Unreal Tournament

THE BAD:
Short single player mode, although that’s not what this game is about

SUMMARY:
This game was the follow up to Unreal and focused much more on the multiplayer and death-match aspect of the game. There is no real story mode in this game and the single player mode just trains you up in the different modes of play and pits you against computer controlled bots. Epic Games learned from the first game that it was fighting against computer controlled bots was what most people spent their time doing, so the focus here was definitely on expanding that area of play.

When you go to the single player mode you will create your character by choosing the appearance, name and clan symbol and you will then battle it out in a series of matches in all the game types and eventually have to duel one on one with Xan on board a ship flying through space, which is a very tough duel. It is good to do this first for no other reason than you get a tutorial in all the game types and it will tell you the rules and objectives in them. Also you are invulnerable when doing the tutorial so you can get a good feel for the whole thing.

Assault is where you have to complete certain objectives in a set time limit. Examples of tasks are to get to a certain place, activate a switch, blow something up or reach 4 separate checkpoints. Once you’ve done it or time runs out you then swap and have to defend what you were just attacking. If you defend for longer than the time limit then you win, or if neither team reaches all the objectives then it’s a tie. For Domination you have to get control of checkpoints by simply running through them. While checkpoints are in your teams control your team score rises. When you get to a set score you win the game. While you need to attack to get the checkpoints, simply placing someone to defend a point you have can make life very hard for other teams trying to get it. For Capture the Flag it’s as it sounds. Your team need to grab the opponent’s team flag from their base and bring it back to where your flag is while still in the base. If both teams have the flag then neither can score and your team-mates will have to try and retrieve your flag. Last Man Standing is where you only have a set amount of lives and need to be the last one alive. Much easier said than done.

You can also customise the bots’ skill levels by changing various things like accuracy, aggressiveness, likeliness to camp and strafing. You can also change what coloured team they are on by default. This may not seem like much, but when done properly you can create teams to be exactly how you like. When there were 4 teams I had the bots configured so the other three teams had 2 enhanced bots and 2 normal bots and my team only had 3 normal bots. The idea behind that was that I then had to make up the difference in the skill levels. I did this when Godlike (the highest difficulty) became too easy and it very quickly gave me a challenge. The easiest difficulty is extremely easy, but with all this the game accommodates people of virtually any skill level. Another way to increase the skill level is to increase the speed of the game. If you find your reflexes are fast enough to decimate people on Godlike, then put the speed of the game up about 20% and see how well you do. It’s a great way of upping the skill level if you don’t want to mess around with bot settings.

The graphics have been enhanced from the first game and many of the weapons are still here. A couple of new ones are the Redeemer and Impact Hammer. The Redeemer is basically a mini nuke launcher and the Impact Hammer is a melee weapon but can be used for jumping when you fire it at the ground, although you do lose a bit of health. The Shock Rifle combo is still around for massive damage, and the Sniper Rifle is great for long distance fighting and on some maps where there are large open spaces. For close up fighting the Flak Cannon and Rocket Launcher are very handy.

The simplicity of this game and great settings, weapons and options make this a very good game, particularly if your PC is slow and can’t handle UT 2003 and UT 2004. Personally I prefer this one to any of the other games in this series because the later ones seem too large and try and incorporate too much in whereas this one keeps some things simple, but there’s enough variety and it’s pretty addictive. You can play this online as well through the simple options menu. No need to register with any websites or anything, just make sure you are connected to the Internet, open UT up and go from there. I do this quite frequently and when you get into a game with people of a similar skill level it can be highly enjoyable.

Since there are further games in the series this one is probably quite cheap by now so I’d recommend anyone interested in FPS games to get this. At the time this was going head to head with one of the Quake games. I feel this has more freedom and it more fun to play so I’d recommend this over the Quake games.