The newest installment on the Unreal series is an improvement but not as much of one as the developers tried to make it.
They’ve added in some jumping maneuvers that are very hard to hit and are basically useless in the matches since no stages have barely any spots you can’t jump normally to get to. You can shoot from first person view, but it cuts out some of your view of approaching adversaries and this hurts you in such a fast passed multiplayer game, so once again it’s not very useful. Lastly there is a new adrenalin system that allows you to build up adrenalin and to get a quick health boost, speed, etc. This is the best and most useful upgrade of the gameplay, but only a few of the power ups can be useful and others don’t seem to help you much at all. Basically all the new elements of play didn’t work out and you’re left with the original Unreal game with some ineffective toys to fool around with to keep you from getting board as quickly with the game.
In game your characters look good, but in the cut scenes you’ll notice that they need a few more polygons. The stages look good except for some tearing on the walls and floor that isn’t to distracting but is definitely noticeable. The games sound effects are decent enough but don’t have any overpowering gun shoots or any really good one-liners from the characters during the game. The background music is ok, but not good enough to keep this interesting and I found myself wishing for custom soundtrack availability.
There are three types of single player modes offered. The story mode is a short crappy tale about the games storyline and is not interesting and has really bad mission type scenarios thrown in with the regular matches. The tournament ladder is where you can play a bunch of matches as each character to win and unlock new items. Lastly is the challenge mode where you have to play in incredibly circumstances and win against all odds. Difficulty in not an issue in this game, with the challenge mode there are three levels of the hard difficulty to be had. You can also play the match after match alone or with your friends for as long as you’d like, but after unlocking everything you’ll probably put it away until you have some friends over and want to play a game. Overall, this game had improvements that just didn’t pan out the way the creators hoped they would. This would be a decent party game, but you may just grab the first Unreal instead because there are more characters and it’s less complicated for someone trying to learn on the spot. Of course learning all the details isn’t too important because most won’t help you in the game at all, so which ever you prefer to get you’ll end up about the same. Don’t let Jeff Worstmann fool you into thinking this is an incredible feat of gaming, because as usual, he’s got in wrong, if it’s great he says it’s ok, if it sucks he says it’s decent, but if it is half decent and it meets whatever obscure particular requirements he has then it’s amazing and he’ll slap a nine on every category to gibe it the score he wants to regardless of merit. In sort it’s a decent game and when you see a Worstmann review go to the readers or IGN.