Design is King
The game is divided into missions (assigned during brief sojourns to your mother-ship) which take place on a variety of alien worlds ranging from the beautiful to the downright bizarre – one particular mission takes place on, and in, an absolutely enormous alien life-form growing on the surface of a planetoid, which is covered with nine-foot high bristly hairs so that the effect is of going into combat on an enormous builder’s bum-crack. When I re-iterate the fact that this mission takes place in the alien as well as on it you probably won’t need much convincing that things don’t exactly get prettier.
Now, since the days of playing the first Unreal I have played a lot of FPSs – in fact, thinking about it, I may well have played all of them, so something truly wondrous and original in the FPS genre is a seriously welcome change from the constant grind of battering waves of mutant/alien enemies. But, well, I’m really enjoying UII anyway. It has to be said that the feeling of the game is pretty original, which is, on the face of it a difficult comment to justify, as there isn’t a lot of the core gameplay that we haven’t seen before. The originality comes more from the fact that you get the feeling that the game, the designers, and most particularly the aliens really hate you. Most FPSs tend to break you in gently by having you give a serious kicking to the alien mutant equivalent of the Andrex puppy and then up the difficulty until you finally find yourself facing something that would make even Rambo reach for the brown corduroys. But not UII. Oh, no, straight in with absolute carnage from the beginning. Right off you are faced by lots of baddies that move quickly and tactically and have weapons that fire bolts of energy which can bounce off walls, so while you’re dodging the initial shot and feeling kinda smug about it the shot goes zinging around the scenery and the smacks you in the back of the head which is a bit demoralising, and not to mention bloody confusing. It’s cool.
Now, the things that are going to set a new FPS apart from the rest are 1) graphics 2) variety of things to kill 3) coolness of weapons 4) enemy AI 5) level design 6) overall gameplay (although I do tend consider this to be a combination of the previous 5 points). Unreal II scores highly on all six points in my opinion.