Unreal evolves with style

By Martin Kingsley

"I'm the party pooper"

Back in '99, there were only two games when it came to online play: Quake, and Unreal Tournament.

Each had it's own fan base, and street fights were known to break out at the slightest infraction when it came to multiplayer fragging.

In the last five years, things have gotten bigger, better, more involved, and games have changed to match said expansion, with the market opening up to involve dozens of developers and just as many games.

With Unreal Tournament 2003, Epic thought they had it made but as is always the case, there was someone hanging about ready to screw everything up.

In this case, the 'someone' was a 'something', and that something was Battlefield 1942.

With its crisp WWII flavour and massive multiplayer potential, it quickly usurped the multiplayer throne, leaving UT2003 out in the cold due to what was perceived as a lack of innovation, a severe case of 'been there, done that, seen the movie, read the book and bought the tee-shirt'.

So, two years on, we're older, shaggier, flabbier and not a skerrick wiser. Looking down the barrels of our polished sniper rifles, the contenders for this year's multiplayer market have lined up, taken their places and, at the back, brawls are breaking out.

The whistle blows and, jostling for pole position, we have the heroin-addled Battlefield Vietnam and Unreal Tournament 2004, grizzled space marine and promoter of good curry. Personally, my money's on UT2004.

It's an impressive package, any way you look at it. With 10 game modes, four new weapons, nearly fifty new maps, five announcer voices, more bots than you can shake a minigun at, land and air-based vehicles (finally) and the reintroduction of the classical UT sniper rifle, this is the real deal, no doubt about it.

Firstly, presentation: Clocking in a hefty 5.5Gb (six CDs or two DVDs, don'tcha know?), and complete with glossy full-colour manual, from the moment you open the box you know you're in for something special, and if the install doesn't tell you that much, your first deathmatch certainly will.

Optimised like nothing you've ever seen, UT2004 seems to be the ultimate scalability experiment, running smoothly on anything from beast-boxes to wee 'ickle midget PCs from the Bronze Age, and looking good no matter what.

"First to the top gets a lobotomy!"

Add to this a great little physics engine that takes care of anything from ragdolls to vehicle physics, the ability to run natively on Windows, Apple and Linux systems, audio that is crisp and thematically perfect without being intrusive, and things are looking up big time.

Onslaught, one of the new modes of play, is a big change of pace from standard UT, concentrating on teamwork in a struggle to link power nodes across huge outdoor maps from your power core to the opposing team's.

Said opposing power core cannot be attacked unless the nearest node to it is under your control, and, in turn, the nearest node can't be usurped unless the node nearest to it belongs to you etc, etc. This kind of thing leads to sprawling tug-o-war type situations, which I must say are jolly good fun.

Due to the gigantic nature of some of the Onslaught maps, it is here more than anywhere else that the vehicles come into play.

From the zippy Manta hovercraft and Scorpion buggy (complete with extendable side-mounted razor blades) to the Goliath and Leviathan tanks, there's a good mix and, thanks to the wonderfully comprehensive physics engine, all the vehicles are a joy to tool around in.

They even have their own special stunt bonuses attached -- be on the lookout for an opportunity to drop your Manta on enemies below for a 'pancake'.

While some of the vehicles, particularly the Leviathan, are extremely powerful, they never become the central focus of battle due to their paper-rock-scissors nature. For instance, the Goliath tank can take out nearly everything in one shot with its main gun, but has a hard time keeping up with the light aircraft, which can plug away at it's sluggish form with impunity.

To combat against vehicle incursions, infantry now have the AVRiL (no relation to the singer, hopefully) guided missile launcher, which locks onto anything that happens to take it's fancy (particularly low-flying enemy aircraft) and then proceeds to blow seven shades of incarnadine out of the offending object.

For more general-purpose situations, there's also the grenade launcher, two types of stationary gun turret, and the spider mine launcher, which, you guessed it, launches spider mines.

Tank battles are always good for a larf

When you're not playing Onslaught, there are always the fifty new maps to consider, and, for instance, Assault mode.

A throwback to the classic Unreal Tournament and sadly missing from UT2003, Assault involves the completion of objectives as a requirement for victory, rather than the immolation and/or disintegration of anything and/or everything within a radius of fifteen miles.

One team must defend the objective, while the opposite team must break in to what is usually the enemy stronghold and blow up the generator, save the damsel in distress and finish that pineapple flambé.

To go with the style of play, Epic have provided six seriously involving maps that range from space stations (complete with dog-fighting spacecraft) to junkyards and post-apocalyptic cities a la Beyond Thunderdome.

As an addendum to the above, double domination, Bombing Run, deathmatch, team deathmatch and Capture the Flag are all still there, and to explain these genre stalwarts would be redundant at the very least, so I won't.

Bristling with ingenuity and showing a level of polish rarely, if ever, seen elsewhere, Epic have proven that they still have what it takes when it comes to cyber-gaming.

Containing big guns, buxom leather-clad goddesses and more explosions than you can shake a tank at, Unreal Tournament contains everything a growing lad needs to grow up big and strong.

Or, at the very least, big and psychotic.

Game: Unreal Tournament 2004
Players: 1-multi
Online: Yes
Developer: Epic Megagames
Distributor: Atari

Rating: 90%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Unreal Tournament 2004 is on the shelves now.