Reviews - Leo(T.C.K.)

While I haven't played Daikatana for a while, it is one of the first fps games I have played and gotten used to, when it came with a cover disc of a Level magazine I believe in 2002 or something. I mostly missed out on the bad hype and stuff and just enjoyed for what it was. It was a simpler time for me and I didn't have as many standards as I have now. I have suffered part of the game unpatched too and had to learn not to save on wyndrax's level part 2. But I had an absolute blast online and even ran a server for a while, even during the game's renewed popularity thanks to the standalone daikatana dm release around 2007.

The deathmatch is one of the most solid 90s/early 2000s experiences you can have.

The singleplayer requires a specific mindset however but its not a bad game compared to what was coming out. Now with the 1.3 patch out there (I tested the patch early on even before the public betas) most issues are fixed and there are many new optional features, I even asked to make them optional originally only through cvars, but you get the point.

I do see Romero having a clear vision with this project but he did mismanage and have the game be "soft rebooted" two times, once the engine switch period along with art being completely redone and second making the game with the new less-experienced team that contributed to the unstable nature of the released game together with the more streamlined psx-like approach with maps being separated into multiple parts that load and essentially this is the only time the hub system is being used but its probably because they did plan PSX2 version at one point and they wanted both games to be identical and what not. Suffice to say it was still badly optimized for its time and some video cards had famously problems, and I didn't know of the existance of some of the additional fixes for those at the time, just had the bad luck of having one of those cards.

There are some genuinly good ideas and the "deathtag" game is essentially an early version of the bombing run game from ut2(kx), which was simplified during developement to be sports-like entirely.

But a lot of it was still not finished like there is an entire array of items that were not finished or do nothing, which is a real shame as it was developed in mind with a lot of inventory but most of it is now instant effect or not, despite there being a usable inventory menu in practice that is a little clumsy.

Also the presentation isn't stellar and is reminiscent of some games like Heretic II but in my opinion Heretic II is a worse game and I do mean Heretic II the post-split Raven game and not the original Heretic II which became Hexen....

Note that both games feature cutscenes with characters not opening their mouths at all. Just in the released game they also opted for FMVs in HII and not in Daikatana....at least between levels.

This was apparently a common thing with Quake 2 Engine games but its really jarring especially if all Unreal engine games that did feature talking characters apart from mods, did have talking animations. I am excluding original Unreal because at no point you can hear or see characters talking there so it didn't need those animations and yet even mods like ONP added talking textures that at least simulated the effect like on that female sidekick at the end...

yet a game like daikatana or heretic II couldn't pull it off despite being the game that also made the models themselves unlike mods for existing games.

And yet they had features in some alpha builds that were not included in the release or that even predated Quake 3..but again this is partly due to the soft reboot happening after the original devs left.

Overall not a bad game, but I do understand why it triggers some people or why they wouldn't want to play it, but in general that was something about the entire era and maybe partly the game engine, too.

And compared to other eidos released games like tomb raider ones I don't think this fares that badly.

I have to say, quite honestly, as a base game, doom2 is better suited for modding/mapping than of the base content and maps itself. You could have cherrypick 1/3 of the game because most of its maps are not good or are just gimmick maps and they reduced detail on ton of maps. Original Doom had much more sense and depth to it than this does. Thankfuly almost all the addons fixed this problem and it just offers all kind of wacky creativity but I do have soft spot for vanilla mods/maps especially and I myself made maps that are compatible fully with vanilla doom2. But some of the level design I found in this game to be just too random, but the quality went down with the "commercial doom" approach this had and that's obvious. The super shotgun also often feels off from the other weapons and they might have been better off still keeping a pump action like it once was obviously. Apart from that it is a good game and people forget that doom2 used a modified engine with new linedef types and other things that weren't possible in plain doom, however the patches for doom upgraded its engine to the level of doom2 anyways and ultimate doom used those new features in episode 4.
But as for the levels, my rating could have easily been 7/10 because of them.

I am split between 7 and 8 sometimes on this one. Its not bad in any way and is more polished and superior version of the Pariah multiplayer to describe the game in few words. It has a much better art theme in my opinion and Jean Rochefort really shines in this one as art director I believe. It even seems to contain few packages from earlier Pariah/warpath developement which is nice and I guess it can be interchanged, though the staticmeshes and animations won't work copied over unfortunately, but they can be exported/reused.

It is a good game and the music is really good too. Has some ut3 vibes too even though this is earlier. This was overshadowed however by the release of Xbox 360 and its games like Gears of War. Maybe this game could be re-released for free, it is a nice deathmatch game and I find that games like Doom 2016 must have taken some inspiration from less known games like this, or it has to do with the fact that Jean Rochefort worked for ID Software after this game, I have no clue. I always wanted to get hold of him to ask, especially given that he made some of the oldtime favorite custom maps for Unreal and UT.

I didn't expect I would find many positives about the game but one of the hidden gems is the leftover first person weapon shockwave model from pariah beta found in one of the game's packages. I find it suspiciously similar to some planned gun for original Unreal and the two games already used some old discarded Unreal ideas from the original game and from warfare.

Well what can I say? This is the only remaining half life game or spinoff that I played that I didn't review yet. Most of this game is fairly boring and honestly it only gets good towards the end where there's a story twist and the game becomes even more reminescent of horror films like Cube. But calling it innovative and best puzzle game ever? No way. Remember Prey? While the original games were cancelled the concept of portal gun isn't entirely new as such. I didn't play the sequel nor I really cared about it.

