lots of action.

As for the sound effects, well, some of the sounds range from just a little weird to all out freaky, but non the less they sound really good, especially over an Ensoniq AudioPCI. And while the effects may not have been as good as Quake, Quake II's sound effects also lacked the same feel of Quake I's sounds, so comparing anything to Quake isn't really fair.

Game controls with the Sidewinder Game pad are a little unusable unless you play with the raw-key bindings so that the D-Pad no longer defaults to strafe, and even then it's still not as responsive as I would like.

The XTerminator on the other hand, with heavy modification of the Raw Keybindings gives you full control of everything from one joypad. With the use of your D-Pad, your Analog Cyclic, your 4 way HAT, 6 firebuttons, 2 Analog Flipper buttons, two Digital Flipper buttons, Mode, Start, Select, and even a Throttle, you can access EVERYTHING you could ever possibly need, and then some. The key here is spending the time figuring out what you want all of it to do, but the advanced raw-key bindings are so complete that with a little work you can customize the controls in ways I've never seen in any video game before, or from any other controller for that matter. In this case, the game and the controller simply compliment each other very well, but since this isn't an XTerminator review, I'll get back to talking about Unreal on my Pentium II 400.

As for the game it's self, it starts you off with the typical Quake-Style menu that makes the typical annoying sound when you select things. Also present is the console typical of games like this, and of course multi-player.

What was new, however, was the BotMatch aspect of the game, which I have had fun playing simply because it's like a Deathmatch without Lag, though with a large amount of Bots the game can get a little rough.

Online deathmatches were a bit bland, since I've not managed to catch a large amount of other players online. It just seems that Deathmatches with Unreal are not real popular yet, if they ever will be.

So that brings us to the highlight of Unreal. Single Player.

The game has it all. Ambience, music, and scripted events such as earth-quakes and NPC victims, and of course the Nali. Any game with a bunch of Four-armed-Bald-Hindu-Fruit-Boys is certainly worth a few giggles. There has been no shortage of surprises. The "OH SHIT, WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!" from the unseen man getting torn to shreads by a creature on the other side of a door had me giggling the first time I played the game (I imagine some players would be a bit scared, but I was a little disapointed that I wasn't able to see the mauling) and the human getting blown away by a rocket at the first encounter with a Brute had me thinking "Hey, man, I'm out gunned awefully early in the game!"

And rightly so I was to feel out-gunned. Because when I first saw that scene I was playing at 200mhz without hardware acceleration, where even the Automag wasn't an autofiring weapon, yet the rockets just kept on coming. Needless to say, at 400mhz the energy blasts from the generic phaser-look-alike come out at a more than pleasing rate and the automag gives off a satisfying barrage of shells that you can hear hitting the ground at your feet.

So we have all grounds covered. Beautiful Graphics, Good Ambient Sound, Cool Scripted Events, and Excellent Control (provided you have a powerful enough system), so what's missing? Believe it or not, originality. It's another first person shooter, after all. While I've played it, and played it quite a bit, I just find myself getting bored of first person shooters and though I've been looking forward to a few others I will probably yawn at them as well, because there just isn't that much pulling me into first person shooters anymore. Unreal is, though pretty and a bit fun for a first person shooter, still every bit as uncharacteristic as any of the others. Rather generic and unoriginal (not to mention ugly) enemies doesn't help out much, but I had the same complaint about Quake II. In fact, nothing compares to a Feind or a Zombie from Quake I anyways, so what the hell am I doing playing a next generation game when Quake I ran fine on my Rendition and 200mhz Pentium? Oh, yeah, I remember now. I'm bored with first person shooters.

End of Review.

12 out of 20

Other Opinions Voodoo 2, or not 2 Voodoo? Who cares? Hardware or Software, Fast Processor or Slow one, it's still a little dull. The Slower the Duller. -Chuck
Hey, Man, like, I like the game, don't get me wrong. Perhaps if there were more explosions, a witty voice-over, and nude chix I'd like it a little more. Dull, but not bad for a game with no sex scenes. Even though the Nali-Fruit kinda sorta pass for Tomatoes, that still isn't enough to redeem it. -Fuse!
Living up to the hype this game was getting would be difficult for any game, and as much hype as I put up with, I was bored with the game long before it ever came out. Add in the lack of 3D hardware support for my machine, and well, anyone up for a game of Quake? The games 24bit color is pretty, the sound is nice, and it is even fun, but it falls right into the "Been There, Done That" catagory. 5 points for style, 1 point for originality. -Noxious?
I've not played it a whole lot and I'm sure I probably never will. -Annex