Epic Games showed off its prowess at generating great graphics (at the time) with the first ever Unreal game, and later at crafting great gameplay with Unreal Tournament. However, story-writing was not exactly Epic Games' strong suite.
Recognizing its shortfalls, Epic Games had outsourced the design of the non-technical elements of their games over to other game developers. The results can be best described as mixed: the first Unreal's story was just decent, and the stories for entries in the Unreal Tournament franchise are little more than excuses for their premise.
Legend Entertainment, who worked on the story of the first Unreal game, has been tapped again to work on the sequel to the second Unreal game almost as a whole - and the result is again a spotty one.
Epic Game's involvement in this game was merely for technical support. Responsibility for post-product and infrastructural support was left to now-defunct Legend Entertainment, which in hindsight was not a good decision on the part of Epic Games.
Despite its numerical designation, Unreal II: Awakening is not a narrative sequel to the first game. The protagonist and the overarching plot are entirely different and, as a shooter game, the weapons are different too.
The protagonist is no longer an anonymous person with little voice-over and next-to-no history. The player character is now a Terran Colonial Authority (TCA) Marshal by the name of John Dalton, who also happens to be a former Marine. He has a backstory regarding his discharge from the Marine Corps and subsequent employment as a Marshal, which can be quite interesting to explore (and the game will offer many opportunities to do so).
His line of work has him being accompanied by initially two other support characters: Aida, who is the intelligence/tactical officer, and Isaac, who is his engineer and the person to go to when Dalton has some technological needs. A later supporting character will enter the scene as the pilot of his TCA vessel.
All three of these secondary characters also have their own backstories, which can be quite entertaining to unearth, if only to listen to their voice-acting and lines.
However, all of their backstories have little to do with each other, and even less to do with the story. They are meant to encourage the player to have some emotional connection with these characters, but these efforts somewhat falter because they have little to do with the actual shooter action. They will be featured in some in-game cutscenes and Isaac will present changes and upgrades to the weaponry available to the player character once in a while, but these are all story-oriented content that occurs on the ship and contribute nothing substantial to gameplay.
A player who is only interested in the shooter action of Unreal II will find, to their dismay, that they cannot skip the story-oriented segments of the game. Between missions, the player character will return to his TCA vessel and in staying true to his personality as a somewhat caring person, has to chat up every sentient person in his crew before the player can trigger the scripts to execute and launch the next mission.
A player looking for story-oriented entertainment during the segments on the ship would also find that other than the lines and voice-overs, there is little else entertaining. The bodily and facial (if any) animations of all the characters, including those of Dalton himself, are very stiff and minimal. There are some changes to the appearance of the ship's insides, such as the infiltration of a certain stow-away animal, and some Easter Eggs to be found, but these are just as minimal and more importantly, contribute nothing to the gameplay.
Unreal II is a shooter, so the player character will have a variety of weapons to defeat enemies with. To the credit of Legend Entertainment, many of these are surprisingly entertaining to use and do not remain stagnant in function throughout the game.
Their respective presences in the game are explained away using story-based reasons, such as privileges that Dalton has as a TCA Marshal, pilfering of armories, weapon stores or corpses that Dalton will come across, or gifts from friends that he makes along the way. This is perhaps the only meaningful contribution that the story has towards the gameplay.
Dalton is a player character designed to be a walking armory, so there will be plenty of options that the players have in surviving encounters with various sorts of enemies with different tactics and methods of attack, assuming that Dalton still has enough ammunition in his reserves.
Much like many other sci-fi shooters at the time, the game gives the player character a default weapon that can never out of ammo in the form of the Dispersion Pistol. Its backstory was that it is a riot weapon, though it is odd indeed that a riot weapon would have technology as sensitive as a self-recharging, everlasting battery.
Its default fire mode is best described as a pea-shooter, albeit a very accurate one. Yet, unlike the pea-shooters in other sci-fi shooters, the gun can be charged to deliver a more powerful shot with splash damage, thus making it somewhat competitive if there is one or two tough enemies around the corner that can be weakened with it. This firing mode, which is available early on, makes the Pistol a lot handier in design than other sci-fi pea-shooters.
Eventually, the player will come across the mainstays of shooters, such as a shotgun, an assault rifle, a sniper rifle, a high-caliber revolver and a rocket launcher. Their default firing modes are unremarkable, standard fares, but they do have secondary firing options that will be elaborated on later.
Some other weapons are guns that are typically found in sci-fi shooters, though they do arguably have less mundane default firing modes.