I cannot give this game justice and of course I am biased since I mod primarily for this game and have loved since i was very young when it came out. Either way, I am sad that tons of levels and other content have been cut and to this day we don't have nearly anything of the cut levels that was made in total for this game. It was really massive once even once made for massively online experience. It had three to four distinct developement phases too and started out on ms dos from which phase we've only seen the mesh editor. Indeed the early phases of all the years are missing from all that got recovered over years in exception of 1998. I hope someone will one day come forward with a full cache of build and maps like the shadow warrior betas were released.

This game was massive...like a giant ****. (check out package aw-junk, there is a giant **** there after all)

But size isn't everything guys. I am ignoring all the ut2003 content here and only rating the new stuff. The assault was great and is probably the best addition of this. A lot of the content and staticmeshes came from the unreal warfare game that epic was in progress to completely remake at that time so they used all that stuff to make new looking stuff while not spending money on new artists. As a result this game contains the cog logo on a dropship in the intro level, known from gears of war, thus making the games canon if you take it that way. As in sharing the same universe, as gears used to be warfare.

This probably already makes your head spin. I give the "low" rating for some ****** new dm maps, for nerfing the dm gameplay which felt fine in ut2k3 and for introducing the terrible credit system which is even worse than it was in the ut2k3 beta. The SP ladder is atrocious.
They also cut out ctf face 2 which was in the de bonuspack for previous game due to some issues they didn't want to fix. The bulldog vehicle demo is missing, instead they added onslaught which was an addon project for ut2k3 that they decided to add in. No more than 4 companies thus in the end worked on this title and all kind of freelancers. Most of the content came from dropped projects or even available addons for ut2k3 like teddy tapawan's deck17 and faceclassic. Teddy made use of the unfinished jump boots item in the ut2k3 original but for this game they cut it out completely and a hot steam shaft as a jumppad was added. Why? Don't know but its one of the many reasons why this game is worse than its predecessor and the hud and art style turned even more cartoony and strange. The new model for the link gun and its projectiles seem to be a call back to the flame gun cut from unreal which was a 1996 weapon that nobody of the wide public knew about back then. Yea, it's all a bit weird. The new weapons in this are a bit strange and have this unfinished feeling like the target painter lacking proper sounds the avril being oversized especially in third person, etc. It also didn't really have any proper design plan unlike most of the games in the series.

My rating is a bit relative but I am rating it this way because I feel that the game is not appreciated enough and overshadowed by its sucessor. It was interesting more science fantasy like take on UT but having unique style and centered around the four planets and it had shared developement with unreal championship which was just a different shade of the same game. this was mostly de's lone job until like the last phase of developement where epic stopped focusing on unreal warfare and helped de get this game out. As a result it includes a bonus in form of warfare's bulldog vehicle as some kind of presentation and the epic bonus pack had used dom junkyard which was a warfare dm map as shown briefly in the gdc 2002 presentation and the leaked warfare demo from the same period. Overall this was still a way better game than that warfare demo sorry to say. The DE bonus pack consists of mostly cut maps from the game which isn't bad at all. The gameplay was very balanced and dm felt right unlike ut2004 where to make it fun you had to activate all kind of mutators.

Lol I end up rating everything unreal almost each time by 8. I am intimately familiar with this game's developement and at one point it was like Blood 2's mess, except it got a polish from some really talented people. It was a mess of decision changing, making game more linear and meeting demands of the publishers who were like slavemaster to the company who made it because they bought them over from gti. The original concept was much grander and the game started on modified unreal 1 engine being the next step after ut's release. While the story details of the initial version are sparse it still featured the corporations from the original game like Inuit. The Hell facility used to be run by them. There are some alternate paths in the levels like in hell via the vent shaft but they are difficult to find for casual players and they were well hidden so that the publishers wouldn't spot it easily. Grayson Edge gave up on trying to mask it though and made his levels incredibly linear while in the alpha version they were still fine (the 2000 version). Some of his later levels were also cut and sections and there was a plan for singleplayer expansion too. Sadly with u2xmp they closed legend down and any wip ended right there.

Since this game got cancelled I cannot really give it a score that would reflect it. Let's just say that I tried it early 2015 for the first time and got really hopeful for it it was like quake live with ut3 but better. But then all those updates came and config problems and they moved it away from the more hardcore group and I'm not keen on that art style either. I didn't try all the versions but I suggest tracking down the older versions too and not just the last one. I know they brought back the uc2 grenade launcher at some point but I didn't try it. I liked how initially the biorifle got updated with more modes and that you could try it in the training map. Ultimately ut3 was still the right evolution for the franchise and now it's dead unfortunately.

Argh this one is a tough cookie for me. I bought it not long after it was released in the collectors edition. It was a good buy and it was even slightly discounted at the time. I had two choices but could only buy one game. I chose UT3 over Gears of War in the end. Even though I could barely run it at the time it was still fun and I actually thought of it as one of the best in the series. Given the shared art theme with Gears it could be argued it takes place at the same universe. After all Gears started as Unreal warfare and they used a lot of content in ut2004 from warfare when it was clear it wasn't going to get used again in the same form. The ut2004 intro even has the cog logo on the dropship.

This was the return to more brutal and mature style and sexy (but not in the way many people think). Yet some of it was so blatantly cringy/dumb. The respawners were better explained in the game devastation which was once an official unreal game too.

But honestly I saw this as a big improvement over ut2004 because it was more of an original game, there was a design doc and real concept art etc and that was lacking from ut2994 as it was basically like a big expansion pack thrown together from a lot of scrapped planned content. So there's certainly more originality here even though it does reuse some ideas planned for unreal 2 and unreal warfare but those were the good ideas so thats fine. Stuff like stasis fields originated in unreal 2 but were cut from the game.

Overall it is a pretty good game and it has underwent some changes thorought the patches and developement.