Muralis review - Unreal Tournament 2004 Game

[page=Introduction--What is Muralis?]

Recipe for Muralis: Take 2 parts Devil May Cry, add a dash of Soul Calibur, a pinch of Oni and a cup of polish.

Some of the special moves do look quite special

Flax’s metal shoulder pads rattle and glisten in the small, fluorescent-lit room. He runs through door after door, looking for any sign of life. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he sees it—movement. Drawing both pistols, he dashes down the hallway in front of him and prepares himself for whatever is there.

As he turns the corner, he opens fire with both pistols, diving forward and peppering the air with blue tracers. The air sizzles and the target, a blue spiked creature, cringes in pain as the projectiles impact. He turns toward Flax, eyes filled with rage. He draws two long swords and charges forward as Flax continues to fire round after round into his enemy’s chest. The chamber clicks empty, and six extendable claws slide out of Flax’s knuckles. Taking a few steps for momentum, he dives forward, hands extended, and plants all 6 claws in the chest of the adversary.

Spike is hurt but unfazed, and begins slashing wildly. Blocking with his claws, Flax dives out of the way of a roundhouse punch and readies his own fists. A spinning punch dizzies Spike, and a quick kick to the face knocks him flat on his back. Flax redraws his claws and slashes at the helpless enemy, blood flying everywhere. As Spike stands up, Flax kicks him into the air and draws his guns again, firing as his target slowly falls. With a grin on his face, Flax makes a quick motion with his claws, creating an explosion of energy that hurls the enemy into a wall. Flax is satisfied, but only for a second. As explosions begin to erupt around him from a faraway threat, Flax dives for cover and readies for the next battle.

This is Muralis.

This is a medium-sized combo in Muralis.

Many games try to innovate in a single way—a new perspective, a new weapon, or something along those lines, without making any real changes to the core gameplay. Muralis decides to leave these crowds behind, and creates its own unique blend of third person shooting and fighting games. Dodging like Devil May Cry, blasting away like The Suffering, and bashing enemies to pieces like Tekken, Muralis isn’t simply a fighting game—it is a true combat simulation.

And this theory, for the most part, works well. There are a few hitches here and there, but, for the most part, Muralis is an intensely satisfying experience. The combat is fought using a so-called “freeform combo system”. Unlike in most games, where combos are premade 4-or-so-hit chains, a combo in Muralis can extend infinitely, or at least in theory. A stamina bar discourages button mashing—Muralis tries to emphasize using the best move at the best time in a precise assault.

At the beginning of the game, however, it is almost impossible to do more than just button mash. It will be too hard to pull off anything more complex. The source of the problem is the precise rhythm needed to perform the moves. Buttons must be pressed not just in the correct sequence, but also with the correct timing. The system functions similarly to a 2-D fighting game like Soul Calibur transferred over to a 3-D world. Instead of being precise and skillful as it is in those games, though, it can become mind-wreckingly frustrating in the sped-up pace and enemy-clogged areas of Muralis.

The precise timing is the true root of the problem—the game just asks a bit too much from the gamer. Beautiful combos can be wrecked by holding a button for too long…a missed press can throw off the entire flow of a battle…you can die because you held “up” for a half second instead of a quarter second. Instead of a nimble warrior, your character feels like a drunk, wildly flailing around, doing the wrong moves.

The game feels extremely sloppy for the first few hours. You’ll feel like combat isn’t based on any sort of skill, but just getting lucky and pressing your buttons right for once. It’s really easy to, within the first couple hours, completely dismiss the game as another piece of trash that doesn’t belong on your hard drive. For those who stick with it, though, it gets much better. Eventually the timing will drill itself into your brain and no longer be a problem. You’ll finally figure out what you’re doing. Once this happens, Muralis becomes a completely different game and quickly transforms from frustration to fun.

[page=An acquired taste…]

The Dam map for Co-Op is quite well done.

At this point, the engine shows what free-form combat truly means. Every character (of four) packs a gun, a melee weapon, and their fists. Changing between these items is instantaneous, allowing a combo to easily chain together guns, swords, and kicks, in a flow similar to the Devil May Cry series (if a bit slower in pace). A combo of spinning punches can instantly shift into a gun assault, or a devastating melee blow can be followed by a leg sweep and a shoot-dodge.

This freedom serves to make the game much more immersive and real than any other game of its type. In similar games like Prince of Persia, you can always tell your character is a digital being—he stops for a half second after every combo, and you often feel forced to play one way. In Muralis, you won’t see anything like this. Your character is never gets special treatment, and you’ll never see an enemy do something you can’t. There are no handicaps, no gameplay contrivances, nothing to hold you back from beating the snot out of everything in range.

You’re never shunted into using one style or one set of moves…you have true freedom to do what you want. If you want to dash around, guns blazing, you can do that; it’s also just as viable to run into a group of enemies, sword drawn, and slash them to pieces with a flash of blue steel. It’s entirely your decision, and that makes it feel like you’re the one fighting, not some onscreen polygon. You’ll feel a much more personal attachment to your character than in similar games, and everything is more satisfying because of it. To get a kill in Muralis is not just one small step toward victory, but a true triumph in itself.

Flax finishes a combo with a brutal killing blow!

