The Stack

Playing all the way through Unreal II: The Awakening has done nothing to change my first impression: that it’s a pretty decent FPS in a military sci-fi setting that has very little to do with Unreal as I know it.

It’s got Skaarj, but despite a dramatic introduction, they turn out to not factor big in the missions or story; when you suddenly have to deal with a Skaarj invasion force occupying your home base in the penultimate mission, it comes as a surprise, in a “Huh? Those guys are still around?” way. The main enemies in most missions are just human mercenaries, and the alien menace that comes to overshadow any mere human opposition towards the end is the Drakk, a race of hovering non-humanoid robots that live in a Gigeresque Borg palace, all black and ribbed and imposing. For my money, the Drakk world is the most satisfying alien environment in the game, more so even than the skin world.

But freed from expectations, it is, as I say, a pretty good single-player shooter, at least as I judge things. It’s got a good variety of weapons optimized for specific situations — albeit mostly it’s the standard assortment; the Shock Rifle, which I described as Unreal‘s signature weapon, never shows up, but we do at least get a chaotic-ricochets weapon and some other novel stuff. And the tactics, while pretty basic, are just complicated enough to be satisfying. Cover is a big factor — not in a Gears of War “press this button to take cover” way, but in that battlefields tend to be littered with rocks and pillars and things, and most weapons need to be reloaded periodically to render you temporarily helpless so you’ll need to take advantage of them. Temporarily incapacitating foes and taking advantage of the fact that they’re not shooting you is a big factor — usually this means knocking them down with a weapon that exerts strong force, such as a shotgun or rocket launcher, but the game’s quirkiest weapon, the spider gun, does it by covering them with spiders, making them run around screaming “Aaah! Get it off!”

The final mission, on a spaceship that’s plunging into a sun, does one of my favorite FPS tricks: playing with gravity. And not just the amount of gravity, letting you make huge slow leaps, but the direction, slowly rotating a hallway as you walk down it, leaving you walking on the wall and struggling to reach the handle of the door out. Now, according on a couple of web searches I just did, the unmodified Unreal Engine does not in fact have the ability to change the direction of the gravity vector. So the game is most likely just rotating the level geometry in that bit. But in the moment, when done in combination with the the floaty sensation that comes from weakening gravity’s strength, it really feels like it’s gravity that’s rotating, not the hallway.

I’m left not quite sure what the Awakening in the title refers to. The story concerns a macguffin that’s been split into seven pieces hidden on different planets, with various armed forces vying to reunite them and control their power. That power turns out to be the power to unlock the genetic potential in a particular alien race, turning them into huge nigh-unstoppable monsters that make you instantly regret your actions. So, that could be the Awakening: the awakening of the dormant monster genes. But that whole deal takes up a very small portion of the game, at the very end, and before that point, I really thought the “Awakening” referred to the Drakk, who also came out of a millennia-long hibernation to suddenly become the game’s major threat.

Finally, let’s talk about Dalton’s confrontation with the treacherous commander who sent him after the artifact pieces in the first place, pretending the orders came from Colonial Authority top brass but really intending to use the artifact for his own rise to power. Now, the obvious way to end his narrative arc, and the most poetically just, would be to see him meet his end at the hands of the monsters he created. Instead, Dalton shoots him dead in a cutscene after a bit of noninteractive dialogue. I assume that the writer felt it important that Dalton is involved in every major story beat, or at least the climactic ones. Just Dalton, though — not the player. That’s strange. It smacks of Hollywood thinking, really: we’re expected to experience agency over the player character’s actions because we identify with the player character, not because we’re performing those actions. The other peculiar thing about it is that, unlike all the other big confrontations in the game, it isn’t a fight: the guy isn’t even armed, and Dalton just murders him. And yet, judging by the camera work and the music, we’re clearly supposed to regard it as a big glory moment, where the audience throws up their hands and cheers for frontier justice. Maybe this is why it’s noninteractive. Maybe players were hesitating to shoot anyone who wasn’t shooting back. Maybe they wouldn’t hesitate in another game, one based on the just-shoot-everything principle, but this game trains you not to kill peaceful NPCs through its numerous defense missions and interstitial dialogue sequences.

The anticipated fourth defense mission was exactly as expected: a combination of all the defense missions seen previously. You command marines and place turrets and force fields to repel attackers on a rooftop before they reach and murder Dr. Meyer, a scientist doing important stuff in the radio room so you can escape. This is preceded by getting Meyer to the radio room from the lab where he was held captive, and that involves crawling around on some perilous ledges to reach the rooftop where the defense sequence takes place. This part is basically an escort mission, except I’m not sure Meyer is ever in any real danger. Mostly he hangs back until you’ve cleared an area of enemies.

