Review: Undying

Undying is a horror game circa 2001. You play an occult investigator visiting an old war buddy (from WWI) who's in trouble. Since this is a horror game, it's bad trouble. If you want some mood music for the review check out Bill Brown's sample page, which includes music from the game.

Gameplay
The gameplay in Undying is a hybrid of magic and gun play. The left mouse button uses weapons. This means guns, molotovs, and occult artifacts. The right mouse button uses your spells. Eventually you'll have eight weapons and eight spells. You also have an on-demand inventory to cycle through and use. This is too much stuff.

The game defaults to having you scroll back and forth through all your various inventories, which is a pain and will generally get you killed. I'll give partial credit for giving me enough configuration options that I was eventually able to work out a compromise that gave me easy access to most of my favored weapons and spells.

Favored spells are especially important as most spells cost way too much mana to use unless they've been fully upgraded with four "amplifiers". On one level, this lets you customize your experience. But in practice it just meant I didn't bother using half the spells in the game because they were prohibitively expensive.

These annoyances aside, the combat actually can be rewarding. There are spells with multiple uses or tricks to making them more effective. There are some boss fights that force you to think on your feet to realize what you need to do to win. A few enemies have interesting attack patterns. Overall I would say the combat was passable.

I'd say the same about the puzzles. There were a few deathtraps, the occasional jumping puzzle, and a lot of finding keys. Navigation is the biggest puzzle, especially in the early game where you're in a giant mansion, trying every door to figure out which one is unlocked this time. Which doors are locked / jammed always changes depending on where the designers want to funnel you next. This problem is compounded by the scarcity of health and ammo in the start of the game, in effect forcing you to check every door, or risk missing that crucial box of bullets or health pack that could have gotten you through the next encounter.

The difficulty curve of the game was also pretty uneven. At the start, I was constantly afraid for my life. By the mid game, I was an action hero. By the late game, I was a juggernaut. I had almost 2500 spare health in my inventory and was unable to pick up ammo because I was full of every kind. I had been taught early on to rely on spells and ammo free artifact weapons.

Theatrics
Undying attempts to tell the story of a family corrupted by the occult. Unfortunately, it does so through a few text journal entries and occasional reenactments by disembodied voices, which while somewhat effective, are too few and far between. System Shock did it much better, seven years earlier. The game actually begins with a flashback to the main character's experiences in WWI.

If they'd shown more of the decline and fall of the family in flashbacks like that, it would have been much more effective. The game was developed by Dreamworks Interactive, so it's not like they didn't know anyone with the talent or money to help out. According to WikiPedia, Dreamworks Interactive was sold to EA after Undying, so it's possible nobody really wanted DI around.

Aesthetics

As you can see (if your monitor's brightness is high enough), the game is capable of impressive visuals. Unfortunately, most of the architecture is not this impressive. The low polygon budget means most of the interior of the mansion is completely bereft of furniture or furniture that is so low poly it's hard to look at. The game uses the Unreal engine, and most of it's outdoor terrain has the same grass texture on a gem stone look that Unreal's did. That said, there are still some environments (or at least sections of environments) that are impressive to see, and there is enough variety of environments to keep the repetition monster at bay. The weapon, magic, and weather effects also help to enhance the visuals.

The sound work is good, with plenty of creepy noises and distinctive weapon and spell sounds. In fact some of my biggest scares in the game came from my own weapons and spells. :) The music (in case you're not listening to it already) is also great at setting the mood.


Final Score
3 of 5