Unreal Gold

Old Guy here on a nostalgia trip! Unreal was the first game I ever played using a dedicated graphics accelerator (3dfx Voodoo2 with 8Mb of VRAM!) and it was simply mind-blowing. The scale of the environments, the textures, the fast-moving gameplay, the surround sound, the incredible music and the jumpscares put it into another realm entirely from the games I'd been playing up till then on PC. No hand-holding, no narration, no talkative NPCs, just magical environments filled with awful things trying to kill you, and an impressive array of weapons designed to gib them all. The atmosphere still survives intact to this day, dated and polygon-ridden though it may be, but it is still a great story you can enjoy on your own. A classic from one of the best game periods in history, that magical 1998-99 timeframe that gave us Half-Life, Unreal Quake III and System Shock 2.

I love Boomer Shooters, but this is so incredibly meh. The positives: -Good music -Impressive enemy AI -Feels impressively large in scale at the beginning It starts pretty good and interesting, exploring some cool different areas, and then the game starts throwing you in claustrophobic dark hallways while spamming overly tanky enemies at you while you're completely lost. This is a fast paced shooter, yet the pacing keeps nosediving over and over, until you just get sick of it. This is because: -You keep getting lost because of too many similair looking rooms -Too many dark rooms, the game feels more like a horror game than an action packed FPS, which clashes with the fast paced action. -Too many tanky enemies. By itself it wouldn't be too much of a problem, but when they keep spamming them over and over in some specific areas, all while their AI is super good, again, not a problem itself, but spamming them becomes so incredibly unbalanced. -The game has this translator item that gives you hints on what to do when interacting with certain objects. But like 90% of the time it's useless information, and you have to keep pressing F2 to read it and press F2 again to make it disappear, instead of, youknow, just displaying the text on screen so you can read it during gameplay. It also only displays text of the LAST interacted thing. So you're pretty much forced to keep checking this stupid translator every time you interact with something if you don't want to get lost, which is so incredibly painful, I absolutely hate it. After numerous areas of being lost in dark cramped spaces and going back and forth into rooms to figure out what stupid button to press or thing to shoot, I eventually got to a spot where there were just infinitely respawning enemies while I was low on health and ammo and it just felt impossible to get through without constantly abusing quick saves. I was just not having fun anymore and I'm dissapointed that a big name like Unreal aged this badly.