It doesn’t hurt that the combat, at times, can look amazing. This is almost entirely due to some stellar particle effects with weapons, blood, and sparks. The general combat is laced with visual excitement—guns litter the ground with explosions, swords send Burnout-style sparks rebounding off walls, and characters animate with a remarkable level of grace. At points, this game can look better than anything else on the Unreal engine, almost becoming artlike.

Yet, for every time the game looks amazing, it spends twice as long looking bland and boring. When the particles aren’t flying, the attacks can look very boring and dull. For all its similarities to 2-D fighting games, Muralis lacks one thing that even the most rudimentary of those has—the feeling of impact. Tekken showed how to make even a basic punch look bone crushing and make a combo almost cringe inducing. Muralis lacks this “pow” entirely. Every hit impacts as a small spark and, except for the occasional stagger, nothing more. Even the bigger hits are too scripted, sometimes looking unnatural while rarely having quite the wham they should.

Overall, this makes Muralis sort of like the Gran Turismo of 3-D fighting games. Like Gran Turismo, its gameplay engine is rock-solid, realistic, and great at what it does. But how Gran Turismo lacked a sense of speed at times, Muralis lacks this punch in its combat. In other words, it never is enough to hold back the game as a whole, but improvement in this area could add so much to the game.

The gun in Flax’s hand smokes from the finished conflict. He rolls his head back and forth, shakes out his legs, and sighs. As he looks at the three dead bodies around him, he gleams with satisfaction at his own abilites. Suddenly, a scuttling alerts him. He turns the hallway and sees a swarm of small enemies running toward him. Confident in his abilities, he draws his claws and walks toward them. As he meets the group, a brutal slash takes out two; a flurry of bullets take out another. As he winds up for his next strike, he gets hit, and cringes in pain. Suddenly, he is hit again, and again…they circle around him and swarm him, beating him to the ground. Helpless, he can do nothing as he is slowly smashed to death…

If you get stuck in a mob like this, consider yourself dead.

This shows a typical bout of group combat.. With attacks coming from every side at once, combos are constantly interrupted, temporarily turning Muralis into a button-masher where you will be praying to get just one good attack off. You’ll be stuck sitting in a circle of enemies, cursing to yourself as every attack gets interrupted and you get slammed to the ground. Group combat will leave you wishing you had more room to breathe and quickly switching back to smaller-scale fights.

The lackluster group fighting mechanics hurt the team-based modes. Team Deathmatch is all right, since it more often is “deathmatch on a team” than true team deathmatch. Co-Op mode, a variant on Assault, is much too chaotic to provide any long-term fun. And Invasion mode, since airborne enemies are nearly impossible to kill, is a pure exercise in frustration.

Just get used to Deathmatch and you’ll be fine. But if you want mode variety, you’ll be disappointed.

[page=…yet smooth as butter]

Preparing to rumble.

Deathmatch, Invasion, and TDM are all played on native UT2004 Deathmatch maps, with a few added Muralis maps. While the lack of unique maps is disappointing (especially with the quality of the few present), Muralis fits most Unreal Tournament maps quite well, so this is never much of a problem. Some might even enjoy not having to learn too many new maps.

Of course, you do need somebody to play with. Right now, you won’t have any luck looking online…I have not seen a soul on the servers. Luckily, the developers anticipated this, and put in some great bots to pass the time.

These bots aren’t the dolts found in some other mods. They know the maps well. They go for health when they need to, and retreat if damaged. And they are surprisingly good combatants. The difficulty scales up well; you can pound on the Novice bots without breaking a sweat, but the Godlike bots will have you gripping the keys, dodging, and frantically clicking just to get a combo off. While this should be something expected of mods these days, it was obvious that Ascension Games wanted to do more than just “checkmark work” here.

This idea of doing a good job, not just completing it, runs throughout the mod. Quality can be seen everywhere from the nice menus to the character backstories. It’s hard to find any holes in the game—everything fits together well and just feels complete. Ascension gets a solid thumbs-up in presentation.

A quickdodge can get you out of a lot of trouble

This is part of the reason sound is such a disappointment. All sounds are very muted and very generic. You would think that some things should sound really impressive, like explosions or swords hitting metal, but the game never rises above basic sci-fi effects. It’s surprising that so much care seemed to be put into every aspect of the game except the sound.

Muralis is probably a closer approximation of real combat than I have seen in a game. The engine is truly spectacular at capturing all the intensity, fluidity, and satisfaction of actual combat. What it also simulates is the hours of training needed for success in combat. The more hours you put into it, the better you’ll be. And the better you are, the more you’ll get out of it. If you’re willing to put in the time needed for success in Muralis, it can truly be amazing. It will need to come from you, though—Muralis doesn’t always look that great, doesn’t sound very good, and will rarely hold your hand.

So, the question is: are you up to it?

(+) Amazingly fluid and dynamic battle system, merging ranged and melee combat artfully
(+) The fighting feels extremely real and believable
(+) Bots work as excellent training tools and scale well with difficulty
(+) In general, feels very polished and finished

(-) Combat system is very hard to get into; steep learning curve
(-) Many moves lack the oomph they should have
(-) Group combat is mindless and disappointing
(-) With the exception of a few areas (like the excellent particle effects), the graphics and sound are very generic.
(-) No current online community