Unreal: Return to Na Pali first playthrough, part 1 (OldUnreal 227j)
2With the base game completed, it's time to move on to Unreal's mission pack, and see what new tricks it has up its sleeve.
When I was younger, I somehow owned this without Unreal (only UT99). Without having played the base game, it gave the impression that the difficulty "curve" was more of a vertical line. I took one look at it at the time, ran head-first into the giant brute on the bottom floor (and promptly died), and immediately noped out. I still question that enemy placement, but at least I had a better idea what I was in for now, having played the original it was based off of.
The new weapons in the mission pack are a lot of fun, and I found myself much more quickly gravitating to them rather than often defaulting to the dispersion pistol as I had in base Unreal. Granted, the CAR in particular is probably _too_ good - even its explosive alt-fire (which seems to also be more ammo-efficient) is absurdly accurate and still hitscan (or extremely close to it) even from long distances. In the early-game, the ammo balancing seems to heavily incentivize the player to use the heck out of the CAR as well.
The first couple of new enemy types (namely the pack hunters and spiders) certainly add new types of threats. The space marines, on the other hand, feel arguably less threatening (usually, at least) than mercenaries, given that they seem to be less tanky, but they certainly can pack a punch given they're also equipped with the new weapons.
The mission pack also went out of its way to include more lore, in the form of an intro plus audio logs by the protagonist between every level. Granted, sometimes it's _too_ much, as the protagonist even says there isn't much to say. I will say the lore had me initially thinking this mission pack might be ridiculously short, but it eventually throws in a twist that makes it clear there's more substance to it.
It's also nice to see kill stats between each level, which is something I was really surprised the original game didn't have. It really helps dispel the feeling of levels being sparsely-populated when you realize how much stuff you had to kill, though I also suspect Return to Na Pali populates levels a bit more thoroughly than Unreal did.
We've already seen plenty of environments making use of both familiar and new aesthetics, and there've been a couple of significant opportunities for side-exploration. So far the mission pack feels like it holds up to the original fairly well in those regards; I'm looking forward to seeing how the rest pans out.
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