Looks great, but play is clunky and repetitive, and shootouts are virtually impossible
Now it's five years later. I once again have a hot gaming machine, I've just finished HL2, and I was in the mood for some FPS action. So I installed Unreal II again, to see if it was any better than I remembered. It isn't. It looks great -- even five years after its release, it's still about the best looking game I've seen. But I find the controls unresponsive, and the gameplay is (as I remembered) just a nonstop series of nearly impossible battles. I am only in the first mission (the first time I tried playing, I got somewhat farther), but already I am frustrated, exhausted, and bored. You'll notice that my time spent playing just trying to get through the first mission (twice -- once each time I've installed the game) is more than most people claim for the entire game.
On the "normal" difficulty, the very first enemies you encounter (gibbering four-armed blue creatures) come at you in a continuous wave, often surrounding you (all sides and above!), firing weapons of enormous power, and dodging your shots as they come at you -- or if they are hit, they don't seem to take any noticeable damage from it most of the time. Of the weapons you start with, they fall into two categories: "Can't hit them" and "Can't damage them." There is one weapon which will kill these guys -- but to hit with it, you both need to be standing still long enough to draw a bead on them; and the moment you stand still, you'll be swarmed by enemies. I've had to play each fight at least half a dozen times in order to get through it with any decent amount of health and shielding left. I finally got past those, and found myself trapped in an elevator with a Skaarj berserker. Imagine fighting an armored grizzly bear on speed, in close quarters. There is no escape, and you can't really damage it with your puny weapons; it will slaughter you every time. I know I somehow made it past this scene the first time I tried playing, but at this point I have no idea how.
Constant running and gunning isn't my style, and although I'm not the best player of shooters in the world, I'm certainly not that bad, either. This game is just way, way, way out there on the difficulty scale. Too bad that something that looks so good is so unplayable.
What would make it better? Well, I would say variety -- but maybe that comes later, so I can't really judge. A more appropriate level of difficulty in the early missions would help; enemies that don't have you outnumbered, outgunned, and outmaneuvered in every fight. And some chance to actually use your brain to get an advantage against them, instead of just using your trigger finger and blasting away at everything that moves. I suppose I could try it on the easier difficulty setting, but I've never had to dumb down any game yet, and I really don't want to start now. The game options describe the easy setting as "a walk in the park." That sounds too easy -- although maybe it's a park filled with gun-wielding muggers, which still might be a challenge.
Also, a note on stability -- I downloaded and installed all the patches I could find for it, so I should be completely up to date. However, it frequently crashes while reloading a saved game. And considering how many times I've needed to reload, that gets to be a major headache.