Played it. Welp, tried to multiple times...But I never really warmed up to it. Mainly because the iteration of 'Unreal' that really got to me were the 'tournament' games(specifically, the first one '99 and 2004). Really like the 'zippy' feel and level design of 2004, and I really love the "military-industrial competition" vibe, and the overall weapon designs of '99.
Yes, I've played it dozens of times and it's an absolute classic. I first played it when it came out and fell in love immediately. The soundtrack is one of my all time favorites along with UT99's. I still have the original big box versions of both!
Recently for the first time. I have done a ton of old fps games now and this one is definitely near the top, though fails to really hit the truly great mark due to some failures in how the combat develops at higher difficulties which becomes especially noticeable towards the end and during the DLC. A similar problem that half life faced but half life embraced it and thus overcame it. Solid 8/10. Definitely better than much of what came after, but it is not the king. The atmosphere is nice and unique, only really comparable to other best-of-early-pc-gaming entries like Hexen 2 or Thief Gold. Just for that it's worth experiencing.
Unreal is near and dear to my heart because it's one of the first PC games I had around 2000. I wasn't my first FPS, but it was unlike anything else I tried before. Meeting the first Nali rabbit, brute, Skaarj, etc. was quite the experience. Tim Sweeney teased us with a possible source code release back in 2015. Flash forward to 2022 and not only there's no source code, but the games are even delisted from digital stores. It's just sad to see Unreal languish like this, while id's classic titles got a new lease on life thanks to being open source. It's even sadder to see people makeing up excuses for Epic why the UE1 source code can't be released (codebase too similar to UE4/5, too many 3rd party components, needs cleanup, etc.), all of which is false or have been already handled by the OldUnreal team.
Great review. It’s truly a shame what epic did to the franchise. In general delisting a Singleplayer game makes zero sense! Unless you hate it like epic games appears to do. Reading about the delisting announcement was a dark moment for the fans an and for me. 😞 Also thank you very much for showcasing my mod #UnrealRedux in your review ❤ Take care and keep up the good work!
Thank you! Yeah same, the day I found out about the delisting, I didn’t even believe it at first. Epic has absolutely zero respect for the game that put them on the map. It’s up to the fans to keep its legacy alive. Keep up the amazing work, I’ve been following Redux for years and it looks absolutely incredible!
This game was the first time I could truly live in the space, it was a turning point. The developers and sound engineers on this game deserve cred no matter what year it is now.
Great video! I just recently loaded this game up on my 90s PC for the first time since the 90s and that first screen where it's just flying around the castle instantly transported me back and gave me goosebumps. Such an awesome game!
A feature that might have been missed but it's extremely unique - being able to set the game speed. From 50% all the way up to 200%. If you feel like the game isn't fast paced enough you just bump it to 120 or 140. If you're getting rekt in botmatch you drop it to 80 or so. I honestly never saw another game with that kind of feature in its options menu.
Yes! A severely underrated feature in games. A lot of source ports/emulators have something similar built in but it's very rare to see it included natively.
To understand epics decision you have to disabuse yourself of the notion that companies have any sort of good will. You might aswell expect morality from a shark. Its a killing machine. The company wants old games dead because people keep coming back to them instead of buying new churned out garbage. these games are evergreens, they gave the company X amount of dolars over two decades ago and do nothing now except make 35+ old gamers wish for games be done to that standard. Its a game for gamers not for casual audience of normies who hate challenge and companies are not interested in making games to impress gamers.
I'm pretty sure the real reason is because they want "Unreal" to be synonymous with a hollywood movie making tool and fear the idea that hollywood execs will find out about the "Unreal" product that has crocodile men that command you to suck on their phallus after blowing your head off into R rated bits. there's just no way that these games were actually drawing enough kids away from Fortnite to make epic lose money
You can read a pretty accurate description of the Epic Games company pathway on wikipedia. They went from game dev, to purchasing other developers, to becoming a 'games as a service' platform with the Epic Games Store. The good timing with the release of fortnight combined with the popularity of battle royale games around 2018 earned the company something like 4 billion dollars in less than 2 years. They have a totally different company model now, and there is no focus on their old 'Unreal' products anymore. Most of the people involved in the development of that series left the company or don't work in game design anymore. It's interesting to talk about certain standards of games, but the numbers don't lie - customers are paying obscene amounts of money for the products they sell today. Almost all of the other staff who left to make their own companies and create single player games either went under or got bought out by someone else (like Microsoft).
Really hope they make a remake of Unreal and Return to Na Pali and a UT99 remake. I will never forget the Dig Site level where you make your way down the illuminated hallway, pick up an item and all the lights slowly start turning off, then the Skaarj soldier ambushes you in the blocked off hallway. Man the atmosphere was so damn good in this masterpiece.
