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The Unreal PreviewTHE HISTORYFor almost three years now, Epic Megagames has been working on their 3D first perspective offering. The buzz surrounding Unreal has now reached fever pitch, and the game has spawned an enormous fan base for whom the lack of anything other than low res screenshots and poor quality video grabs seems irrelevant. It got to a stage some two weeks ago when people were seriously doubting that the game was ever going to be finished. The doubt was, it seems, ill-founded however and the company released a near complete version of Unreal for review by PCgamer last month. THE ENGINE After following the progress of the various 'next gen' graphics engines and their respective games over the past two years, I have noticed that companies are constantly forced to second guess each others progress in order to stay cutting edge. Unreal's engine has caused a lot of speculation. It has changed almost entirely since conception adding coloured highlighting intense light flaring effects (blurs and distortions when a wepon is fired or when you encounter a brightly burning torch etc.) a new chaos based approach to water effects has also been implemented which has to be seen to be believed. Another new addition is the implemetation of 'Portal Technology'. This is where the differences between the present engines doing the rounds become apparent. Portal Tecnology is almost self-explanatory especially for those who are familiar with Sci-Fi movies and images that portray gateways to other dimensions and so on. A Portal allows the player to view parts of the game-world that may be far away in real terms through for example a teleporter. Wherever that teleporter takes you to can be seen in three dimensions through the portal. If you dont quite get me, dont worry its self-explanatory but incredibly difficult to explain on paper. Animation for the central characters within the game rival Quake 2 in terms of fluidity but according to te PCgamer review it isnt quite as original. THE GAME Fairly standard first person stuff mostly. However Unreal does add some nicely original play features that set it apart from the rest of the pack. First up is the ability to use two different weapons simultaneously and the certain wepons can be powered up manually (e.g more than one shot can be fired at once. MULTIPLAYER Unreal is planning to take Quake head on with some never before seen deathmatch features and some fearsome arenas in which to cheerfully dis-member your closest friends either on-line or (if your lucky enough) over a LAN. The only criticism that has been levelled at Unreal is the weapon line up which isnt quite as Beefy as Quake 2's and judging by some of the preview videos Ive seen, this could well be the case, with some of the lesser wepons looking distinctly weedy when compared to there Quake stablemates. Its almost as if Unreal has tried to a little too hard to be original. Unreal will apparently be released at the end of May but dont hold your breath. For more information head on over to unreal.com. |
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