Execution of levels is as standard as they come: enter, run through linear path blowing away anything in said path, reach exit. It’s all been done a million times before, but there is hope within these walls and it does reach out for more. The designs of the worlds are beautifully varied, hopping from ice planets to lush jungles to military installations, all of them outstanding in their look. One that particularly grabbed my attention was a world that had a gigantic life form feeding off the planet itself, to where it had grown so large it encapsulated almost the entire planet. Our man-in-command, John Dalton, gets to drop inside it and fight his way back out, through that beautifully grotesque stomach.

There’s a surprising amount of story in between those levels, generally told while wandering around the ship talking to people. While it does occasionally have the immersion-jarring third-person cutscene from time to time, the game thankfully retains the first-person view for almost all of the dialogue and conversations. It’s standard stuff in and of itself but still nice to see in this genre and gives all of its characters personality. A shame their backgrounds were so stereotypical, but at least they didn’t rely on the instruction manual for the entire back story like so many first-person shooters.

Legend also blessed the game with some defensive missions, which do provide some innovation to this blast-a-thon and are pretty damn cool to boot. Turrets and laser walls can be set up while troops can be ordered to patrol certain areas, giving Dalton some real authority past a one-man army. It does mean additional suspension of disbelief in that he can run around with not only a huge arsenal but a few rocket turrets as big as he is, but it’s worth it for the ride.

But those still need to be backed up by the main man in heavy armor, and Dalton certainly has the armaments to do so. While the initial readout may sound like a typical lineup of weapons, the secondary fire breathes extra life into all of them and creates some truly great stuff. The assault rifle, the rocket launcher, the grenade launcher, the sniper rifle . . . you’ve heard and used these all before. But then comes the flamethrower with its beautiful igniting effect and the alternate fire on the shotgun, both of which reduce enemies to crispy critters. My other favorite is the grenade launcher, which is in no way like its previous incarnations in FPSes. This baby comes complete with six different types of grenades, allowing you to pick and choose how death should come depending on your mood. Want to rip apart their shields for an easy kill from your pistol? Want a third option to light them on fire? Want to make them choke to death on toxic fumes? Oh, sweet decision. Another nice touch I liked was the Aliens Vs. Predator take on the assault rifle: fire in short, controlled bursts. If you go nuts with it you’re just wasting it.

It’s got the guns, it’s got the characters, it’s got the design, and it’s got the levels. Which brings me to the point where Unreal 2 finally rips open a giant flaw that stops the game from becoming the best single-player FPS around: the enemy AI. Many of them are just dumb, falling to the same traps that have plagued the genre for years. Enemies have a "sense range" that only extends so far, meaning you can move forward slightly until they appear within view and then repeatedly shoot them in the head without them responding at all. In fact, whenever the enemies aren’t overburdened with excessive ordnance they’re pushovers. There were entire areas where I would rip through legions of troops without taking a scratch, wondering if something glitched and I suddenly wasn’t taking damage.

The truly odd thing is that this is completely unbalanced. I would often rip through areas like those mentioned above only to get stuck on a single room with a few soldiers for fifteen minutes. It was like the difficulty suddenly shot through the roof, and then once that area was passed it dropped again. Sporadic starts and stops like that persist throughout, leaving me to wonder if I should turn the difficulty up or down. This was even true with bosses, where some would die from a simple hail of gunfire and others required the entire ammo storage for over three weapons put together. It seems to be that they couldn’t actually make enemies as good as the best (which still remains as the soldiers in Half-Life) so they instead choose tricky placement or, if that didn’t work, would overload the enemy with heavy weaponry.

That’s rather a shame because in a game about killing, especially one with no multiplayer, bad enemies don’t cut it. Everything else is excellent, making this a great pure destruction game with some great ways to flambè aliens, but never really rises beyond that. Although in a day and age when so many action games have so much needless filler, it’s still nice to have games that reflect back to how to things were, without too much fluff. Well, that and it is really, really pretty.

· · · MechDeus