Here are my thoughts on Unreal II: The Awakening (UT2) as someone who enjoys old school FPS games and also had a blast playing all the Unreal Tournament titles - with the exception of UT 2003 and UT 2004:

PROS:

- I think the graphics still look reasonably nice as of 2023. In other words, it's not like they've aged poorly.

- The game may have had demanding hardware requirements back when it was released, but any half decent PC built since 2010 or so should be able to run UT2 at max settings with little difficulty.

- The action is decent, if uninspired.

CONS:

- Once the game loads, you are forced to hit the 'Esc' key just to get the main menu. No other key will do the job. The fact that more commonly used and accessible keys like 'Enter' and the space bar could not be used makes it seem like UT2 is a game that was, first and foremost, designed for the original Xbox and was later ported to the PC.

- The game has long cutscenes that cannot be skipped.

- Loading saved game states takes quite long - especially for a game that was published in the early 2000s. I'm reminded of waiting to load saved game states for Duke Nukem Forever off of a solid state drive. To make matters worse, the game regularly crashes or glitches by loading endlessly while attempting to load saved states.

- The character you control moves slowly.

- UT2's levels are linear, do not promote exploration, and lack interactivity.

- The music is generic and unmemorable. While the sound effects are serviceable, they're nothing to write home about.

- The original Unreal game let you simulate multiplayer matches against AI-controlled bots - not unlike what Unreal Tournament became. However, UT2 lacks any such feature.

- At the time of the UT2's release, it wasn't doing anything special in terms of game play mechanics, graphics, story, etc. Half-Life 1 and Red Faction had already been out for a while. As overrated and regressive as I believe it has been for how FPS games are designed, Halo had also been out and had been very influential. Other than having its own plot, which hasn't struck me as particularly memorable after playing for a few hours, UT2 doesn't seem like it was doing anything to be different or special compared to other FPS games.

CLOSING IMPRESSIONS:

UT2 seems decent, but inferior to its prequel as well as the first Unreal Tournament. I will continue playing it and forming my opinion, but for now, I'll say that UT2 isn't a game I'd recommend people spend money on. And even if you wanted to buy the game, as of 2023, Steam has notified me that it is "no longer available on the Steam store." I suspect that happened because Epic Games made it exclusive to their virtual store. If that is the case, Epic can get bent for limiting customer choices and probably making it nearly impossible for anyone who doesn't already own UT2 to find - much less read - this review.