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Pretty good, but buggy

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: February 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I like the game. Its not up to Halo standards, but its a fun FPS. Unfortunately, I found bugs (not the kind you kill in the game). It freezes sometimes, doesn't always load right and occassional video dropout.

Having said that...I doubt seriously anyone will read this review who isn't already sold on the game. Have fun.

cool game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: February 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Unreal II: The Awakening's combat and overall polish isn't anywhere near Halo, or Rainbow Six 3 for that matter, but that doesn't stop it from being fun anyway. The graphics are good and it does everything well enough, but just not great. As you progress in the game it gives you a chance to get into the storyline more and the characters start to grow on you. The personalities and dialogue of some of the characters is funny and adds to the game and the story gives a sense of purpose in the missions.

Unreal II is a good looking game with tough looking combat suits on the marines and nice weapons with unique twists in terms of capability. There are quite a few weapons and sometimes in the middle of a firefight it's hard to cycle through them in time to find the right one before the enemy rushes you, but that's ok since you get used to sticking to the one with the most ammo or the one best suited to that particular environment. The environments themselves look good even down to the individual grassblades. The levels are also designed well and aren't overly big which is a plus. The missions you have to accomplish are straightforward without being predictable or boring and are explained to you in a pre-mission briefing by one of your crewmates on the ship.

Along with the unique weapons, I liked that the planets have their own alien-animal lifeforms that will attack you if you walk near them or mess with them, and also that you have the capability in some instances to direct other soldiers to defend assigned areas. Some of these marines are heavily armored - they look like human-sized mechs and shake the ground when they walk. There are good ideas throughout the game that make it better than it might seem at first and the character's personality traits, motivations, and dialogue help to bring the whole thing to life.

As far as sci-fi FPS games go, Unreal II is much better than say Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter for instance, but it still can't compare to the pure all-out fun of Metal Arms (I know it's a 3PS not FPS). Still, if you already have Rainbow Six and Metal Arms, I'd get Unreal II at least just to hold you over until Doom3, Half Life2, and of course Halo2 come out. It's turned out to be a good game so far and I look forward to finishing it.

Great Game for Halo Fans

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: February 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Unreal II - The Awakening is a Halo-like space marine adventure that boasts great graphics, good sounds, an interesting storyline and XBox Live for as much multiplayer gameplay as you can stand!

First, the basic story. You're John, a Marshall out on the fringes of space. You want to be a marine but keep being turned down, and you are bored out of your mind. Your base ship is the Atlantis, which you occupy along with a snippy female pilot, a strange alien dude, and a gnarly weapons master. The usual odd collection of people.

You're sent down on a planet to help in a mayday situation. Soon you're up to your eyeballs in aliens, and the aliens and weapons get more powerful as you go. You meet up with marines, rescue them, find artifacts, and get drawn into the plot.

Yup, you know the story, we've seen it many times. But just like you can read 10 different space-combat novels and love each one, the plotline is really fresh and fun here. The characters are all fleshed out and you really become fond of them. We got caught up in the game, wanting to keep playing more and more levels.

The graphics are really good, although to be honest, they aren't up to Halo's stellar quality. They're more of a Brute Force level. Many objects seem to be 'shapes painted with a single skin' instead of detailed multi-part people or vehicles. The characters themselves, even in the cut-scenes, often seem a little 'squared off'.

There are waving grasses and thick fogs and heads-on-pikes, but much of what you encounter is static. I suppose I still hope that after all these months that ONE other game would finally at least equal Halo's level of quality, but it seems we have to wait for Halo 2 for that.

The sounds work well to get you in the atmosphere. The characters all have distinct attitudes that come through well in their acting. The background noises, the splashes of water, the various types of rounds being fired, all help you keep track of where your friends and enemies are. Be sure to have your stereo system hooked in for this one!

Gameplay is rather straightforward but fun too. The maps are big but they do a good job of helping you know what to do next. You don't spend hours and hours searching over a giant map for that one tiny hidden switch. You know what your objectives are here, and with some planning and strategy you can get to them.

Many of the rooms and situations reminded me explicitly of ones in Halo, but again this wasn't necessarily a bad thing. We would say, "Oh this is just like the cafeteria in Halo" and quarter out the room accordingly. Pretty much all the time, the techniques learned in one helped make the strategy for this game easy.

In addition to all of this, there is the main thing that Halo is missing - XBox Live gameplay! There is a great team-based multiplay system that should get every XBox fan hooking up to XBox Live (assuming you haven't already)! Big note here - Unreal II has a mature rating on it. It actually seems fine for most teenagers as far as alien-violence goes - just spattered blue blood on the walls. But when you get into XBox Live, it seems that every game we played involved gamers who could only speak in swears. Every third word (I kid you not) was a swear word. Since most of it was non-helpful (having nothing to do with coordinating attacks or anything else) it got really tedious, really fast. So I'd keep that in mind if you're playing Live.

