Unreal II: The Awakening - Demo

After a successful first title, the Unreal series returns with a sequel, which features more action, better graphics and far more refined mechanics, in order to provide you with a smooth gameplay experience. The storyline carries you through a variety of different landscapes and alien worlds, all of which pose a different threat and powerful foes for you to destroy.

Unreal II: The Awakening maintains the same principles as the previous title and features a first-person perspective, making it easier for you to use weapons and gaze at the stunning surroundings. Right from the beginning, you can see the main character John Dalton landing on a distant world by himself, at the board of a futuristic space ship and carrying a few powerful weapons with him.

The story revolves around a forgotten artifact of untold powers, which, when completed, can be used as a weapon to annihilate anything that stands in your way. Since the item has been broken into pieces and scattered across multiple planets, Dalton must explore these worlds and recover them before the other races do, in order to avoid giving the aliens the most powerful weapon in existence.

As the Unreal series accustomed its fans, the pace at which the action takes place can be a bit too much for a beginner, but you quickly get used to it. The powerful weapons require some practice before they can be used efficiently, since most of them are pulse-based and the bullets do not always reach their target instantly, meaning that you have to anticipate the enemy movements.

The graphic engine is probably the center piece of the game, because the other elements haven't been that well refined in this sequel. The visuals, however, are downright stunning, especially since it features real-time soft-shadows and a wide variety of special effects that bring the alien worlds to life. There's a lot of spoken dialog as well, while each creature has its own specific shriek used to make its presence known.

Unfortunately, Unreal II: The Awakening does not really rise up to expectations overall, because, although it looks sublime, everything else was almost ignored by the developers. Thus, although it is not, by any account, a bad game, the title had the potential for much more than it delivered.