No.

But, that doesn't mean Unreal II: The Awakening is a straight-up bad game. If anything, it seems to hit all the notes required by next-generation games: it has ably voice-acted real-time cinematics, a large selection of loud weapons, a story that slowly builds with layers of mystery, a woman with large round voluptuous boobs, and the now standard, "forest, ice, lava, alien jungle, and desert" levels.

The game sets players in the well-shined boots of a former Marine, washed-out for reasons not immediately made clear, who now patrols the "ass-end" of the universe as space marshal. Along for the ride is a standard allotment of screwed-up crewmates with hearts of gold trying to prove themselves. The hook? Sometimes, very rarely in fact, players will get to work alongside NPC Marines in gaming segments that will remind players of Halo's more exciting moments.

Sadly, the word "exciting" just doesn't seem to have made it into Unreal II. Before players can even dive into the game, they'll have to sit through both the pre-loading screen and the actual loading screen in a process that takes an average of forty-five seconds. They'll do this so they can run around first-person, shooting things of course, for about five minutes before committing some unseen crime. The punishment is another loading screen.

Usually, the crime is walking through an innocent-looking door. Of course, some doors require players to press the "action" button to open while other doors open automatically. There appears to be no logic that determines how doors should act. It's utterly frustrating because players end up having to walk up to each door they see to make sure it's not one they're supposed to be walking through.

And what can players look forward to doing once they open the door? Why, shooting things of course! This is where a decade of first-person shooter design comes to a crashing halt. Remember Pac-Man? Well, that little yellow blob had more frames of animation than any of the creatures players will see and shoot at in Unreal II.

Human eyes haven't seen animation this stiff since the first generation of PlayStation games. In fact, it's not just generic alien foes who animate poorly; everything in the game from Marines who salute the player to fellow shipmates just walking around looks like it's been clipped by a few frames.

One might guess that animation was shortchanged to lessen the memory footprint of the game. After all, the Xbox only has 64MB of RAM to work with. Sadly, along with animation, texture resolution took a hit in the guts. The world of Unreal II on the PC was a rich, vibrant tapestry of purple and green alien blood. On the Xbox, it looks more like one of those used rugs gamers might see at a flea market while looking for a working NES.

With so little animation and the game's odd lighting setup, many of the foes who attack players tend to look like 2D sprites of yesterday. The drama of lights going out and crazed alien screams is quickly lost when players watch what is supposed to be an alien race so badass it enslaved another badass alien race move at them like a drunken DDR newbie. Finally, all the tension of being shot at is quickly lost once players realize that this "advanced" alien race fires balls of glowing crap that move slower than their trusty space marshal can run backwards.

With stiff moving enemies who appear to just teleport from pose to pose and a chop-happy frame rate to battle, players may soon find themselves frustrated just trying to shoot a simple alien monkey with the "shock lance." That's if they have any ammo left.

Gamers who thought Halo was even slightly less than generous with its ammo supplies on the harder difficulties should walk away now, because even the easiest of Unreal II's difficulties doesn't offer much ammo. Many levels start the player with one whole clip in the assault rifle. Players should remind themselves that it's all for the better that the Space Marshal HQ saves taxpayer money by only giving them 75 rounds to save the universe with.

And save the universe players will. The story starts a little slow and subtle, but it quickly becomes apparent that the situations the player deals with are interconnected with a web of lies that hold at their center the very fate of the universe. Sadly, the technical glitches and design decisions that hamper the game's graphics and presentation also hamper the game's controls.

For example, despite the fact that the D-Pad goes largely unused, and that previous console first-person shooters such as Turok offered up sound solutions to juggling a backpack full of death, Unreal II offers up two face buttons dedicated to cycling through the weapons. What's meant to help you keep pace with the game becomes instead a clunky chore. Any sense of speed or action is lost once the player has to start flipping through a half dozen weapons looking for one that still has ammunition. Factor in the inability to change weapons once the reload animation has started, and the formula for maximum frustration is complete.

Other areas of the control setup that seem to defy logic: ducking by pressing down on the D-Pad, standing up with the jump button, and sniper rifle zoom modes bound to the L-trigger. In every case Halo had a better solution to the problem. Whether the developers were afraid to copy Halo, or just blissfully unaware of the console's biggest and best-selling first-person shooter isn't clear.

It's a shame that the controls weren't tailored better for the Xbox, because the basic first-person shooter elements in the game work well enough. The standard "walk into a room, shoot everyone, push the red button" moments are accentuated well enough with very kick-ass moments of getting to play base defense. During these levels, players will get to set-up autoturrets and energy fences.

Of course any tension and excitement is lost as players will have to sort through all of their weapons to select these defensive options at the same time that raging hordes of very bad aliens are trying to kill them. Further hampering any adrenaline build-up is the inability of the Xbox to bring more than a small handful of enemies for the player to kill at any one time. The failure of the game to make its best aspect shine ultimately brings the whole house of cards crashing down, and what would have been a solid average title becomes instead a mediocre one.

Technical difficulties - which included one Xbox seizure-inducing bug - aside Unreal II fails to offer anything beyond a boring and remedial reminder of what first-person shooters were like five years ago. Efforts to imbue the game with an epic and mysterious story to pull players along fall short of doing anything except making Warren Spector's recent comments on storytelling in video games dead true. With a plethora of better-looking, better-playing titles to choose from, there's just no reason to buy Unreal II: The Awakening.

Final Note: Xbox Live Multiplayer modes were not tested, and as such the review score should not be considered to reflect any such value that could be found in these modes.

· · · Ross "Zondaro" Fisher