I don't really want a remaster since OldUnreal made a great job at patching it. There are also high definition texture packs and alternative renderers. Also, God bless Krull0r, I very much look forward to Unreal Redux being released. :)
Thank you for making this video!!!! Had this game back in the day on Xbox and did a BUNCH of coop and I was trying for the life of me remember what game I played!
i remember picking up this game on a whim at the local pc shop and being blown away by how real it looked. then i was equally stunned when i bought unreal tournament and realized it wasnt a sequel 🤣 ended up throwing me down the rabbit hole of arena shooters for the next decade and a half though so it was still a win.
THIS game was and still is one of the most impressive PC games ever. Not only was it the beginning of a new Era in terms of 3D engines, it was also the end of another era when it comes to the soundtrack department, since the game used Tracker Modules. Which is why the games music almost makes the game feel like a late 90s Commodore Amiga game :) Unreal and Unreal Tournament were more or less the last games who ever did that. This is also why the actual storage space for Unreal is so small. Because the Module music format was and still is far more efficient than compressed Audio formats. And also no use of Redbook Audio CD music needed, like many other games (including Half Life and Hexen II) did. Module Music is also a LOT more dynamic because it would change speed and style depending on the game scenario and would not just play in the background.
This was the first game that graphically blew my mind. I played it repeatedly. I lived in this game for well over a year. I made friends playing this that I still know to this day.
Just randomly discovered your channel and wanted to say thabks for covering one of my favorite games whose own owners treat like garbage despite its importance.
Excellent video! Unreal was fantastic because it had at that time: the best most advanced graphics, by far the biggest open-space levels, the best level design, awesome music.
oh man. you didn't show off that title screen with the flyby on castle pali. I remember my jaw hitting the floor when I got this game since the only other games I played were like doom clones or 2d side scrollers ala jazz jackrabbit (fun game still actually).
I wish they would have continued to release an new Ureal and Unreal Turnament Title for each new Ureal Engine. Just to showcase what it can do and to kick asses of titles like CoD and other bullshit games for little kids!
That's the funny thing though, they DID released an Unreal Engine showcase game, that DID kicked asses of games like CoD and other bullshit games for little kids...it's called Fortnite. That game was so successful, it arguably KILLED the last Unreal Tournament game.
Unreal along Half - Life & Quake 2 are one of the pillars for fun and interesting FPS. It's only fair to add a review for Half - Life too as it is and still remains my number 1 FPS.
First-person shooter classics that every FPS fan should experience: Doom, Doom 2, Star Wars: Dark Forces, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Star Wars Dark Forces 2, Quake 2, Unreal, Half-Life, Far Cry, Half-Life 2 and Crysis. To get higher/wide-screen resolutions and more goodies, use fan-made engines like EDuke32 for Duke Nukem 3D, QuakeSpasm for Quake and so on.
go0d video man much better review than many other creators in your genre with bigger audiences! keep up the good work! The only "90s Full 3D FPS" that Quake never overshadowed on it! so stupid that Epic abandoned such a RELIC to spend more time on what...Fortnite xD BTW IMO there is no shame or illegal issue by freely downloading an abandonware! I mean they could still sell it, but they don't! sooo...idk!
You can actually disable the dodging thing in the options menu. Go into the menu, then go into options, click game and disable dodging and there you go it's disabled :D
I really do like playing Unreal Gold because there aren't many games out there like it. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a large community out there developing new content for it. Oh, I like the fact that I don't need a Steam account to play it ...
Golly, this game sure seems fun, I hope the Publisher didn't delist this game and the rest of the entire franchise for no reason! In all seriousness tho, great video all around.
The only reason this game is a "forgotten classic" is because of Epic. It seems they've disowned the franchise at this point, and now all they are worried about is keeping Fortnite making money and making their engine more profitable etc. Shame.
Unreal was indeed a great looking game, shown by new modern upgraded version for new hardware. But back then, in order to get close as it's shown in the video, you had to have 3DFX Voodoo card, which was unreachable for many. I remember the awesome look of the unreal and the great game play, but it took another few years when they so called pached the game for Riva TNT or ATI rage pro and it still hadn't delivered the graphics they were promising.
That moment you realize your favorite childhood game was made by the same devs of your current favorite game. Now it makes perfect sense, Digital Extremes make some of the most beautiful looking environments imo, a lot of things from Warframe remind me of Unreal, the vibe and tone of the game the music, the environmental story telling, the enemy design....
It makes me so unbelievably sad to see unreal get delisted. I remember when I was about to get UT on GOG and the next thing I knew, UT and the entire unreal franchise is getting delisted overnight. It just infuriates me on how silent they are about this, they didn't even give a proper reason or anything like why??? Someone also had suggested that maybe the delisting was because of some controversies they had with digital extremes. I don't know much about that however, so take it with a grain of salt
One of the first games I ever played on PC and playing up to this date. Honestly since I no longer have PC with DVD Drive I am glad I was able to buy the Whole Unreal Collection on Steam, when I read about that Deletion of Unreal games from Stores I was honestly mad, becuase since than I am unable to recommend the game to anyone, not by getting it Legally which is a damn shame.
