Unreal II: The Awakening

It speaks like no other game in the genre, loud and with feeling, and tells a story worth telling among all the explosions.

For anyone who is looking for an old-school action FPS experience with solid production values and lots of explosions, this is your game.

The first Unreal made its name on, well, its unreal visuals, but we had no idea how saucy a first-person shooter could look until we tried the sequel.

To sum up, Unreal II is disappointing, not so much in terms of what it is as in terms of what we expected, what it hints at, and what it might have been.

Forward-looking tech, backwards-looking gaming.

Unreal II, for all its technical pizzazz, lacks a similar let's-pile-on-the-scares inventiveness... Awakening, we have to say, is anything but. [28 Feb 2003, p.86]

The bottom line is that Unreal 2 is saddled with unmemorable weapons and enemies, disappointing AI, a dull lead character, underdone level design, and a lack of technical polish, all wrapped around the same old stuff you’ve seen in so many first person shooters, most of which are better than this game.

I loved this game, everything from the weapons to the lame humor. The game offers a mixture of both linear and non-linear missions, with a cool plot that continues a few twists which will really get to you. All the missions are on different plants, which allows them to make some very cool environments for the player to explore. As for your arsenal, you have everything from turrets and laser fences, to sniper rifles and flamethrowers. All in all an amazing single player game with great atmosphere.

Well, Unreal II: The Awakening had an insurmountable hurdle upon its release. The predecessor was nearly perfect. Unreal II is very disappointing regarding this aspect. Sure, the action is fine and the graphics look marvellous but the game was too short, repetitive and quickly became boring. If you haven´t played the first entry, it will satisfy your shooter desires. Otherwise it´s just good average.

Прошёл Unreal 2: the awakening 2004 года на пк. Первый unreal в 1998 году был невероятным технологическим прорывом, при этом геймплей тоже держал планку, про вторую часть, насколько я могу судить, вообще не вспоминают. После прохождения второй части четко сложилось впечатление, что разработчики пытались создать некий аналог Halo но на пк, очень многое мне её напоминает, видимо хотели повторить успех консольного продукта. Однако, 2004 год был просто нереально конкурентным, и в итоге игру особо никто не заметил среди громких (по итогу культовых) релизов. Более того, технологически unreal 2 отстает от конкурентов, видимо никто не мог представить, что выйдет первый far cry и всех расхуярит своим графонием и открытым пространством. В то же время unreal 2 это вполне достойный продукт эпохи. Геймплей и стрельба порядочные, много разного прикольного оружия, интересный дизайн врагов, много разных планет и локаций, игра совсем не душит, всё достаточно вылизано. Графика слабовата, видимо делалась игра с расчетом на слабые пк пользователей, приемлемо в общем. Из-за того что больше одиночных игр по франшизе не выходило, делаю вывод что unreal 2 не был успешен и разрабы приняли решение делать только онлайн продукцию, так как unreal tournament 2004 оказался крайне популярен, понимаемо. А Unreal 2: the awakening просто приличная игра своего времени – 6/10.

I gave this a play through again in 2017 and ****'s still pretty bad. It's disappointing because Legend Entertainment made Return to Na Pali, which I think took everything about Unreal and made it better. You can definitely tell they wanted to port this later to the Xbox because the level size and number of NPCs per map is extremely limited. My biggest complaint about the actual gameplay is movement speed, since by default it is excruciatingly slow compared to other Unreal games. Type "BeMyMonkey" and then "Setspeed 2" in the console to fix this. Gameplay aside I am most disappointed by the atmosphere. There is absolutely no sense of wonder anywhere like in the original Unreal. Not a single memorable music track, and often the maps will have no music playing and little to no environmental sounds. Some actual good things about the game: The three cheesy members of the crew actually grew on me as time went on. The ending surprisingly actually stirred up a little bit of emotion. The "holdout" portions of gameplay were actually pretty fun. It is a bit like when you set up turrets from Half-Life 2, except more dynamic and strategy based. The story while basic has an interesting twist on the Dorian Grey.

Wow. This was bad. It's one of the few games I left unfinished - and it happened at the beginning, no less! Ok, I loved Unreal (the first), I even liked the "Return to Na Pali" expansion (although way less good than Unreal), so maybe I had high expectations, but IMHO this is just plain awful: boring, uninspired, repetitive, soulless. I played user created maps/levels that were way more fun and entertaining than this. There's no "awakening" here, the game is fast asleep, and most likely so will be you ;-) In the few hours I spent playing it, I had no fun at all: and for a game, that's the death knell.