What do you think of Unreal Gold?
Is it more similar to Quake or Half Life?
Does its multiplayer mode actually works?
It's most similar to Unreal.
It's basically Unreal plus it's somewhat mediocre (but still playable) expansion. In the past there were some intercompatibility problems between Unreal and Unreal Gold (Important when using custom content or playing MP), but modern patches seem to have taken care of that (as well as such things a compatibility issues with modern graphics hardware).
As for Unreal itself, it's awesome.
Overall it's somewhere between Quake and HL - far more focused experience than Quake, but not as concerned with story as HL is, with more fluid, atmosphere-centric style somewhat calling back to Quakes less literal stylistics.
It's definitely not like Quake where instead of forming some coherent whole the levels are merely a suitably gloomy backdrop for the carnage, but it's also not HL1 where the environments are firmly rooted in reality of particular location and wrapped around the narrative of one unlucky scientist dude with surprising knack for modern warfare. Instead, in Unreal you can say that the game is a journey; you will travel through vast variety of environments, themes (more often than not quite unearthly) changing like in a kaleidoscope.
So where Quake was basically all greenish brown castles, bluish brown temples/magical castles and brownish brown industrial interiors (still vaguely castle like), and where Half-Life was a collection of typical scientific-industrial complex interiors in various stages of devastation, plus some desert (with a hint of alien WTF at the end helping it to not be a game about crates), Unreal will take you through crashed spaceships (and some quite functional), picturesque canyons connecting alien industrial complexes with old castles and ruined temples, and beyond without stopping mid-stride.
It will nevertheless still try to paint cohesive bigger picture and allow you to cross your paths with numerous backstories populating its universe, told using both environments and text, helpfully translated by your portable universal translator device. Still, unlike HL Unreal is predominately a game of loneliness and alienation, where your physical loneliness is compounded by being stranger in a strange land.
That's about the atmosphere, technically Unreal is quite impressive as well.
Stunning (for its time) visuals (dat lighting and procedural textures) help bring the environments to life, while levels themselves tend to be large and often have fairly nonlinear layouts. They are pretty numerous too, making game fairly long at 38 maps in single player campaign (to be fair, not *all* of them are massive nonlinear environments).
The game features excellent dynamic soundtrack (by the guys who made Deus Ex music), and sound design (mostly) doesn't lag behind music quality-wise.
Enemy AI was stunning back in 1998 and, partly thanks to lack of development in this regard, remains praiseworthy to this day. It's a bit worse than HL's at apparent teamwork, but far better at environment traversal and situational awareness.
The game features an arsenal of 10 weapons, which are a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand they are far more imaginative and interesting (both conceptually and in actual use) than either classic "fallback melee weapon, pistol, shotgun, machinegun (often gatling), rocket launcher, energy thingamajig" or modern "assault rifle #567, assault rifle #389, etc." typical FPS weapon collection, further enhanced by each weapon featuring at least two distinct fire modes.
On the other the weapons are slightly let down by their relatively low power and proportionally wimpy sound effects (to clarify - on release sounds were pretty cool, but way too quiet, a later patch replaced them with much louder, but generic sounding ones), which thankfully pretty much exhausts the list of game's less awesome traits.
In addition to weapons you have a number of usable inventory items that will help you in various combat and non-combat situations.
Expansion is basically Unreal, except with muddled environmental and narrative progression and much less sense of identity.
It adds some (usually annoying) enemies, three boring and unimaginative weapons and some voice acted intermissions that have an interesting property of making the protagonist sound like an emasculated wimp.
On the upside, being essentialy a big glob of glued together Unreal outtakes with some original content in between it has several really sweet maps.
It's about half as long as the game proper.
There are also tons of user content floating around the web, some of it is of superb quality.
Multiplayer generally works, but since there is such thing as Unreal Tournament it only really makes sense to run coop, as UT offers superior competitive experience.
Make sure to grab the
patches as otherwise you may be stuck with lack of compatibility with other Unreal versions and possibly annoying technical issues like inability to use hardware acceleration which may degrade visuals to the point where it becomes noticeable by unaided eye (Unreal was notorious for not only its stunning visuals, but also its ability to still look breathtakingly awesome without hardware acceleration).
I enjoyed Unreal 2. Great sci fi shooter. Different than Unreal 1, which is why people were disappointed. As usual.
Lol, "addled".
Andross
FYI, Unreal 2 is possibly on par with Oblivion in terms of both franchise rape and general failure.
Sluggish, linear, heavily scripted, devoid of any atmosphere, with facepalm inducing enemy design, downright insulting redesign of Skaarj (the major antagonists of 1), no continuity with 1 or any indication it takes part in the same universe (other than aforementioned skaarj that got badly raped themselves) and retarded plot.
It has some interesting looking locations and some fairly interesting and fun to use weapons, but they are as much of this game's saving grace as turds being firm and solid instead of drowning you with diarrhea can be a saving grace of being crushed under an avalanche of shit.
