Introduction
Company / Developers – Atari / Legend Entertainment
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Genre – First Person Shooter (single player only)
Introduction
The original Unreal was a success. Not only did it break the Quake engine's stranglehold of the FPS market, offering itself to be a healthy competitor, but it also helped opened up the whole multiplayer deathmatch phenomenon which still influences FPS game styles today.
This time, Unreal 2 goes back to its roots, becoming a single player game. If you want deathmatch then you can buy the separate title (of the same brand name). This game is all about going back to the good old basics. The question is, do players really want to go back to straight single/multiplayer only games, or are SP/MP hybrids considered the new standard of first person gaming?
Battlefield 1942 earlier last year was a slight disappointment to some players due to it strictly being a multiplayer only game, and not having substantial single player content. Will players put off Unreal 2 due to not having ANY multiplayer options at all?
Compatibility
Resolutions tested
OK people, Unreal 2 is probably the most graphically intensive FPS until DOOM III, so you need a considerably fast computer for it to run well. DirectX 8.0 compliant video cards like the Geforce 3/4 and Radeon 8500/9xxx are very highly recommended. I consider my system a fair bit above average nowadays, so anyone on low end machines I’m sorry, it’s probably time to upgrade again! Unless of course, you really don’t mind turning the settings way down, but then where’s the fun in that?
Getting Unreal 2 to work to my satisfaction using my machine was time consuming I admit. I have to push my PC to its limits, without sacrificing visual quality or suffering from slowdowns, quite a difficult compromise to reach at times I tell you. After 20 minutes of tweaking I finally settled for medium texture quality and 1028 x 768 in 32bit colour (16bit seemed to cause some wierd visual corruption in places for my computer in Unreal 2) which works admirably and shows Unreal 2 in all its beauty.
Yes I still got slowdown, but only rarely in areas of extreme texture saturation (e.g. in a Aliens-style complex on a later level) or during extremely intense combat situations. Maybe I’ll be upgrading again in the near future…
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