Unreal II: The Awakening

It would be difficult to make a game as boring as Unreal II: The Awakening if you tried. And, good god, I am not putting aside the possibility that they did. Everything is so ungodly slow! There is no run and the walk is more of a trundle-- I kept one finger on the quicksave key at all times, not because the game is hard, but because walking from one side of a room to another is so arduous that it is best not repeated under any circumstance. The game is loaded with cutscenes, most of them unskippable, and they are packed with superfluous material. At the end of a level the protagonist must pilot his dropship back to the mothership. Each time this is portrayed in excruciating detail and without dynamic camerawork or musical score. Imagine a panning shot of a small spaceship slowly flying from the left side of your screen to the right side of the screen without truncation, and now consider that the game also must show the protagonist slowly docking and exiting his dropship once he's there.

Each level is preceded by a mission briefing. This involves your second in command, a female Snake Plissken wannabe named Aida, explaining the lore of the upcoming level with a holographic Powerpoint presentation. Did you know the mining colony you're going to is a mining colony? Did you know it mines fictiotanium? Did you know it's commissioned by the Korano Corporation? Did you know the Korano Corporation is headed by the Breepoids? Did you know your entrance point is at the beginning of a linear series of twisting corridors and your goal is at the end of those corridors? Don't worry if you didn't, it's all going to be explained in unskippable detail, with pauses in between each statement so Aida can silently walk from one side of her computer console to the other and click her mouse a bunch of times. As a bonus, the voice acting is delivered with the heavy-lidded, sleepy ennui of a Garfield. I'd complain about exactly how long the mission briefings last but I'm honestly not sure if they are actually as long as they feel.

Even as someone who wasn't a huge fan of the first Unreal, it's pretty incredible how that game's major strengths are ignored or subverted in its sequel. Instead of a balanced arsenal of creative weapons, you get a pretty standard array of firearms that have cris-crossing and uneven utility. Instead of a single coherent adventure that builds immersion, it's split up into discreet missions. Instead of hectic battles against a variety of crazy aliens, here you'll spend most of your time fighting humans in Halo armor that are equipped with undodgeable hitscan weapons... not that you move fast enough to be able to reliably dodge any of the few projectiles that come your way. The inability to move quickly or dodge attacks also causes friction with the classic non-regenerative health system.

The one area where Unreal 2 matches the first game, at least superficially, is in the creativity of its environments. Every planet you visit is dramatically different from the others in terms of look and themeing, with the creative apex coming with a planet that is actually a living organism. Unfortunately, the creativity ends at the conceptual level, as the game makes little use of it. In practice, the interior areas of the living organism world is not much different from a cave world, except that the walls are red and gooey instead of brown and rocky.

There are some missions that revolve entirely around first-person tower defense. The mechanics for placing turrets and laser walls are functional and easy to grasp. Some missions give you AI squadmates you can order to patrol specific zones, and ordering them around involves walking up to them and hitting the Use key to initiate a dialogue tree. It's not exactly Rainbow Six, and these AI buddies don't tend to live long unless you're in the same room as them doing 90% of the work. Even though the mechanics for these defense missions are not terribly implemented, they're still a real drag as they mostly involve sitting and waiting. When you've sat and waited through a mission briefing to get to the mission where you sit and wait, it is... not endearing. Having to 'run' back and forth between breaches in your defense is yet another area where the game twists the knife on its excruciatingly slow movement speed.

The story is barely worth getting into. You go from planet to planet collecting pieces of an ancient artifact. Spoiler Alert: Getting all of these ancient artifacts and putting them together MIGHT turn out to do something BAD. You and your crew are presented as some sort of rag-tag group of hasbeens and losers, like a Guardians of the Galaxy thing, but it never really comes up and the actors sound so bored. The characters' backstories are literally told to you rather than shown and don't really inform the characters much. Why am I even talking about this? The characters are paper thin and every time you're forced to listen to them talk it is horrible. That's all you need to know. Here's another fun thing: the game is called Unreal II: The Awakening. Nothing in the game ever Awakens. I don't know why it's called The Awakening. At the very very end the ancient artifacts turn some aliens into bigger, meaner aliens. Is that the Awakening? If so, that's sort of like giving Bioshock the subtitle Attack of the Giant Blue Man in terms of being technically true but wholly immaterial.

There are technically worse games than Unreal II. I played Daikatana and Blood 2. Those games are broken, buggy, sloppy messes and they are objectively worse. I recommend both of them over Unreal II. This game is boring. It's BORING. It is mind-numbing in its boringness. Don't play this.