One of these is the Flamethrower. While there has been fire-spewing weapons in other shooters before, its inclusion in a game powered with Unreal Engine 2 makes for impressive aesthetics. Moreover, it has been designed with reliable programming for after-burn damage, i.e. damage that is inflicted from merely setting enemies on fire. Another is the Laser Cannon, whose default firing mode is similar to the "Railgun" archetypes seen in many sci-fi shooters since Quake II.
Just these weapons and their default firing modes would have made the game rather dull, so it would be a joy to most players that there are a sizable number of other weapons with peculiar and very interesting firing modes.
An early-game example is the Izarian Shock Lance, which can be best described as an energy-based submachine-gun, at least until the player realizes that its energy bolts can be bounced off walls. While the ricocheting of the bolts is difficult to predict, it can fill corridors with lethal bolts, making it a valuable (if a bit risky) weapon for close quarters combat, as the player would soon realize through encounters with a certain kind of enemy that prefers fighting uncomfortably up-close.
The Spidergun does not damage targets directly, but damages the targets' behavior scripts instead. Its primary fire mode covers targets in tenacious alien arachnids, causing them to panic and thus become unable to retaliate as the player switches over to other weapons to get rid of them, or at least perform some crowd management if area-effect weapons are not suitable at the time. The Takkra Drone is a weapon with a similar function, as it can be sent after individual enemies to harry them.
The most amazing of these is the Hydra Grenade Launcher. Granted, there had been other shooters with grenade launchers, but Awakening's distinguishes itself by having up to six different types of ammunition, which is an astonishing number for a sci-fi shooter at the time.
Each of these grenades serves well for a specific combat situation or purpose, and with enough rounds for most of them, the Hydra can be made the mainstay of the player's arsenal. There are the typical frag rounds for explosive solutions, incendiary and chemical rounds for disrupting the enemy and killing them at the same time, concussion rounds for stunning enemies with to set them up for other grenades and EMP grenades as hard-counters for robotic enemies.
Unfortunately, the smoke grenades are useless, due to lack of programming to apply the disorienting effects of smoke on affected CPU-controlled enemies. Most of them caught in the palls of smoke will still be able to see Dalton anyway and fire at him with next-to-no loss in accuracy, if they don't just run out of the smoke anyway. Considering that the player won't be able to see through the smoke anyway, smoke grenades are self-defeating, which is a major oversight on the part of Legend Entertainment.
While the above suggested it is a bit sloppy, Legend Entertainment was at least wise enough to have noticed one of the most appealing game designs of Unreal Tournament, which is its many weapons and secondary firing modes, and implemented this in Awakening.
Throughout the story, usually a short while after obtaining new weapons, the player will receive upgrades to weapons that unlock their secondary or even tertiary fire functions. These open up new tactical possibilities for the use of these weapons.
The mundane firearm archetypes especially benefit from these weapon designs. The shotgun's secondary fire applies incendiary properties to its shells with minor splash damage, while the assault rifle collects 5 rounds together to be launched as a make-shift fragmentation grenade that can also bounce around a bit. The revolver gains a triple-round burst that can quickly get rid of very tough enemies.
The Rocket Launcher benefits from upgrades the most, gaining not only homing capabilities but also the ability to split its firepower against four targets, if using entire rockets against them is overkill.
The more exotic weapons gain secondary firing modes that make them even more interesting to use.
The Flamethrower gains the ability to coat surfaces with sticky napalm, which can be remotely ignited (through whatever plausible reason) or ignited through other weapons, making it highly useful for booby-trapping corners with. Furthermore, enemies are unable to perceive the napalm anyway, making this a rather effective if a bit cheap gun to use.
The Laser Cannon gains a continuous beam attack, making it a handy weapon in both long and short ranges.
Shock Lance gains the ability to launch EMP bombs, which are devastating against robotic enemies, as well as handy at removing the shields of enemies so that other ammunition need not be wasted against them.
The Spidergun gains the ability to create larger arachnids, which can be used as a meatshield to direct fire away from the player character.
The Takkra Drone perhaps gain the most useful secondary fire mode. Using it, the player can send the drone out to revolve around the player character, shooting down incoming projectiles.
There is a final weapon in this game, but its design will not be elaborated in this review as it is actually the story's last and most impressive contribution to the gameplay.
It has to be noted here, again, that the story provides the rationale for the inclusion of not only the weapons in the game, but also their ammunition as well. The ammunition for certain weapons, especially the more exotic ones, can be very rare in levels other than the one where many of them can be canonically found in plentiful quantities.
Therefore, the player has to be careful about the expenditure of ammo. If there is a gripe to be had here, it is that there is no in-game warning given about the rarity of such types of ammunition, especially considering that the game designers went out of their way to make sure that the distribution of ammunition follows the canon of the story.
