Unreal

STORY
The game's story takes place in a land called "The Land of Nothingness" (quite odd name isn't it?) where Arabatan (our hero) leads a peaceful life with his beloved wife Isolde. Some couples usually have a pet animal, but the unique thing with this couple is that they have a special friend; a dragon called Dracus! Everything was so calm and fruitful until one day Isolde was kidnapped by an evil creature called "Master of Darkness" who was mesmerized by her beauty and declared he would marry her on Mortenis' Day! As Arabatan, your quest is to seek for Isolde and rescue her before it's too late! The quest is so tough, but you'll have a precious ally by your side; Dracus!

GAMEPLAY
Unreal consists of eight different levels (five in pseudo-3D)! At the beginning, the game has you on Dracus's back flying at high speeds and collecting crystals for bonuses while you avoid crashing on trees, hills and some huge dinosaur monsters (!), gigantic bears and more! The style of this level reminds us of Sega's Space Harrier. At the second level, after landing on the ground, the game takes you to a 2D game where you control Arabatan with his shiny sword and battle with a variety of enemies and small dragons! Apart from the living foes, you must be careful with several deadly obstacles that move towards you such as rocks etc. In addition, you must look around (especially when in 2D mode) to unravel clues to advance. Your sword is quite powerful but it gets twice as powerful when you poke it into a nearby fire and it's magically transformed into a sword-of-fire making the enemies bash considerably easier and saving your life-energy in the process. In the meantime, you should keep an eye on your flaming sword, because it can kill you instantly if you hold it in this state for too long. Overall, the game is great with great playability and gradual difficulty that will keep you interested for a long time. Unreal is a real visuals and sound showcase, especially for the Amiga hardware, and it's surely worth giving it a try!

GRAPHICS
The MS-DOS version offers some nice visuals taken from the original (Amiga) version but similar in quality to the ST version. The graphics consist of some nice effects on both pseudo-3D and 2D levels, along with well designed sprites. Overall the game features nice touches like resolving moons and multi-level scrolling but also a number of different switching screen resolutions (high res for the title screens, low for the pseudo 3D levels for ultra fast bits and standard the 2D horizontal levels), but again there are a few really cool touches missing from the original (i.e. check the Amiga's details at the skies that are full of color-shadings, clouds etc)!

SOUND
The sound on the PC (DOS) version is nice, including all the original tunes and sound effects, but again not of the same quality since only Ad-Lib sound hardware is supported.