In My Experience... | Unreal 2 is... uh, not so great. (7110)

Video Game legitimization. « prev
Old news. » next

Unreal 2 is... uh, not so great.
[ Posted by Dan on February 29, 2004 | 0 Comments ]

This is of course all IMHO, but...

I bought Unreal 2 based on previous Unreal experience and the prospect of adding vehicles to the mix. To bad the game is unpolished, unnecessarily complex and self-imbalancing.

The character animations are just weak. It's 2004 for crying out loud and Epic could only manage death animations that are rough approximations of falling down, and doing so within a few frames. Everything in Tribes 1 was better than everything in Unreal II.

The Multiplayer game is far to complex for its own good. The not-immediately-spawning thing is pretty cool and allows you to change your character class before you choose to spam. That's cool. But the choice on where to spawn based on which spawn points your team has captured accelerates unbalance team play when the other team gets forward spawn points. And don't bother using a vehicle to get anywhere because they are easily killed and they go from 'just fine' to 'blowing up.'

As the game goes on you capture generators to get energy for your team. The more energy, the more weapons and tech available to you. It doesn't take too long before one team has captured enough gens to rob you of any energy, so they have all the toys and you are stuff with your pea shooter. It's as if the game is designed to unbalance itself as you play and allows a critical mass to develop that should NEVER exist in a multiplayer game. May God help you if you are on a shitty team, because if you are, you will lose, period.

Also, a major gripe is the user interface in MXP mode (why call this MXP?). The HUD has sooooo much crap on it that getting an accurate or meaningful status is difficult and since this is a first person shooter I have no time to be scanning the interface for multilayer status indicators...

That's right, weapon status and energy have two layers. With the weapon portion of the HUD there's a bar for ammo in the current clip, and a bar for how many clips. And for energy there's you energy level and the team's level. There's about 10 icons for the tech items and diff colors for their status. So grokkable, no wonder it's #1!

There's a bunch of other crap on the screen that I have no clue about and the manual gives no info about. Thanks Epic. And thank you too Best Buy for not taking back opened software products.

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).