A Game for the Masses?
The core element to most of the game’s downsides is that it is so. Damned. Processor. Hungry. God is this game ever processor hungry! This game is priced at £35 in most shops, however I think that if you really want to play it the way it’s meant to be played you are looking at a more realistic price tag of about £1,035. By the time you’ve finished buying more RAM, a better processor, a new motherboard (because you find that the one you’ve got won’t accept the faster processor), a better graphics card, and a new hard drive to make room for the 3GB installation … well, you may as well just have your wages paid straight into your favourite computer retailer’s bank account - it’ll save you time in the long-run.
I can live with having to turn the graphics down – I still like System Shock 2’s graphics so I’m not all that fussy – I can deal with the occasional jerk, I can handle a little clipping, but the thing that seriously gets on my tits is the time the game takes to load. Now, if a game takes an age to load initially then no problem, that’s fine by me – I’ll go make a coffee, read a book, go the loo, organise world peace, or whatever, but quite frankly if I have to wait for 35 seconds for the game to load every time I get killed (and in Unreal II you are going to get killed quite a lot) then I really am very likely to fling it out the window, which would be a shame as I actually bought this copy myself (rather than scrounging one from the publishers). Unfortunately the two minute loading time is pretty much the norm for UII and I think that it will probably prevent me from ever becoming properly hooked on the game – for all my praise of it’s graphics, AI, weapons, and variety I think that I will find myself always looking at Unreal II as a novelty to be toyed with when I’m feeling patient rather than something I want to rush home and play.
Seeing as how I’m on the subject of game-saving, I’ll take a quick break from my tirade to mention a really useful feature of Unreal II, which is that it has two quick-save slots (much like Half-Life) as opposed to the usual one. This is great as it means that if you quick-save and then realise that you should have done something rather differently before going headlong into a sealed room with a huge boss-monster, you have a back up plan (and also means that you’re not completely stuffed if, like me, you occasionally hit the quick-save button instead of the quick-load button when you get killed – that can ruin my week, can that).