The main thing that’s striking about this whole sequence, both the escort part and the defense part, is how abrasive Meyer is. That’s definitely deliberate. He’s arrogant, impatient, and above all ungrateful that you’ve showed up to rescue him, and his periodic interjections become more and more outright insulting as the story goes on. (To be charitable, he’s under a lot of stress.) The player character, Dalton, expresses a desire to kill him, but of course can’t do so without losing the mission. The punch line comes at the conclusion of the mission when, in another reminiscent-of-Half Life moment, a remote commander actually orders Dalton to kill all surviving scientists at the site to keep their knowledge out of enemy hands, and Dalton refuses to do it, proving himself the better man.

Which, of course. He has to be a better man than Meyer in this sort of story. Meyer is a civilian.

That’s really the core of the ethos here, the glorification of — not really even the military, exactly, because commanders can be unethical and insubordination is shown as sympathetic, but of the soldier, the people making unappreciated personal sacrifices, forming a found family with their brothers-in-arms, and shouldering the moral burdens of warfare together. The only reward Dalton ever wanted was to be reinstated in the marines. And while this attitude is hardly uncommon in FPS games, it is (once again) a far cry from the first Unreal‘s air of alien mysticism.

I’ve just hit two more defense missions in a row and already I’m starting to get tired of them. I want to go exploring! I want the dopamine hit that comes from finding a new resource cache, not the sense of dread from having to carefully husband the resources you already have.

At least they’re changing up the mechanics every time. The first defense mission, the one I described before with the aliens attacking at night while you wait for a dropship to get you out of there, had space marines and some stationary devices, like turrets and force field generators, but you didn’t have control over any of them. You did your best to keep both the marines and the devices from being destroyed, because they were defending you while you defended them, but that was the extent of your interaction. The second defense mission, keeping mercenaries away while your ship undergoes repair, puts the stationary devices in your hands: it starts with a lot of tutorial dialogue explaining how to deploy force fields and so forth. The third, keeping enemies away from a captured base while one of your engineers extracts data from their computers, lets you order around a small group of marines using the game’s usual dialogue system, assigning them positions like “Defend the control room” or “Patrol the front wall”. Just on the basis of combinatorics, I’m guessing there’s going to be one more mission where you have both devices and marines at your disposal.

Come to think of it, I bet it was possible to pick up the force field generators and turrets and redeploy them elsewhere in the first defense mission. It hadn’t been explained to the player yet how to do it, but that doesn’t mean the functionality was disabled. I find that happening a lot in the mission briefings. I’ll pick up a new weapon from a fallen enemy in the course of a mission, and then between missions the tech guy back on the ship will say “I’ve been making some improvements to that weapon you found, now it has an alt-fire mode that does yadda yadda”, but I already know about that functionality, because I experimented with the alt-fire button when I first picked it up. Basically what I’m saying is that the devs didn’t bother making the mechanics fit the story completely and also the tech guy is a liar who takes credit for things he didn’t do.

Despite what I said before, it turns out that the story in Unreal II: The Awakening isn’t simply Humans vs Alien Monsters. The third through fifth missions feature human antagonists. And, although I’ll be very surprised if there are any sympathetic Skaarj, we’ve seen a few aliens on the Terran Colonial Authority side from the very beginning, purportedly as part of an officer exchange program. One, named Ne’ban, even pilots the player’s ship. He’s basically a comic sidekick, mangling his English, being confused about human customs, and generally being childlike in comparison to the humans: short, awkward, with a higher-pitched voice. Characters like this have existed for a long time, but an earlier generation would have made him Chinese or something. I’m not sure whether an alien version is a positive development or not. It strikes me as related to the question of whether the Ferengi are anti-semitic, except less specific.

Also, although the living planet in mission 3 isn’t exactly friendly, it can hardly be called a bad guy. At least, it’s not the aggressor in the situation — that would be the morally questionable human corporation trying to excavate a mysterious macguffin from under its surface. The player doesn’t want them to have it, but the planet doesn’t care about factions — as far as it’s concerned, you’re all part of the same infestation. Hopefully it can just heal over and live in peace now that the artifact is gone, although that kind of depends on whether the corporation was solely interested in the artifact or had other ways to profit from killing a planet. It’s worth noting that the corporation has a Japanese name. Even when the bad guys aren’t aliens, the authors want you to regard them as foreign.

Sometimes Unreal II: The Awakening feels like Quake and sometimes it feels more like Half-Life, but it never really feels like Unreal.

Admittedly, that’s a pretty mild criticism. Also, to be fair, it does have some things tying it to Unreal. It’s still got Skaarj. It still has a weapon that ricochets chaotically, even if it fires energy blasts rather than discs. And, after a fairly mundane beginning setting a bad first impression, the environments may be getting weirder and more alien as it goes — the third mission takes place on a planet covered with a single organism that gives it the appearance of magnified skin, complete with hairs. We’ll see how it goes from there. There’s probably more Unrealisms to come.