Nice review, Unreal lives as the fans live. :) There are quite a few mods which makes the game more beutiful, making it look quite (retro) modern. I think the enemy AI still holds its place to this day. Nowdays there are really bad AIs because of laziness. Also I quite like the dodge ability, it is a life saver on higher difficulties.
Nice review, I love the game. However it surprised me you called dodging janky and weird. For me its a must to avoid bullets, especially online, in UT.
I played the Unreal campaign properly the first time this year. Back in 1998 I was strictly on the Quake bandwagon and refused to mingle with the competitor... ah well. My experience with Unreal, playing it for the first time in 2023, was that the graphics are amazing, the levels look great, the weapons are really interesting, though some are just vastly overshadowed by others, and the enemies were a good challenge. However the story it tried to tell falls completely flat for me, and it's not helped by the at times extremely obtuse puzzles presented. I did not have fun playing the single player campaign. I might have enjoyed it somewhat if the story at least made sense, but no... as a random prisoner randomly surviving a spaceship crash, you somehow manage to single-handedly defeat an entire oppressing force against a native population on the planet, almost as if by accident, while just trying to find a ride back home. The game tried so hard to tell a story, that it forgot to give you an objective to play towards. If simply the player character had had a narration, "I should find X to achieve Y", that might have saved my impression a whole lot, and simultaneously also helped with the nonsensical puzzles! How I remember most of the puzzles, it was simply hunting for the next switch you hadn't pressed yet, and after that then good luck guessing what it opened. This kind of undirected switch hunting is just tiring. (For comparison, Quake 1 and 2 generally handles switch hunts such that activating something either let you have the effect of the switch directly in view, or give you a message/mission update on what you achieved, or otherwise make it not a switch but a "key" item to match with a door. All methods that telegraph to the player what the way forward is.) I also remember Unreal having several rooms shutting you in until you achieve a goal, but never hinting at the goal: Similar-looking arenas in the same level could have different goals, with some being "find the hidden switch" while spawning endless enemies, other being "hit this sequence of less hidden switches", again with endless enemies, and yet some having long but not endless waves of enemies and only opening after defeating them all. One other thing detracting from the single player experience for me might be that the environments and the contexts they are placed in can be too detailed for their own good. The locations intend to be real places used for specific purposes by one or another culture, but they just don't always feel sensible for that, somewhat like the uncanny valley for humanoid figures: By being too close to looking like something an alien culture might have built and be using, the level design for the gameplay challenges starts sticking out that much more. Unreal might be a game worth remembering for the things it did well, but I don't think it's a game that's still worth playing for its campaign today.
Love Unreal. There still seems to be this bubbling under love for it. Such a shame Epic delisted it. Can't wait for Unreal Redux though. There's at least one project to write an open source Unreal one engine (maybe more). If they can mimic it right then might end up better than having the original source code anyway :D
graphically it was a showcase, very demanding on the hardware - but game wise, it didnt blow me away, i didnt like the enemy design, weapons, level design. It pales compared to HL. The highly praised "AI" was just a combination of dodging, stafing moves., but nothing i would call AI. HL did this much better. When i first encountered the grunts, i tried the old peek a boo tactics that always worked in 90s shooters. lure them around the corner and shoot them in the face. When i tried that in HL, i was waiting behind the corner, but instead of the grunt running into my pump gun, i faced a grenade that was thrown to smoke me out and blew up in my face - that blew my mind at the time, that really made enemy feel smart and not like cannon fodder.
Played this classic multiple times back in the day and today. IMO the relentless loads of half baked garbage we see today cant hold a candle to games from over 20 years ago MoH, Quake, Unreal etc always fun. Ive been gaming since the Atari 2600 and IMO the majority of corporate, political agenda filled, BS games today f-ing suck, a scant few are worth my time.
No you should not. It is boring engine advertisement with irritating enemies movements. Even its atmosphere was better implemented in Heavy Metal FAKK 2. Some decent music tough.
Good video but 2:09 isn't true. Sega Model 3 arcade games were the absolute pinnacle of graphics technology at the time. Daytona USA 2, Scud Race, Virtua Fighter 3, Sega Rally 2 etc. Just a few examples. Unreal was the best looking PC/home game in 1998, but it certainly wasn't THE best looking game. Try running Daytona 2 in the 'Super Model' emulator with a similar high res as here, it will embarrass Unreal. Then there's Scud Race which came out 2 years earlier in 1996, yet still looked better. Model 3 hardware was extremely desirable but out of reach tech for the average person, but it set the bar back then, so everything i see i would judge by those standards. Basically, Model 3 ruined Unreal for me lol, because the graphics were the main thing it had going for it, but i'd already seen better looking games, running at a solid 60fps, that also had a far higher level of overall polish.
@@rodrigogirao8344 Yeah i have, it's nice, but that texture mod didn't exist at the time and no PC could have run it either because GPU's didn't have enough VRAM back then.
