Unreal (PC)

Unreal is a first-person-perspective science fiction shoot-em-up with fantastic graphics and oodles of atmosphere. The story is of little consequence, but for the record - you play a prisoner who has just escaped from his prison ship following a crash-landing on a hostile planet. You only have one thing on your mind - ESCAPE. This is a shooty game, and as such your method of escape does not take the form of painstaking design and construction of a spacecraft from naturally occurring materials; it's more along the lines of running down corridors and shooting at aliens with very large guns. Unreal looks absolutely fantastic. The level of detail in the ...  Read the complete review

Unreal was realeased for the PC back in 1998 at around the same time as its main rival Quake 2, and like Quake 2 was one of the first first-person shooters to make full use of the then-new 3d-acceleration graphics technology. The game looked stunning when it first came out, -far better than Quake 2 did- and it still looks rather nice now, with beautifully lit, detailed and grand-looking alien landscapes and mediaval/futuristic structures, and a varied range of nicely designed and animated 3D enemies. The game sees you crash-land on an alien planet, freeing you from your incarceration (it was a prison-ship you were on), whereupon you must navigate your way ...  Read the complete review

The story centres around you), a convict being transported to death row onboard the prison ship Vortex Rikers. Suffice to say, your ship stops to investigate an unknown planet along the way, and is caught in it's unusually strong gravitational field, and starts to descend into the planets surface. When you awake, days later, the ship is a mess, and the security grid around your cell is damaged, so you escape (applause applause!). The one problem however, is that the ships entire crew has been killed off by alien nasties, and you have to find away to get yourself off the rock. Like most stories to games of this type, it's only really an excuse to go ...  Read the complete review

I must be getting all retro in my old age, reviewing a game thats been out for almost three years to my knowledge, Unreal still proves that it can go up against the best of em, and still come out on top. Basically, Unreal is a first person shoot-um-up, similiar to the infamous Doom genre, and the more recent Quake series, which was made a classic style of gaming during the nineties by techno wizards ID Software. Pretty soon, other developers tried their hands at the style, and while most failed miserably, others went on to produce high quality games such as Duke Nukem 3D, and Hexen. However, nobody has quite reached the high standards set by ID's favourite ...  Read the complete review

The plot in Unreal is that your ship has crash landed on an alien planet and that you must escape from it and return home. However there is one major problem in that the planet is populated by some of the most fearsome enemy creatures that have ever graced the computer screen. They are fast, tough and beautifully animated and will be more than a match for you in your early days of playing the game. The scenery is beautifully drawn and the sound effects compliment the game perfectly producing an atmosphere of true foreboding in the underground sections and beauty above ground. The atmosphere is further enhanced in the early sections by distant visions and sounds ...  Read the complete review