In addition to Dalton having a walking armory design, he has a health and armor mechanic that would be familiar to veterans of sci-fi shooters. (The armor statistic is called "shields" in this game, though it should not be confused with the shields in Halo: Combat Evolved.)
He has to replenish his health with health pick-ups and recharge his shields with batteries, while nobody else in the game, including human soldiers, seem to perform the same. This game design would seem rather familiar to veterans of sci-fi shooters, though the game does give a canonical reason for this if other players are wondering.
Outside of the relatively dull segments of the game that take place inside Dalton's ship, he engages in missions that take him to many planets; these can range from worlds owned by the very powerful mega-corporations in the Unreal universe to utterly alien planets, such as a world that has been overrun by an unbelievably massive macro-organism.
The early part of the game has the most rudimentary of prologue segments for the stories of sci-fi shooters: a recon mission that seemed like just any other would eventually turn out to be the start of a greater, overarching plot. After the prologues, the player will engage in missions that range from escort and/or rescue missions to sabotage of enemy assets and retrieval of technological items or alien artifacts.
The objectives may be varied, but to veterans of sci-fi shooters, they would seem to be nothing more than the ending points of the levels, which are typically linear corridors of varying width and filled with enemies and enemy spawning points to be shot to bits. There are some set-piece sequences in between stretches of corridors, such as turret sequences and some others where the player can do nothing but watch events unfold.
Fortunately, not all of these scripted events would seem bland to an experienced game consumer. Some of these can be awesome, such as a segment where a certain vicious alien enemy attempts to break open an elevator that the player character is riding down helplessly in, which is in itself a pop-culture reference to a certain popular sci-fi movie franchise also involving a certain vicious alien.
There are also some levels that are a lot more interesting than just the usual corridor crawl, such as the romp through the aforementioned planet that has been overrun by a macro-organism; this one has the player character treading through it relatively uneventfully, at least until an event trigger causes the return trip to be more excitingly different.
Another exciting mission has the player being part of a squad of TCA marines and has to run through a forest filled with angry aliens who scuttle across the tree-tops and drop down from them. Another one has the player setting up static defenses to help defend against an onslaught of determined mercenaries.
The best of these missions are a couple where the player has to plan out the defense of mission-critical facilities together with actual allies, though these will have to be elaborated later as it is one of very few examples of good enemy-spawn programming on the part of Legend Entertainment.
The player fights a variety of enemies in this game, some of which may be familiar to players who had played the first game. The Skaarj return from the first game, threatening the player character with their natural speed, toughness and strength, augmented by their claw attachments.
The Izarians are a relatively new addition to the franchise, and where Skaarj are to be found, they will serve as the unhealthily eager meatshields for their masters.
Both of these races are vicious and aggressive, though their attack methods are rather predictable: they will often go after the player character in various approach patterns that can be exploited, such as the zig-zagging pattern used by the Skaarj.
Soon enough, the player will be fighting more human enemies, such as the mercenaries employed by the aforementioned mega-corporations. These are smarter and often more well-armed, but usually they will do little more than pop in and out of cover to shoot with whatever gun that they have in hand. There is very little in the way of squad tactics in their behavior programming, which can be a bit disappointing as they are canonically meant to be professionally-trained soldiers.
There are some variety in the designs of human soldiers, such as soldiers in light, regular and heavy variants of powered armor, which present different challenges such as the light ones being a lot more sprightly and the heavy ones being slower but tougher, but these are pretty much it.
Later, the player will be fighting more exotic enemies, such as robotic drones that fire energy beams all over the place, as well as a few bosses that can take a lot of punishment and require some dodging and cover-taking to survive through encounters with them.
However, most of them have predictable attack patterns that can be take advantage of, provided that the player has the means, e.g. ammunition and health, which can be expended to bring them down; that the areas where these boss fights occur also happen to have convenient stashes of supplies to retrieve strengthen the impression that they are the usual and typical battles of attrition that had once permeated through boss battles in the sci-fi subgenre of shooters.
The various difficulty levels that the player can set before the start of the game are designed with the usual tropes: making enemies tougher and nastier statistics-wise, while making the player a lot weaker. There are no changes in enemies' behaviour or any other aspect of gameplay.
That is not saying that much of the NPCs in the game are dumb through and through. The segments of the game that have Dalton accompanying (or following) CPU-controlled friendlies show some pretty good behaviour programming on the part of the developers (or at least good rubber-banding).
The best of these can be seen in the two aforementioned missions, where the player can direct friendly forces to deploy in and defend different sections of said facilities. They do a pretty good job of getting to where they need to be, as well as staying there as long as they are alive.
