I bought Unreal 2: The Awakening over a year ago when it was first released, mainly because I had played the original Unreal and loved it. The original Unreal was a long multiplayer game with versatile weapons, challenging game play, and a rewarding feeling once you made it all the way through, so I expected to see the same out of the second. I had played a bit of Unreal Tournament also, but only seen UT 2010 once or twice. I was excited to play Unreal 2 when it was released.

I played Unreal 2 and was dazzled by the sweet weapons and gorgeous weapons, but was disappointed when I found it to be a short game with no multiplayer. (For more detail on Unreal 2: The Awakening, read Andy Lee’s review with my Second Opinion look, as this review will cover only the game’s multiplayer expansion /pc/unreal2.php). I took a melancholy attitude toward the game, and put it in a drawer for a long time.

One day almost a year later, I saw that they had originally meant to put in multiplayer, but ran out of time. So they were going to make a patch with vehicles and a multiplayer mode, and release it. When I checked a few months later, I found it.

Unreal 2 Extended Multiplayer, or XMP as it is usually referred to, is once again beautiful graphically. There is one game mode, and that is a Capture-The-Flag mutation. If you have ever played Burning Bridges outside (assuming you have been outdoors before) it is sort of like that. If you haven’t, listen up.

The game play consists of 4 artifacts, or your “flags” in essence being the targets of your rampage. In true CTF fashion, you need to collect them from the enemy base and ship them on over to your base. Here is the trick though, you have to have all four at once at your base to win, and each team starts with two.

You are a marine of one of three classes and two teams in this game. You are equipped with jump jets, shields, and armor of different qualities depending on your class. The teams are “Red vs. Blue” (which sounds a lot like a great online show that you should all watch at redvsblue.com) and your classes consist of the Ranger class, the Tech class, and the Gunner class.

The Ranger is the recon unit of sorts, with a sniper rifle, magnum pistol, an alien shock lance, and a grenade launcher armed with both fragmentation and smoke grenades. They also act as medic, dropping health packs and healing teammates.

The Techie has a combat assault rifle, a shotgun, and a grenade launcher armed with electro-magnetic-pulse and corrosive gas grenades. The Techie also has the ability to deploy force shield walls along with auto-cannon and rocket turrets, and can repair teammate shields or drop shield pickups.

Finally, the Gunner class carries a rocket launcher, an urban-assault flamethrower, and a grenade launcher loaded with incendiary and concussion (flash-bang) grenades. The Gunner can also drop landmines or deploy laser trip mines. The ability to drop ammunition pickups and fill teammates ammo also comes with this class.
There are three vehicle types that you can use, and up to three people can man them. There is the Harbinger, the Juggernaut, and the Raptor. The Harbinger resembles a sort of APC truck, with rocket launchers and a plasma cannon. The Juggernaut is a big tank with a main cannon and flamethrower. The Raptor is a souped-up jeep with a rapid-fire machine gun. It bears a strong resemblance to the Warthog in Halo, if you have played that game.

Each team also has mannable-defense guns, such as roundhouse machine gun turrets, huge mortars, gigantic electric beam projectors, and many others. These are very useful for defending your artifacts, but don’t be in it when they blow up!

You spawn at designated deploy points across the map that you have to run up and hack for your team, though each team has a few in their base that are non-hackable. Other things you can hack are doors (so that only your team can use them) and energy generators. Generators power everything. Your base, it’s mannable-defense cannons, vehicles, artifact node, deployable turrets, mines, force fields, everything. If your team has no energy generators captured, you will gradually lose the usage of your defenses.

You need to utilize teamwork to get through the tough lines of enemies and their deadly defenses, as this strange variation of Capture-The-Flag takes a lot more strategy than most people are used to in a First-Person Shooter. If you have Unreal 2 and never bothered to play it after you beat it, now is the time. The patch for XMP is downloadable at www.u2xmp.com, but beware, it is a biggie at 275 MB. If you own the game, it is definitely worth it however. When I wrote the Unreal 2 review when that game came out, and if you read it, you will find I was not too happy with the game. With the addition of multiplayer now though, if you see the game for cheap somewhere, remember there is a lot more to the game than there once was, and I would suggest looking into playing it. I enjoy it very much, and I hope you do to if you get the chance to experience it.