This game is a mess that likes to throw OP enemies at you without any warning, where half of the quests are badly explained in terms of where you're supposed to go, and where you're not allowed to assign spells and items to hotkeys for quick-casting/quick-use. Sure, you can assign spells and skills to F buttons, but 1) that still forces you to manually cast the spell after you select it with an F key, and 2) the F keys are supposed to be for quick saving/loading, not spells and skills. I have never gotten used to this and I constantly mixed keys (#2) throughout God knows how money hours I've wasted on this. Have fun trying to restore your health or mana with potions from the inventory while being pounded by enemies. And don't let me even get started about bugs that others are complaining about. Apparently, it's possible to break several quests just by solving them out of order. This is beyond ridiculous for a game that's supposed to be a sandbox RPG like Skyrim or Oblivion, where you're supposed to be able to solve quests in any order you want. I didn't personally have any problems with this, but that's probably because I rage-quit the game before any problems even had a chance to manifest in the first place. This really should have been a straightforward clone of Diablo 2 instead of trying to be inventive and unique by adding sandbox RPG elements as well. I have a strong suspicion that would have solved at least half the problems I have with it.
As of writing this review, Unreal is by far the most atmospheric game that I know, at least as far as I can recall at this moment. Levels look gorgeous (at least when you take into account the fact that the graphics do reflect the fact that the game was originally released in mid-1998) and the music is chill and has that one unique thing the parts of which can be recognized in other games that used the same engine, such as the original Deus Ex. So, what went wrong? Two simple words. Level design. (Or level layouts, if you want to avoid confusion with what I mentioned in the first paragraph.) Levels start relatively straightforward, not causing any confusion whatsoever, but then start getting confusing in the second third, with my opinion being that the worst offender by far is the Sunspire level. The problem is that levels get very labyrinthine which negatively impacts the player's ability to navigate them, a lot. By the time I finished the Nali Castle level, I was on a brink of just ragequitting the game in frustration, having troubles with finding out where I'm supposed to go next. Like I tried to point out in my Steam review of Merger 3D, if you're making a game with non-linear level design in this time period after the release of original two Doom games, minimap is a must if you don't want to confuse your players. Unreal, of course, doesn't have it, although I guess I have to admit it would be difficult to pull off, given the fact that this game's levels go in all three dimension, whereas Doom 1 and 2's levels were, technically speaking, just on a 2D plane. There's also a certain something that happens near the end of the game that turns this otherwise pure FPS title into a borderline horror game, something I most definitely neither expected nor wanted, the latter being so due to fact that I don't have the nerves needed for that kind of a game. For me, Unreal would have been a straight 5/5 if only it wasn't for this frustrating level design.
I would like to say there's a good game somewhere in here, but I just can't. I usually also manage to find SOMETHING good in a bad game, but I now can't, not in this one. Terrible level design, absolutely atrocious vehicle control, snipers that basically delete your health before you even realize what's going on (yet alone actually see them), stealth mechanics that are so basic they're flatout bad... You're also, for some reason, unable to use the mouse in the main menu. In a PC game. That already uses a mouse for aiming. What. And to make this even worse, the main menu is circular, meaning it can get temporarily confusing to actually navigate it (it uses arrow keys for that). Why not just use a regular list-like menu, like every other game? Just stick to Unreal or Quake. I would personally also recommend Soldier of Fortune, even if it's not SF.