But at this point, I’m thinking that I’m enjoying it the most when it’s more Half-Life-y. When there’s an emphasis on set-pieces, environmental obstacles, huge machinery, and sub-goals with more variety than just getting from point A to point B. There’s one set-piece that I thought was particularly effective, and it plays a lot like those defense sequences from Half-Life 2 (which was still in development when this was released, so maybe the influence goes the other way?): waiting for extraction for five minutes straight in the dark of night while fending off waves of baddies, with the help of three ultra-macho space marine NPCs. I’ve seen space marines in games criticized as cribbing their design heavily from the movie Aliens while entirely missing the point of them there: that all their tough-guy swagger was useless when the xenomorphs came. Nonetheless, this scene, with its sense of tension enhanced by poor visibility, was an excellent portrayal of “Aliens but the space marines win”.

The more I think about this, the more I start to wonder if Half-Life was the main design paradigm for the whole game, like if the project lead was a big Half-Life fan and thought that obviously the best way to improve on Unreal was not to build on its own strengths but to make it more like Half-Life. Such things happen in the games industry. Or, if not the whole game, then at least the second mission is really extremely Half-Life-inspired: it takes place in a weapons research facility where an experiment went wrong, you spend a certain amount of time crawling through air ducts, and the main enemies are small leaping arthropods. That’s enough similarity to elevate it from imitation to homage. If I try, I can convince myself that mission 1 is similarly based on Quake or Doom, in architectural style if nothing else. But how this pattern extends to the hair-covered hills of mission 3, I have no idea.

I’ve been toying with Unreal Engine lately — I figure that even if I never make a game with it, it’s good to understand what it does and how it does it. And after poking at it for a while, my thoughts drifted to the FPS it was initially made for. The original Unreal is not on the Stack — I played it to completion many years ago. But I have its little-regarded immediate sequel on disc.

(If I didn’t have it on disc? Oddly enough, both Unreal and Unreal II: The Awakening are available on GOG and Steam, but not on the Epic Store, even though Epic is responsible for their existence. As far as the Epic Store is concerned, the series starts with Unreal Tournament. I wonder why? My guess is some kind of contractual thing.)

Before I get into Unreal II, for comparison purposes, here’s what I remember about the original Unreal:

• It was more about environment than story. Your initial situation, escaping from a prison ship after it crashes, is just kind of forgotten about once the ship is out of sight.
• For all the coarseness of the meshes, the visuals were lovely and weird. All alien environments with with highly effective use of colored light sources and well-integrated particle effects.
• It basically alternated between exterior and interior scenes. You’d get a sequence where you cross a ravine or climb a mountain or whatever, then go into a large building or tunnel to reach the next biome. I liked that; it gave a nice sense of progression.
• The main enemy was aliens called the Skaarj, which look a bit like the Predator. Their main novelty was that they could dodge-roll like a Dark Souls player, and tended to do so whenever you pointed a gun at them, forcing you to aim twice in rapid succession.
• There was a weapon that shot razor discs that ricocheted off walls and made a huge chaotic mess. It was pretty obviously inspired by the disc guns that were a popular toy at the time.
• There was another weapon where the primary fire was a beam and the secondary fire was an exploding projectile, and the most effective way to use it was to shoot the projectile with the beam, creating a far more powerful explosion. This, more than anything else, characterizes the Unreal experience for me.
• There was a sort of overcharge device that turned the basic zap gun into the most powerful weapon in the game for a limited time. It was clearly intended to be used, and used up, near where you found it, but it was possible to hoard it, and use it to make the final boss fight downright trivial.

Now, my first pass at Unreal II, nearly two decades ago, was short. I didn’t even really get into the game proper, because it was failing to meet my expectations in the intro and mission briefing sections simply by having intro and mission briefing sections. Before you get into the action, you have to engage NPCs in choice-based dialogue, which struck me as sullying the purity of the thing. Perhaps we can blame the involvement of Legend Entertainment, a company founded to make adventure games.

The visuals are definitely more technically advanced, with lots of smooth curves where the first game would have sharp angles, but at the same time less inspiring, more typical of the FPS genre, more beige. This extends to the characters: where Unreal made you an escaped prisoner (and never stated what it was you were imprisoned for), Unreal II takes the default route and makes you a space marine. Or technically a former space marine, now working for something called the “Colonial Authority”, which to my mind puts you on the wrong side of history. But accepting it on its own terms, this is a story where the good guys are humans and the bad guys are aliens, unlike the first game, which took place in a totally alien environment where both the good guys and the bad guys were aliens, and anything smacking of human authority is best avoided lest they put you back in space prison.

In short, my basic impression of Unreal II so far, after playing through the first sequence of levels to a major cutscene break, is just that it’s disappointingly typical. The first game was something special and strange and this one isn’t. But I’ll keep playing it.