The Landing, 7.0 out of 10 based on 8 ratings

The Landing is an early work of Mike “Hellscrag” Wilberforce, author of Vacillations of a Victorian Vagrant among others. The Landing is his second SP release, dating back to early 2002. The unfinished map pack of 3 maps (out of planned 4) is a cliché crash-landing survival story but certainly one of the better ones. The timing of its release was lucky – just before the big bar-raisers like ONP and especially Xidia came out, putting into new light nearly every aspects of Unreal mapping. By today’s standards it certainly has an “early Unreal” feel attached to it, but this characteristic of the pack seems more like a charm than a negative aspect, especially since the quality of story construction is just good enough, and the locations are interesting enough to make you want to explore. Even after all those years it is well worth a play to any Unreal player who might have missed it before.

You will explore a fairly complex cave system, a Nali town which, unlike those few houses scattered around in a loose group in most maps, is a real town and a small offshore island with a mercenary facility on it. You will enjoy some nice visuals and have a basic story through well written translator messages. A not so conventional feature of the map is that sometimes the Nali talk to you directly through your translator.

As mentioned before, the map pack is unfinished, so at the end of the 3rd level you will encounter an error message letting you know that the next map failed to load. A shame, giving up so close to the end, especially for a map pack that is quite alright.

Note that the Landing is for UT only. Also note that the real release date is not mentioned in the readme file, so it was assumed to be the last modification date of the readme (and the last unr file).

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