Got the power?
The graphics are absolutely stunning. I think that I can say in all honesty that they are far and away the most beautiful graphics that I have seen in any game ever (and I’m not a man to use the word beautiful willy-nilly). Textures are complex, polished, colourful, varied, and despite the fact that things like shiny surfaces and water are so impressive that they don’t look anything like the way shiny surfaces or water look you probably won’t care because they are just so cool (I have to admit that I spent a minute or two stepping from side to side and admiring the light effects on a huge polished metal block). Now this isn’t to say that there isn’t a cost, and the cost can be really high. I tend to think that I have a pretty good rig – it’s a PIII 1.2Ghz machine, 300-odd MB of RAM, a GeForce4 64MB graphics card, and 512K Creative Labs sound card. Also, I’m running XP Pro and have converted my main hard-drive to NTFS for maximum performance. Because of this my habits of late have been to install a new game, go to the options menu, crank everything up to maximum, and then expect it to run smooth as silk. Wrong. Not with UII. The developers of Unreal II seem to be part of a new (and damnably irritating) set that are designing games to run with technology that is not likely to be affordable, or possibly even available until several months after the game has been launched. I started off with everything at maximum, entered the game, and it crashed about 20 yards into the start of the pre-mission showing-off session. So I went back and dropped it from 32-bit colour to 16-bit and started again. Better, but still not great, and to cut a long story short, I ended up getting rid of the shadows altogether, knocking the water textures down a notch, not going above 1024x768 resolution, and even then it’s still a little jerky when things get cluttered onscreen – which is, of course the time when you really need the frame-rates to be good. I find this a shame because, as I said, the graphics really are incredible, and even with all of the concessions that I’ve had to make it still looks great but … y’know … it’s not that much better than a lot of other games in the genre, and I still know that this isn’t the way it’s supposed to look and that does rather rankle. It’s not all bad news though as even considering all the bits that I’ve had to give up for the sake of a good frame-rate there are still plenty of good things to look at such as the character animations, the weapon animations and the indigenous life-forms which are all superbly done.
