Unreal (via OldUnreal)

[][][] from one prison to another [][][] the armoury's stranger than your usual old-school FPS loadout; [][][] an incoherent amalgam of Mesoamerican, medieval Christian, Buddhist, and Roman culture and architecture—a bloody empire whose stars have long since fallen, each fall an enigmatic angel from the void [][][] the jolting injection of sci-fi elements into fantasy environs [][][] levels with a sense of place, designed for someone, just not entirely designed for you [][][] heaven's vault gauzed by magenta midnight clouds, a river luminous like alien blood carries your little boat from a tedious ludomatic dungeon and to the main menu. Literally, Unreal uses a dramatic flyby of one of its last levels as the main menu [][][] “Chosen One” prophecies litter the temples and hearts of the planet's enslaved indigenous people and they play the odds as dozens of shipwreck survivors stream across the landscape with a gun in one hand and a translator in the other. Everywhere you go you find your deeds foretold as legend brought to life, though always undercut by the corpses of half a dozen other humans brave and bold enough to make it as far as you. As for the enslaved, pacifist Nali, they rush headlong into lethal danger, secure in the belief that their appointed saviour will keep them from harm. Unreal does this plot much better than Half-Life 2's shrinkwrapped Jesus narrative. [][][]

There's not much primary story to speak of. You're a nameless inmate freed from an interstellar prison bus crash-landed on an alien world for mysterious reasons. The first two thirds or so of the game consists of following in the footsteps of various other shipwreck survivors, as well as the plans of the Nali, the native people of the planet, who everywhere you arrive are setting out on an exodus to escape the colonial empire of the Skaarj, if they haven't been enslaved or killed already. All these tiny side-stories play out mainly through extremely optional text logs; the Nali in particular give the game the closest thing it has to an overarching goal as they lay out the route to the Sunspire, a fortress carved into a mountain visible in the skybox for about half the game. One after another, every refuge, every shelter you pass along the way is revealed as desecrated, execrated, ruined. So also for the Sunspire, infested by Skaarj pupae and hostile wildlife [][][] you'll often end up doing things before you realise you're meant to do them [][][] some levels do make things clearer, played with a little in Na Pali as every lever has a window or grate nearby showing you exactly what's changed… except the last switch, where the window just shows you the waterfall and demands you make the last connection yourself. [][][] no game I've played from this era feels so lonely as this. All the others are claustrophobic run-and-gun dungeoncrawls saturated with adrenaline and horror (or sprinkled with human companions and enemies like Half-Life).

[][][]The depth of the armoury is pretty stunning. Take the Eightball Gun as an example—basically the game's rocket launcher, but alt-fire is a grenade launcher. You can hold either fire button to slowly load anywhere from 2 to 6 rockets/grenades. Rockets fire in a horizontal line and grenades in a cluster, but you can hold both fire buttons to fire rockets in a cluster. Oh, and hovering over a living thing triggers a weak lock-on, but this also counts as an attack, so it alerts enemies who weren't aware of you and scares away friendly Nali. This is definitely the most complex set of features on any one weapon in the game, but at minimum everything else has at least two fire modes (except the sniper rifle, which has scope on alt). Very few are standard milshooter hitscan weapons. The Flak Cannon is a sort of combo shotgun/grenade launcher whose shotgun blasts bounce as shrapnel (that can bounce back and hurt you) and whose grenades explode on impact. The Dispersion Pistol is your starting weapon and its projectiles double as (coloured) light sources and it has a charge-up alt-fire, plus you can find secret modules that boost its damage (at the cost of consuming more ammo). The Razorjack fires shuriken that bounce straight off surfaces and instakill on headshot; alt-fire lets you wire-guide them with your crosshair. Almost every weapon has some niche. Though you'll probably end up defaulting to some combo of ASMD and Flak and Eightball, it's easy to run low on ammo and fall back to the other, more outré stuff. [][][] The Eightball Gun is maybe the most iconic of Unreal's weapons to me. It's not my weapon of choice—that goes to its neighbours, the ASMD and Flak Cannon—but it encapsulates the high-depth approach the devs had towards the game's weaponry. More than that , in practice its multi-rocket/grenade mode plays really well with the [][][hectic][][] combat, especially with Skaarj and Titans. Once you hold the trigger(s) down you're committing to getting the right position and timing to get the shot off right, and all the while more and more ammo's being loaded into the machine…