Unreal (1998)

 Found out you could get the original Unreal and Unreal Tournament legit, for free, on Linux. Awesome!

Took me a little over a week to shoot through the first game's campaign. I'll hit the expansion pack next week, probably.

Pros:

Epic managed to build an engine to rival (if not surpass) the Quake (2) engine. After over a decade of everyone else being the "other" choice next to the idtechs, that's pretty impressive on its own.

The "OS" style top menu. These were really in vogue for 5 or 10 years starting in the mid nineties. I love them. With a little theming they can stay reasonably immersive, and they're so much more convenient than individually navigating a half dozen poorly labeled menus to find what you want. Or just not having menus at all anymore...

It does the "long string of organically connected levels" thing better than anything else I can think of for the time period. (And most after.)

The outdoor environments still hold up today. Indoor, meh. The engine/art design looks great doing forests and rivers and the like.

Good variety of environments. Two or three styles of tech-ship, ancient temples, villages. In an era where most games picked one (boring) palette and beat it to death, Unreal mixes it up effectively. And most of them (the Skaarj ship doesn't do it for me) are well designed. 

Level design is mostly good. This is a real shitty period for levels. Quake 2 is the sloggiest slog to ever slog. They run out of tricks at the end, but the fact that most levels don't overstay their welcome and a few of the early ones have some cute tricks and puzzles is great for the era. Could probably have stood to chop like 20% off the final act and maybe moved forward with some of the earlier physics puzzles.

Meh:

Weapon design: On the one hand, 10 weapons that all have secondary fires is a solid mix. Some are pretty creative. The Shock Rifle remains one of the best designed weapons, and the "combo" fire is a joy. On the other, some of them have more like 4 or 5 modes, and it feels kind of cumbersome and pointless. Also, how many grenade launchers do we really need? (I count 3) Maybe a bit more tuning of the first 3 weapons. Two pistols and a shitty machine gun/shotgun isn't a great start, and the upgrade system on the blaster is kinda awkward. And I'm a firm believer that all FPS games need a dedicated melee weapon (preferably in slot 1 or 0). This is before most games had quick-melee, so there's no joy there. UT makes some tweaks and massively improves things, but I think that speaks almost as much to the differences between a good deathmatch and SP weapon set as it does to the actual changes.

Bad:

Enemy Design: There are like 5 enemies in the game? They get remixed a million (indistinct) ways, but there's basically:

1. Brutes
2. Assorted murder fish/birds/bugs
3. "Ninja" Skaarj
4. Mercs/Tech Skaarj (they're the same thing, you can't fool me)
5. Bosses (about half of which are identical)

This is the era of bullet sponges, and Unreal is probably even worse than Quake 2 in this regard since there aren't a lot of filler "troopers" to mix it up.

Well worth a play (again, for free!) for anyone interested in FPS, retro gaming, etc. 

And don't call them Boomer Shooters