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Unreal (1998) is the FPS you have been missingTruly Epic
Truly Epic
I wanted a comfort game. A big, safe, entertaining game to sink into, to distract me from cold-o-geddon. And what better than Unreal? An enormous, superbly built FPS, that’s fast, entertaining, and full of… coughing, coughing aliens. Oh no.
Unreal might be one of the only games that exists in reality the same way it exists in my head. My memory of playing this in 1998 is exactly how it plays today, no idealised inventions being revealed as false as I charge around its enormous levels. And yet I feel like Unreal is bizarrely forgotten when it comes to reminiscing on the first-person shooter.
Clearly thenameUnreal is not forgotten. Epic’s series lives on as an engine that couldn’t really be much more famous. It makes me feel a bit sad to think that for many, the game from which its name is taken might not even be known. Especially when it turns out to still be just so much fun to play.
It’s a very traditional shooter in many ways. You charge through individual levels, growing your arsenal of weapons, hitting switches to open doors, and shooting all the baddies along the way. It isn’t, in this sense at least, much more sophisticated than that. It’s just done so exquisitely well. And as such a technical achievement.
Obviously games have nonchalantly switched between indoors and outdoors for many years, so it’s hard to remember just what an extraordinary feature it was in Unreal. They just couldn’t do that before. There’d be a giant load, and an awkward skybox, until you were glad to load back into a corridor. But even 22 years on, the contrast is striking. Unreal feels like a combination of a corridor shooter and an arena shooter, seamlessly switching between the two, its weapons and systems coping with both tight spaces and wide open hillsides. It’s the game that taught me to circle strafe, and its enemies feel better to fight than pretty much any FPS released recently.
I want to elaborate on that last point, actually. I just can’t get over how good the shoot-outs are. Enemies duck and roll and run about, hiding behind cover, circle around you, all sorts of things that feel practically forgotten as a possibility today. Most of it’s luck, absolutely, but it gets lucky so damned often they start to feel like incredibly sophisticated AI.
It did, however, rather quickly get overshadowed.
No one knew how goodHalf-Lifewas going to be. I don’t think anyone was expecting it to be quitethatgood. And for poor old Unreal, it came out just a few months later. 1998 became the year of Half-Life. And while Unreal had taken technical leaps, Valve’s shooter expanded the sense of possibility so much farther. Oh, and there was the small matter of “Quake vs Unreal”.
I’m not pretending Unreal went forgotten! But I am arguing that it has perhaps not received the recognition it deserves alongside the Quakes. Playing it today, it’s still an absolutely fantastic creation, in a large part due to elements that are woefully absent in shooters today.
The only thing that really bugs me about it is the jump. It’s horrible. Slidey, erratic, and far too often need to be relied upon for progress. It’s ridiculous how far you career onward after landing, and then the next jump barely make it off the ground. But then a native Nali will beckon me over, and if I can save his life from the evil bads, he’ll take me over and show me a secret cupboard, and I love it all over again. And then he’ll stand there coughing, and remind me of the real world, and I’ll resent him just a bit.
Can I still play Unreal?
Absolutely. It’s onGOGandSteam(and reduced to $2.49 on GOG until the 30th), and will play right away. However, you’re definitely going to want to get hold of theOldUnreal 227 patch, which sets it running at modern widescreen resolutions, including ultro-widescreen silliness, and tidies up lots of issues.
Should I still play Unreal?
So very yes. It’s such a tremendous FPS game, with such excellent enemies to battle, and some of the best architecture in first-person gaming.
