Undying starts interesting and becomes even better over time, brilliant enough to almost forget the lack of multiplayer.
To venture in this awesome dark fantasy adventure, you play as Patrick Galloway, an occultist that owns his life to a friend who is now with health problems. Jeremiah Covenant, the name of Galloway's buddy, wrote an urgent letter requesting his visit, to investigate a curse that is possibly the cause to his bad health, and for the deaths in all his family. That curse is tied to the estate where the Covenant family once lived, and Galloway is there to search for clues and solve all the supernatural terror that haunts Jeremiah. The story in Undying is deep, and is build in a unique and remarkable way, while Galloway make conversations with some interesting characters and read the books found in the estate.
However, even with all those aspects, this game doesn't fit in the Adventure genre and therefore cannot be compared to Resident Evil or Silent Hill. It's also a little sparse in enemies to fill up such a relativity lengthy campaign, which takes a good and satisfying 10-15 hours of playing time to finish. So, for a First-Person Shooter, it's also a bit sporadic. But all those features intentionally works together to build an immersive creepy atmosphere, although I didn't find it scary. You start the game in the estate, and you'll pass a lot of time in the manor's rooms, corridors and yards. But before you think this is Edward Carnby from the Alone in the Dark's mansion, let me say that at least a half of the game occurs in amazing places, which are all equally imaginative.
Everything works in concert to create the sinister environment: the great graphics engine, which can render impressive shadows and lightning effects; the sounds are all convincing, as you can efficiently hear winds, strange noises, monsters from the dark etc; and, most important, the design of the maps. Even the mansion, although it gets a little repetitive, looks good. I'll not spoiler by saying all the other places you'll visit, but I'm sure you'll find most of them, if not all, very exciting.
The gameplay is fast-paced and old-school, and maybe that's the reason Undying didn't creeped me out. Your character moves pretty fast, and that definitely doesn't help to build suspense or any scary moment, but perhaps that's only me. The monsters aren't much variety, and also the demons don't look horrifying, since most of them are so short that don't even seem to be dangerous (and they are).
To battle the enemies, you have both weapons and spells. Galloway has a handy six-shoot pistol, which can use normal or silver bullets; this last is a very strong projectile against supernatural beings. Eventually, he will find the powerful double-barreled shotgun, and the not-so-good Molotov cocktails, which you'll probably forget to use since it isn't effective. There're also some magical weapons, like the Tibetan War Cannon, used to freeze and greatly damage your opponents. You'll occasionally find a melee weapon that is the most destructible one in your arsenal, and really fun to use.
The spells are very similar to the RPGs stereotypes. The player starts with a standard ethereal bolt and the useful Scrye, which is used to see supernatural beings and to learn things from the past. When its use is extremely necessary or at least a little relevant, you'll hear a frightening voice telling you "to see". But the real similarities from most RPGs are spells like Haste, Lightning Bolt and Shield, which are all found in ancient scrolls. All spells are quite helpful, although the combination Haste-and-Shield works fine in all situations. You can upgrade your magical powers with the Amplifier stones, and this gives a good sense of freedom because you can actually select what spells you want to strengthen.
Casting spells costs mana, but don't worry, because there aren't mana potions in Undying, since Galloway regenerates its energy pretty fast. You can also increase its mana capacity and regeneration by searching for and acquiring special hiding artifacts. This also increases Undying's value of gameplay, because you have several secret places to search for, and some of them are intriguingly hard to spot.
Apart from weapons and spells, there is a good list of miscellaneous items, which range from health packs to dynamites. All of the usable stuff is accessed via an intuitive circular menu, except to the general items, which are all listed in a standard window. This is a viable interface feature, but it gets some time to get used to. But the input configuration options let you to customize in your own way, using the classic hotkey style from most First-Person Shooters, although I think it will be much harder to handle both your weapons and spells.
The default difficult setting ('Normal') does a good job when offering challenging moments, although the game becomes easier when you have almost all the weapons and spells. There are some boss battles, and most of them you have to figure out a particular way to kill the enemy. They aren't very enigmatic, but you'll have to think a while and will probably make you quick load the progress sometimes.
The maps in Undying are all pretty small, and you can already guess what this means considering the length of this game: frequent loading bars. You'll travel from area to area very often, and this will make the 'Loading' text appear more than you would like to see. But that isn't that annoying since Undying is a 7 years old game, and the tour between the levels will be probably fast, depending on your hardware.
Your most time-consuming tasks in this game is to find the right door to enter, or the key to open a locked door (which you can easily forget where it is), or figuring out how to escape a place or how to operate a lever. Thankfully you have some sort of a diary, where you can access your current objectives, information from dialogues, or even some stuff about your weapons and spells.
Considering everything that Undying does have, it's not hard to forgive the developers by not introducing a multiplayer mode. Maybe those well-known competitive modes would be enough, since I can't find a way to fit a cooperative mode in such a complex story, which involves only one playable character. If you're after a quality and amazing First-Person Shooter, get Clive Barker's Undying for a satisfying and memorable experience.