I humbly propose that Unreal be considered the best (as combination of length, enjoyability, replayability, originality, innovativity, immersiveness and character) FPS there is. Unreal's monsters, on the other hand, offer quite a variety and some of the nastiest challenges (the Skaarj Warrior being the pinnacle of what FPS enemies should stive to be (well, perhaps with slightly improved AI and edge handling) and the Slith being what every nastiest FPS creature should strive to be). To me, what Half-Life 2 offered, was a long linear route through a sequence of scripts and. Of Half-Life's monsters, the funnest/most original was probably the Barnacle. Doom 3, as far as I remember, only offered one beast that was fun to kill and that was the most regular of all - the Zombie. Granted, the Kleer from Serious Sam were a great pack game, but quite honestly the only beast who has the right balance of agiliy (such as being able to dodge Flak shells and rockets) and aggressiveness is the Skaarj. However, as far as the enjoyment factor of fighting these beasts goes, the good old regular Skaarj beats all. Indeed - in my opinion, the ArchVile in Doom 1 and 2 is the ultimate enemy in any FPS (actually the Vore from Quake I comes a close second). Let's also have a look at the monsters each game has to offer: Let's analyze in-depth (the higher the score, the better):ģ immersiveness is a combination of several factors, not just how addictive the game was: how good its ambience is and how original it "feels" and how well it alienates you from the real world when you play itĪs one can see, Unreal, in my humble opinion, simply outdoes the two of its most feared rivals (even if the games aren't too directly comparable). The only game that comes close to challenging its position is System Shock (2), but I wouldn't go so far as to compare the two, them being pretty different in nature and all. Of all the "non-trivial" FPS's, Unreal beats all rivals. The original game is a whopping 38 levels long, with some levels that stand at up to a day of gameplay if you're playing them the first time round (not my case). I just got my hands on Unreal Gold and finished both the main game as well as the Na Pali mission pack on Unreal (granted, the Na Pali mission pack more sucked than it did not). That scared the crap out of me.Īlso, when I was playing through Half-Life Source for the first time and was going through the underwater obstacle course later in the same map and suddenly got plucked out of the water by a barnacle thanks to the Source engine allowing their tongues to reach underwater.The original Unreal. Behind that fence is a corner with a rocket launcher lying on the ground and a barnacle directly above it, cleverly hidden by some piping but low enough that if it grabs you, it starts munching on you instantly. You know the part with the snark nests, where you're supposed to go right but going left and through three snark nests eventually get you to a room with Alien Grunts and some hidden health? Past the second nest is an alcove to the left with a chain link fence.
My worst experience with them was at the beginning of Forget About Freeman. Not that the latter would be flat-out impossible, mind you, as a derivative of the tau cannon, the ion ramjet engine note basically a tau cannon's accelerator component mated to an ion engine to crank up exhaust velocity to the point where it's more powerful than a conventional rocket engine and gains Weaponized Exhaust that can cut titanium from a hundred meters away, in addition to a ramscoop that can use anything from atmospheric air to solar wind as reaction mass, is inspired by video footage and sensor readings of the completed version being used by a time traveler, making its very existence a causal loop and leaving those in the know wondering where the concept originated from in the first place.Īlso, regarding the above question about the surprise barnacle. Speaking of which, I'm half-considering some people eventually getting suspicious that something's off about tau cannon technology because this kind of ultracompact particle accelerator is waaaaaay too advanced for turn-of-the-millennium, resulting in suspicions that Black Mesa either copied it from undisclosed alien technology or acquired it via time travel.