Continuing on my backlog of old-school First-Person Shooter games I never got to play until recently, Unreal Gold is the very first game in Epic Game’s Unreal franchise, and it was a great start to the series!
In this title you play as prisoner who wakes up after the ship you were
being transported on has crash-landed somewhere. The prisoner has no
name, and in the game’s settings, you can choose different character
models, and skins as well - including female ones, which is quite
progressive for an FPS game from 1998, and made me happy (and also
amusingly reminds me of a certain gamer douche-bag who tried with argue
to me that games in 1998 didn’t have the technology to be
gender-inclusive). It’s also pretty cool that you even have the option
of using “gibbed” skins, which make your character look all bloody and
fucked-up, like they’ve just been through a nasty fight.
~
(Plot details ahead, spoiler warning!)
Once you escape the ship, you find yourself on a
beautiful alien world called Na Pali, and must find a way to get
off-planet. As you explore the planet, you meet multiple races and
species, including a variety of wildlife both adorable and deadly, the
peaceful humanoid Nali folk, and whole bunch of nasty mean
motherfuckers, the Skaarj army. The Skaarj you fight are a tyrannical
people who believe themselves genetically superior to all other
life-forms and desire to conquer them all. This is seen on Na Pali where
they frequently attack and torture the Nali race. At the end of the
main story-line (there are two campaigns included in Unreal Gold), you
kill the Skaarj queen on their mother-ship and use a ship to flee, only
to run of fuel in orbit around the planet.
When
the second campaign begins, you are picked up by some bastard space cops
who force you do a mission for them and retrieve the data cores from
another ship that crashed on Na Pali. The storytelling is more fleshed
out in this campaign, as in addition to finding readable lore books, you
also get a mission log between level that let you see hear more about
your character’s personality (though you need a patch to fix this, as
sadly this game has some pretty bad bugs…more on that later). It’s a
rough task for the protagonist, as they still have to deal with Skaarj
and even more deadly critters. The military is dropping supply crates
for you, which seems helpful at first, but later in the game we sadly
see that they do it with no regard for the native inhabitants of the
planet, something hurting and killing Nali folk with the crates when
they crash right into their homes! As if that wasn’t bad enough, when
you finally complete your mission, it is revealed that they were
planning to kill you all along, and were just waiting for you to clear
the Skaarj out of the crashed ship for them so they could get the data
cores from your corpse. Their soldiers are some of the toughest enemies
in the game with their insanely accurate weapon fire (though I was
playing on the highest difficulty so that’s probably my own fault!) but
once you beat them, your character sets out to find a way off the planet
on their own. Thankfully, after journeying further, they do so and as
an extra bit of satisfaction, trick the space cops ship into firing a
missile right into their own ship, destroying it. Suck on that, bastard
space cops! Our cop-killing hero then flies off into the distance, and
hopefully arrives home safely.
(plot spoilers end here)
~
That
might just be the longest I’ve got on about a game’s story in a review
yet! I really enjoyed the story in this one, because it was much more
detailed than a lot of other similar FPS games from the 90s. I also have
a soft spot for the Unreal series, because it was my main introduction
into PC games back in the mid/late-2000s when I learned to make maps for
Unreal Tournament 2004 (UT2004) in college. It was really neat getting
to play this title as it retro-actively added a lot more context for all
the things I saw in the Unreal Tournament games.
