This game is unreal. Having enjoyed Unreal Tournament (the first one), I thought Unreal 2 would be a good choice to play next. (I have the Unreal Anthology). Its fun for the first level, which takes place in a creepy, gore stained mining facility, but, I didn't really like that whole "RPG" element, you know, where you have to talk to your teammates to go on missions, and includes dialogue trees. How I hate dialogue trees. The next mission, Sanctuary: Swamp, was apparently more on atmosphere than gunplay at the beginning, and was a bit like "343 Guilty Spark" from Halo Combat Evolved, but much more boring. The battle in this level at the landing site for your ship is boring and is hard to find enemies. The second time I attempted to play through the game, it froze while loading on this level. Read it again if you must. The game gets better at the next two levels, yet the shooting is still rather uninspired and lame. The flamethrower isn't as powerful as one might think, but it shines during the the third level's boss battle, where I sprayed the ground with the alternate fire, a sort of combustible material, then lit it all on fire. That was likely the best part of the game. The characters are all stiff and never blink, and their eyes are wide open. This wasn't really a problem in Halo, but in this game, they look really creepy. Some of the lines are really stupid, and I could think of ways of making them fit the mood less than they already do (like, at the beginning of Halo 2, when Master Chief says 'I need a weapon', you should imagine him saying 'I need a muffin'. Quote from Khunkurisu 7/14/2009), but they're too lame and stiff, plus most of the dumb crap fits with the characters perfectly. For example, on the mine level, when you're swimming through the station, John Dalton, the main character, spots a dead body in blood, and he says "You know how they say that blood is thicker than water? Its true." And that is a good line in comparison to this next one. In the level "Hell", your radio/adviser tells you to "go to Hell", and Dalton, on the planet Hell, replies "Already there, toots", and it sounds worse than if Master Chief actually had said "I need a muffin". Dull game, dull story, dull characters, moronic lines. That sums up Unreal 2: The Awakening.
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