unreal gold or just unreal i havent actually played the gold levels yet
unreal is an old ass first person shooter about some guy loving around and shooting aliens made a billion years ago. it is mostly a singleplayer experience and differentiates itself from games like doom and other "horde shooters" in that combat is centered on duels or small battles between intelligent foes who are as strong and fast as the player. think of it as single player multiplayer where both guys are trying to shoot and dodge simultaneously instead of a mob mindlessly charging the shootdodger. while the fights are pretty good, the rest of the game hasnt aged too well and suffers from some rather outdated map design, genericy graphics, and repetition due to lack of variety. it isnt terrible but it really is an early shooter and its pretty obvious they were loving around with a lot of concepts that were fidgety or half-implemented. also it spawned the unreal series of tournaments and engines.
i want to go out on a limb to say how enjoyable the combat is because i have never seen anything like it done for an entire game. the closest comparison would be bot games but even then they are usually of lower quality ai and often are not being designed for singleplayer. it helps greatly that the player the ai imitates is blessed with old school fps super speed so every shootout requires the player to be aware of enemy patterns and aim appropriately and stuff. bots who use weapons the player has are a staple as well so it really does feel like youre throwing down with body doubles. the combat is easily the best and defining feature of this game and it sets an enemy design benchmark that lasts to this day.
unfortunately the rest of the game is either bland or actively annoying, most notably the level design. maps often take a page from the older school of fps maps and can be quite maze-y, which is bad where the objective is find things to shoot. i can understand having levels where you can find stuff if you search around but there comes a point where a map transitions from linear with alternative paths to where the hell do i go. when combat is a game's best feature and a map prevents the player from going from firefight to firefight its a bad map.
further aggravation is drawn from the game's lighting system which appears to exist only to show off a lighting system as the game was also the debut of the unreal engine. the game is dark as stuff to the point of actually obscuring where enemies are for no reason and the only way the player can light it up is with consumable items that last way too loving short to matter. any map that actually uses this goofy ass lighting stuff is immediately worse off because of it and every one does at least partially. some use it a lot, those are not fun maps. imagine a multiplayer game about ducking and weaving where the only light source is gun flashes. hell just imagine any popular shooter like counter strike or tf2 as being dark as stuff and the uselessness and annoyance of the lighting system is immediately understandable.
there is also a slight issue with one specific movement mechanic, the dash. dashing propels you rapidly in a direction of your choice and is enacted by pressing a movement key twice in rapid succession. rapidly pressing a movement key twice in a game about strafing and repositioning causing a usually unexpected and potentially dangerous reposition is the dumbest stuff ive ever heard and the developers should feel bad for this mechanic still being in the unreal series circa the newest unreal tournament. there is no option to rebind it to something like a dash button. the only fix is turning it off but dashing is important as it is the fastest way to move around so you cant even do that.
unreal is a decently long game clocking in at more than a few hours and the unfortunate reality of long games is that they can suffer from repetition. doing the same thing over and over again eventually wears down the enjoyment it brought previously no matter how good it is. although unreal's battles are good they are all very similar to each other due to the small amount of types of enemies. its got around four total, two of which are dumb mobs that functionally serve to place more projectiles on the screen and get shot, two are intelligent and fight extremely similarly in a straft/dodge style. as a result the player is fighting battles that have been fought before for most of the game. while fighting is certainly more entertaining than average, the long periods of repetition can be grating especially when combined with the other annoying stuff.
fight format also factors heavily into the feeling of repetition. rarely does the game ever step away from its 1-2 intelligent mobs or 3-4 dumb mob encounter format and almost never does it combine dumb with smart. the player will basically be repeating the same encounter with the same mobs for hours on end, an error able to end games of lesser quality. unreal tries to power through it anyway and mostly does but mileage may vary.
graphically the game shows the most age. everything looks boring and all the environments are bland and blue-green-brownish. the themes are indoors with rock walls, outdoors, and spaceship. all of the outdoor and spaceship levels look identical but there is some variation on rock indoors. normally i would give less of a stuff except the whole length and repetition issues before make this a more pronounced problem than i would like. same deal with the music although its less left behind by technology and more just ass in general. the entirety of the soundtrack is boring electronic ambient stuff that is dull beyond belief.
in summary its an alright singleplayer experience with interesting ai weighed down by everything else around it. the multiplayer is dead so i dont give a stuff about that. theres a story but its irrelevant.
decent tier
lisa: the painful
chrono trigger
station 37
skelemania
the witch's house
unreal out there somewhere
warhammer 40k dark nexus arena
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planetside 2