Below are user reviews of Unreal II: The Awakening and on the right are links to professionally written reviews.
The summary of review scores shows the distribution of scores given by the professional reviewers for Unreal II: The Awakening.
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User Reviews (1 - 11 of 35)
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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 graphics but too short on gameplay
3
Rating: 3,
Useful: 1 / 2
Date: September 13, 2003
Author: Amazon User
Unreal 2 has some nice graphics and you get to visit some very diverse planets but I found the game way too short for the price . I found my self on a few planets I found were fun to play and battle in but the amount of area you are allowed to visit was sadly lacking.
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.
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!
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.
Disappointment
3
Rating: 3,
Useful: 0 / 0
Date: February 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User
I am a big fan of the original Unreal Championship--even though it did not have a single player game. The original had a huge multiplayer selection of characters, levels, and guns--even if you weren't online. The new one doesn't. It does however, have a good single player and co-op game, great levels and enemies, but it still lost a lot of the great weapons and characters from the original. This was not a happy day.
WARNING! - This is NOT like Unreal Championship
3
Rating: 3,
Useful: 0 / 1
Date: February 23, 2004
Author: Amazon User
This is not a bad game, but I feel I MUST post words of caution here to potential buyers who are getting it for use on Xbox Live. Don't bother reading this review if you're looking for info on the 1-player part of the game.
If you're buying this game because you want to play a straight-up upgraded version of Unreal Championship on Xbox Live, you may be deeply disappointed. There are no standard fighting modes. No deathmatches. There is only one online game (and only 4 or 5 maps for that game), and if you don't like it, you're out of luck.
Other less-than-stellar points of caution:
- Load times are AWFUL. I mean, much much longer than any other Live game I have.
- You can not use your headsets in the lobby to talk to others.
- Almost all of the 4 or 5 available maps are way too large.
- People can and will join and drop from teams in the middle of your games, sometimes drastically throwing things off balance where one team has 6 players and another has 2.
All of this said, the one available online game IS somewhat fun and interesting. It does have the interesting element of basic shooter-meets-strategy. It's essentially a team-based capture the flag game, only you need to collect 4 flags instead of just 1. Where it gets a little different is that your team needs to maintain control of generators to power various extra (and needed ) items, such as automatic turrets, vehicles, force fields, etc. This adds a bit of strategy to the usual kill-kill-kill of the FPS, and I've enjoyed that so far.
Still, if you want an extremely solid FPS (first person shooter) on Xbox Live, Mech Assault and Unreal Championship are still better games. And for shooter-meets-strategy, Star Wars Clone Wars "Conquest" mode is still the top of the Xbox Live heap, IMHO.
This game is fun, don't get me wrong. I was just suprised and a bit disappointed by this game. I expected AT LEAST the things from the first Unreal for Xbox (like a standard Deathmatch option) to be here, and they're not. Though they have developed a pretty decent online game mode, if you don't like the one mode, you've wasted $40.
I was very disappointed
1
Rating: 1,
Useful: 1 / 2
Date: February 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User
I loved Unreal! I loved Unreal Championship! Unreal II SUCKS! It's on the XBOX, so why such bad graphics?! The video outtakes are toooooooo long! Why bother with them, after we've played the game once they just get in the way of replayability. (is that a word)
Buy it used, if you just have to have it, or better yet borrow it from a friend and don't watse the money.
A Significant Disappointment
1
Rating: 1,
Useful: 0 / 3
Date: February 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User
I don't want to repeat what the previous two reviews have said. I agree with it all, except the parts that say it is an okay game. It's not. The single player is simple, boring, graphics below average, too much dialogue, and takes way too long to load. The multi-player has some cool ideas and concepts to it, yet takes forever to load and the gameplay is slow. Why is it so much slower than Unreal Championship? Why does the PC version have so many game modes and the XBOX only has one option?
Bottom line: waste of $40, I hope to get $15 back when I trade it in.
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