As a game made using the Unreal Engine, Unreal II: Awakening is a picture-perfect game. (When this reviewer played this game, the reviewer had a machine that was considered above-mid-range at the time.)
Many of the environments are lavishly textured and have plenty of polygons to generate edges and surfaces of many contours with. Lighting is also state of the art, and this can be especially seen in industrial and military complexes, as well as alien locations where there is a lot of lighting of the unconventional sorts.
The models for the characters in the game also receives the same lavish treatment, having many polygons, textures and even lighting sources, for some of them. Decals, such as blood splatters, scorch marks and dents in their armor, appear very easily and smoothly on their models too.
Of particular noteworthiness are the aesthetic designs of items that the player character will pick up and use. Weapons look suitably menacing and brutal - even the lowly Dispersion Pistol looks more dangerous than its roots in anti-riot weaponry would suggest. The health and armor pick-ups are also very visually interesting, as they look far different from the typical aesthetic designs used for such pickups, e.g. crosses for health pick-ups and blocks/plates of metal for armor. The health pick-ups are especially peculiar, as they appear to look like eggs in sci-fi trays.
However, the game does not exactly do so well in the animation department, if the phrase "picture-perfect" that had been used a while earlier had not suggested so already.
The story-oriented sequences on Dalton's ship particularly highlight the flaws in the animations. During the conversations on the ship, the player will notice that facial animations are very stiff, with only the lips and eye-lids providing most of the facial movement. The game also resorts to shifting the characters' models around for cutscenes, damaging the sense of belief that these conversations occurred naturally.
Considering that these segments were included in the hope that the player can make some emotional connections to the main character and supporting characters, the lack of decent facial animations and more pronounced body language can be quite disappointing, especially when they don't support the otherwise good voice-acting and lines.
During battle, the player will notice that the game uses movement animations for character models that can look rather forced, similar to those for Unreal Tournament. Of course, one can argue that the game is a sci-fi shooter and it would be understandable that the game uses such animations, but it has to be said here that such animations are more suitable for games with very fast pacing; Unreal II: Awakening doesn't have that.
However, watching the guns create their own unique particle effects and watching the effects of their firepower on enemies can be very entertaining. Incendiary weapons are the highlight here, as they create rather believable (at the time) flames and sadistically entertaining panicking animations in burning enemies.
There are also other effects such as the very impressive ones associated with the aforementioned final weapon. To describe this one in detail would be to invite spoilers, but it should suffice to say that it showcases the Unreal Engine 2's ability at warping models and turning them into from virtual solids into what are flat decals very smoothly
Enemies turn into ragdolls when they die, so there won't be much in the way of death animations. On the other hand, the weapons in Unreal II have a lot of force to their shots, so dying enemies often get blown or knocked around in entertaining ways.
The better half of Awakening's aesthetics is its sound designs. The best aspect of these is the voice-acting, which are often fitting with the current mood. For example, the segments on the ship are laid-back, so characters talk with casual voices, whereas situations of battle have every voiced character, including the ones on the ship, uttering their lines with proper urgency.
Some of the lines uttered can also be rather witty, and most of them belong to Dalton, who often cracks jokes when particularly powerful enemies bite the dust (this particular figurative speech is uttered in the game too). However, it can be said that while the lines are pretty good, they are not very remarkable (as pervasive figures of speech such as the aforementioned one tend to be).
The sound effects are the next best aspect of the sound designs. The guns, of course, provide the most of these; many of them sounds satisfying powerful, the Laser Cannon being the most aurally impressive of them (at least to this reviewer) with the sizzling of its primary fire and the roar of its secondary fire.
Besides gunfire, there are also plenty of explosions, hum of machinery and crackling of electricity, among other sound effects that one may hear in a game with interstellar, sci-fi themes.
The soundtracks are mostly composed of electronic beats and rock tunes, as to be expected of a game associated with Epic Games. Most of them fit the current situation, such as rapid, electronic thumping for an urgent escape through a rapidly destabilizing facility.
Legend Entertainment had promised that the game will have a multiplayer mode upon release of the game, so it was a disappointment that the supposedly final version of the game did not have it. The disappointment can even be considered greater if one looks at how much entertainment that the different tactical values of the various weapons can be brought into multiplayer.
(There is a free expansion that Legend Entertainment made later, but this review is for the launch version of Unreal II.)
In conclusion, Legend Entertainment hit some spots with the sounds and graphics of the game, but the pace of the story mode is marred by unexciting segments that do not contribute to the gameplay in meaningful ways. The lack of a multiplayer mode also damages the longevity of this game, especially when compared to the previous entries in the Unreal franchise.