Other than that one caveat, this is definitely a game to buy and enjoy!

Doesn't quite cut it

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: March 29, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game just doesn't hit the mark.

The Unreal Engine is certainly awesome. And I've been a fan of any game using the Unreal engine, but this game just is not even interesting enough to keep playing. It certainly doesn't have replay value, and has really painfully long load times.

Worst of all, as someone who doesn't do xbox live, I felt a bit of "bait and switch" when the back of the case speaks of "spectacular vehicle carnage" and there's not one vehicle in the entire single player mode! Ouch. And here I thought Unreal would never let me down.

Weapons are great, and I dig the flamethrower effects, but that's about the only positive I can think of for this game..

I may have to stop being an Unreal fan after this one.

Don't spend the $40. Here, take mine.

What a crummy game.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: July 09, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Miserable game that uses atrocious checkpoint type saves since the designers apparently lack the imagination it takes to make the game challenging otherwise. This is even worse than most games that use checkpoints due to lack of creativity in that it can set you back very far in your progress. Beyond that, there are several other aspects that make this game pretty crummy:

The story and characters seem like they come straight from an episode of one of the many goofy tv sci-fi's that waste the airwaves today. There is the sensitive, but tough main character, the hot, almost super hero type chick in the sexy outfit, the obligatory alien and the weeny little mechanic that shows that he can still contribute despite being a spineless geek.

The enemies are much less impressive than most other games of this type and seem to run around wildy sometimes for no other purpose than to be a rapidly moving target. And I don't mean this in the tactical way either. They just run back and forth like idiots.

Although there are gobs of weapons, none of them are really impressive except for maybe the grenade launcher. And when playing games like this on a console, too many weapons can sometimes become a pain.

I have not tried the online game for this, and from what I understand, that is all most Unreal games are worth in the first place. What makes the single player even more disappointing is that a lot of the things available for the online game are not available such as vehicles and even the ability to run.

The upshot is, unless you want it for the online game or you really like doing the same thing over and over again via brainless checkpoint saves, avoid this game.

Completley new game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 14
Date: November 23, 2002
Author: Amazon User

If you guys like quake 3 and unreal tournament 2003 its not guaranteed you will like this game. This is sort of an adventure/fps gmae with very little heavy gun fights. I have seen this game in action at E3 and Gdc and have played it. I find it VERY VERY fun with great graphics and a high frame rate on a radeon 9000 pro 128 ddr. The dynamic lighting features look great almost like doom 3. So for fans of original half life, quake 2 singleplayer, unreal gold THIS IS THE GAME FOR YOU!!!!!!!!

Nice game - Good graphics, nice story

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: October 02, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Nice game- great graphics and good job with the different environments. I personally thought it was a good all around FPS type game. A bit limited on the interactions, but nice plot as far as FPS goes. Nice set of weapons even though you tend to gravitate to your favorites.

I cant believe this game is real

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: May 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

unreal 2 the awakening has a lot of problems the graphics suck the weapons are very ordinary the mission objectives are at times nearly impossible to complete and the thing that puts it over the top is its poorly written plot line the cut scenes are boring and you have to sit through them avoid this game and get halo or halo 2

Stop comparing this game to Halo

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 18, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Every review I read had something to do with Halo. Just forget about that. Unreal has been out before halo evan began so how can it be ripping off of Halo. They do have similaritys, but Unreal II is more like the orginal Unreal that came out in the 90's. So my question is how can it be ripping off Halo, maybe Halo is ripping off Unreal. And further more a rip off of a good game is still a good game.

Now onto the review. This takes place in space, (sounds kinda like Halo I have to admit) and you have to go investigate some distress call from earth. When you get there everyone has been killed except for one surviver, he managed to get a valuable peice of somethin somethin and the aliens are going on a rampage. The game gos on but I don't want to spoil it for you just incase you want to get it.

The graphics are decent, some nice lighting, cool weapons designed for alien killing goodness. The load times are suprisingly long, but there is stuff on screen to read that keeps you interesested. The moltiplayer is probably the best part of the game. Overall its a fun game and it only cost about ten bucks, so if you want a change of the average first person shooter give it a shot.

Great Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: April 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Great game for the casual gamer. Good graphics, lots of great weapons and not too hard. Some games of this type can be very frustrating for people that are not hard core gamers. This game is great because it's a blast to kick but!

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