Unreal

I played this for the first time about 10 years ago and absolutely hated it. Recently I decided to give it another shot. It's not as bad as I remembered it being, but considering I remembered it being worse than gout that's not saying much. Back then I mostly suffered because I refused to read the notes on the universal translator, which give hints on how to solve the "puzzles" roughly 3% of the time. The other 97% of the time they just say, "I saw a monster, it was really tough so I hid. I hope they don't find me! Wait, I hear a noi- argh!!" They're audio logs without audio. They never say anything interesting or give much insight into the world and they rarely lead you to secrets or solutions. For the most part they are constant, useless reminders that the monsters are monsters. This time I read every single one I found, and as a result I got stuck less. I put quotes around "puzzles" because the "puzzles" are things like a door that will only unlock if you jump into an otherwise unremarkable pool of water. The way you know about this is you read a text log that says something to the effect of, "the Chosen One will illuminate the path by jumping into that fountain over there because its a god fountain or something," which isn't so much a puzzle as it is completely inscrutable until the game tells you exactly what to do to progress.

Even though I got stuck less due to my text-reading, I did find myself wandering around aimlessly a few times because of poor signposting. Another gripe I have with the level design is that often the game will throw endless waves of monsters at you until you hit a button, interspersed with sections where the game throws waves of monsters at you but the solution is to defeat them. It's really a crapshoot between being overwhelmed while wandering around searching for which bit of rock is slightly raised from the wall, or wasting all your ammo on an infinite amount of monsters.

Exploration isn't helped by the fact that, while the game has a pretty diverse set of environments, the rooms inside each of them are practically identical. It's also not always clear what the switches you're pressing are actually doing. It's sort of like a mix of Deus-Ex-without-Systems and Half-Life-without-Playtesting. If you're thorough and know the language the level designer is speaking ('always check behind the waterfall' type stuff) it's not too bad. I mean, I wouldn't call it fun or engaging but it's not bad. It may have been better in 1998 when the graphics were top of the line, but it's not 1998 anymore so the graphics aren't much of a saving grace.

The biggest problems I have with Unreal are the enemies and the weapons. Enemies first: A lot of praise is still being given to Unreal because its AI acts almost like multiplayer bots in a single player campaign setting. This is impressive on paper. In practice, however, I find it obnoxious and exhausting to deal with their constant juking and sliding around. In a non-botmatch-arena setting I don't want to deal with that shit. I want to find and exploit patterns in enemy AI, not deal with chaos. This also means there's less variety in enemy behaviors-- most major types act like a bot with some other accessory ("shield" or "armor") bolted on. There are also minor enemy types, such as eels that hang from the ceiling and shoot thorns, evil fish, and tiny but surprisingly powerful spiders that jump around erratically with terrible hitboxes and more HP than you'd expect.

Unreal also gets a lot of praise for its 'eclectic' and interesting weapons, but they're largely creative reskins of common tropes and are profoundly weak and unsatisfying. It's weird, I remember a lot of these being fun in UT99 but here they're just... not.

Dispersion Pistol: Like the blaster from Quake 2 except you can charge it and upgrade it to make it more powerful. Problem is, the projectile is so slow you'll only use it on stuff like the stationary hanging eels or fish that swim straight at you. The projectile also has pretty poor collision detection on top of being slow. Mostly used for breaking crates.

Stinger: A chaingun that shoots projectiles instead of hitscan, which is profoundly dumb even in concept. This is especially true in a game where the enemies quickly glide around and dodge your shots. You get a hitscan chaingun later making the stinger completely useless.

ASMR Rifle: A railgun that is incredibly weak and takes eight shots to kill anything while retaining the traditional slow rate of fire. The alt fire and combo shoots out a blue exploding orb which is useful if you want to look at a blue orb while the enemies move to the opposite side of the room. You get a hitscan sniper rifle later making the ASMR completely useless.

Rocket Launcher:: About as powerful as the Quake 2 rocket launcher, meaning it's weak as piss. Rockets move slow, so enemies will just dodge it. Alt fire is a grenade launcher which is for when you want a rocket that misses more often. You can charge up both, except instead of a more powerful shot it sends out multiple rockets in a horizontal spread guaranteeing most of it is a waste. Has a lock-on function that doesn't work particularly well. Alongside the bot AI it simulates perfectly the multiplayer FPS art of spraying rockets everywhere and hoping you do enough splash damage to slowly wear your opponent down.

Flak Cannon: People love this weapon, but it's just a shotgun that's slower and makes an unsatisfying ploop noise when you shoot it. If any part of of your spread hits a wall it will riccochet back and hit you in the face.

Razorjack: Shoots slow razorblade projectiles that your enemies dodge, but unlike the Stinger its rate of fire sucks too. The blades riccochet off of walls and hit you in the face. It can behead enemies for an instant kill, but the odds are very sporadic, I think it's either a die roll or just an alternate death animation. The Rate of Fire is too slow to be useful at close range and the projectile is too slow to be useful at long range. It's okay at medium range as long as you're willing to stand still and soak up damage while you line up your shots.

Chaingun: It's hitscan but it's weak as hell and it sucks and takes like 30 seconds of continual fire to take down one enemy.

Sniper Rifle: It's hitscan but it's weak as hell and takes like 4 zoomed in headshots to take down one enemy.

The only weapons I thought were good without an asterisk were the pistol and the biorifle.

I don't like this game, but not as much as I didn't like it before. I had some amount of fun, generally early on in the campaign, but as it goes (and goes, and goes) it slowly transforms into a slog.