Of course, There is a lot to be enjoyed in the game-play itself, too - The game features plenty of guns, some of which are very similar to ones I used in UT2004 such as the flak cannon, while many others were unique to this title. You could also collect a variety of items to keep in your inventory, similar to games like Shadow Warrior or Heretic. One of the more interesting items is the “Nali Seed” (no, not THAT kind of seed!) which could be planted in the ground to eventually grow fruit that you could then eat to restore your health. which I always had fun exploring the levels, and found them very immersive.The game uses a lot of darker and subdued color tones that are very easy on the eyes, and go well with the super-relaxing synthy/ambient soundtrack. In a way, I found myself enjoying this one in a somewhat similar way to how I enjoyed Half-Life 2 - I loved exploring and soaking in the relaxing atmosphere just as much as I loved the fun combat whenever a baddie would pop up. The variety of creatures on Na Pali make the planet very interesting - the little Nali “rabbits” and Nali “cows” were adorable to me and I always tried to keep them safe along with the Nali themselves. The game is also technically impressive for a old 90s title - Some objects have physics and can be pushed around, there’s a lot of massive outdoor environments, really nice looking skies, well-animated characters, surface reflections, and while the water in the game has no physics, it does still look quite lovely . The Unreal Engine has gone through many upgrades over the years, but even the original was pretty solid!
Sadly, as I did mention bugs earlier…this great game does have some troubling issues that hold it back a bit. This might possibly be because I’m running a 1998 game on a modern Windows 10 computer, but with this version being hosted on steam, I don’t see why it couldn’t be patched and fixed up more. Here’s a list of the bugs I encountered:
-Sometimes hit detection wouldn’t work if you were too close to an ammo crate before firing at it.
- Sometimes the music would stop playing when you loaded a save file (which is a damn shame, this game has wonderful music).
- At one point the game locked my whole laptop up and I had to initiate a shut down just to get the game to close!
- Sometimes the animation of water surfaces would stop or become jittery.
- Sometimes if you save too many times in a single map the game won’t be able to load your saves anymore. There’s a fix for this bug here: https://forums.beyondunreal.com/threads/server-at-capacity-when-restoring-games-fixed.3408/
- possibly the most surprising bug - the audio logs in the second campaign don’t play after the first level unless you install a fan-made patch! Thankfully you can get that patch here: https://www.oldunreal.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1506873085 just be aware you may lose your save progress, so it’s best to have this installed from the get-go after you backup your original files.
There
are some design choices in the game that I found troubling as well.
Many bodies of water in the game would have a surface that was
non-transparent from one side, meaning you could end up not being able
to see something shooting at you from within or above a pool of water. I
also ended up being confused for most of the game how to use my weapons
alternate fire because it isn’t listed anywhere in the game’s control
settings (I wish I had experimented with pushing random keys sooner, as I
eventually found them on my own). Similarly, the “" key is the one I
use on steam for screenshots, and it took me a while to realize that it
was moving my HUD around every-time I pressed it, because this was not
listed in the controls. Early in playing the game, I tried finding a
manual online since Steam didn’t provide one, but the only download link
I could find set off my antivirus software. The lack of a manual also
kept me from knowing what Nali seeds were for through most of the game -
which is again partially my fault for not experimenting more - but also
another good example of why this game really ought to come with a
digital manual when it is on something like steam. Lastly, the game has
a problem with being *excessively* dark on many occasions. I know a lot
of people complained about Doom 3 being too dark, but atleast in that game,
your flashlight was not a finite resource and could be used almost any
time - in Unreal your flares and light batteries are all consumable
items, meaning you could end up wandering in pitch black areas at times
if you didn’t conserve them.
Despite all those
problems - I was still very impressed with this first outing in the
Unreal series. I have to wonder if it’s not mentioned as much as games
like Doom, Quake or Half-Life is because of the rough patches that Epic
ought to have ironed out before releasing this. I’m really happy for the
fan-made patches that help fix the games worst problems and I think
it’s a shame that the Unreal single player series only ever got two
games. The Unreal Tournament series went on for much longer, possibly
due to the (often toxic) competitive macho attitudes of many gamers
making it more of a financial success, but even that too was eventually
thrown to the curb by Epic Games in favor of their modern cash-cow,
Fortnite. At this point it seems unlikely we’ll ever get another
single-player Unreal adventure from Epic, but from what I’ve seen,
there’s plenty of fan-made mods and campaigns you can get for this game
to continue having more adventures. Another nice feature is that because
this an old pc game from before shit like steam came around, you can
get yourself a physical copy! It can be acquired surprisingly cheap on
ebay, even in brand new condition!
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