Breaking from the traditional “find red key, use red key to open
red door, repeat” formula of most first person shooters, Unreal
Tournament instead puts you up against a series of AI bots, which
are designed to mimic real human players.
And they do it pretty well. In fact, at a (somewhat premature)
launch party back in September, UT’s bots passed the Turing Test by
fooling me into thinking they were real players for almost half an
hour!
Epic have done a great job of making the bots behave like humans,
and in almost every situation they work perfectly. You can even
give your AI team mates basic orders in team games using a
straightforward drag and click interface.
There are a few problems though, the most obvious being the AI’s
inability to deal with windows. Stand a bot at a window and it will
keep shooting, even when the target on the ground below gets so
close that the bot ends up shooting at the wall underneath the
window trying to hit it.
Otherwise they make convincing opponents though. Their aim isn’t
inhumanly good (unless you set their skill to “inhuman” of course),
and they don’t have eyes in the backs of their heads.
And because there are eight skill levels to choose from, ranging
from “novice” to “godlike”, they should provide a reasonable
challenge to anybody from Joe Newbie to Thresh.
Deathmatch is very fast paced, and most of the two dozen maps on
offer are excellent. There are a few novelty maps though, and some
of these just don’t work.
One is set on board a galleon, and although it looks great you
really don’t have time to stop and admire the scenery. What you do
have time to notice though is the fact that it is poorly
interconnected and badly cluttered… Nice idea, but it just
doesn’t work for deathmatch.
Some of the novelty maps are rather good though. DM_Morpheus is
inspired by the “Woah” scene from The Matrix, and sees players
leaping between the roofs of skyscrapers. Surprisingly it works,
and is one of the most enjoyable maps in the game.
CTF should also be familiar to any first person shooter fan, a
basic teamplay option in which you attempt to capture a flag from
the other team and then bring it back to your own base.
UT CTF is probably the best I’ve ever played, with fast-paced
gameplay and some truly excellent maps. The real gem is “Facing
Worlds”, featuring a pair of giant towers facing each other across
a narrow strip of land suspended in space. This map is sniper
heaven, with the tops of the two towers providing a vantage point
from which you can see most of the map.
Domination is similar to the “Capture And Hold” mode in Starsiege
Tribes. The idea is to control certain locations scattered around
the map. The longer your team controls one, the more points you
score.
What really makes Assault mode shine though are the maps. One
relives the D-Day Normandy landings, with one team starting in a
landing vessel and the other team trying to stop them from storming
the beaches and destroying a massive cannon in the cliff face
behind.
Other maps involve breaking into a frigate, escaping from a castle,
destroying an underwater laboratory, and taking control of a high
speed train. All are excellently designed, and great fun to play ..
against bots. Unfortunately over the internet it is a whole
different story.
The problem is that many of us have already found ways to complete
most of the maps within a minute! Essentially this turns the game
into a mad dash, with the best players on the attacking team
charging headlong through the level trying to reach their
objectives, while the defenders desperately try to stop any of them
from breaking through.
All it takes is one or two good players on the attacking team and
the defenders are likely to lose, and lose fast. Well balanced
games are very enjoyable, but as soon as one team gains any sort of
advantage it soon turns into a farce.
If you like “speed running” then Assault mode will probably suit
you, and there is something strangely enjoyable in dashing through
the level faster than anybody else has done before. But it is
likely to wear thin fast…
Which is a shame, because at first this seemed to be the best of
the games on offer in Unreal Tournament.
The game has a whole set of “mutators” which can be applied in
almost any combination to any of the main gameplay modes. There is
a rocket arena mutator, which lets all the players duel it out with
rocket launchers. There is a low gravity option, which makes life
rather interesting.
The instagib mutator arms everybody with enhanced shock rifles that
will reduce anything they hit to a steaming pile of meaty bits.
Which is nice…
There’s even a rather bizarre mutator which makes you gain or lose
weight depending on how many kills you have. The more times you get
killed, the more like Kate Moss your character looks. The more
times you kill your enemies, the more you look like Santa Claus
after a few too many mincepies. Strange, but true.
The best part though is that players will be able to modify Unreal
Tournament themselves, creating their own mutators, maps, or even
whole new gameplay styles. The first user-made mutators have
already started to appear, and more add-ons are likely to follow.
For newcomers to the whole first person shooter genre, there are
tutorial maps for each game type to introduce you to basic concepts
like strafing, picking up items, capturing flags, and aiming and
firing your weapons using a mouse.
The interface is easy to use, and puts most other games to shame.
It looks and feels like Windows, and a series of drop down menus
and resizable panes makes it easy to set up and control the game.
Which makes a nice change from the endless undocumented command
line options and console settings which most previous first person
shooters have suffered from…
And even if you don’t want to take the plunge into online gaming,
the bots provide a great offline single player experience. They are
also there to practice against, meaning that even the most
inexperienced player can pick up the basics of the game before they
venture into a real game.
Even for battle hardened veterans, playing through the single
player campaign is highly recommended. If nothing else it gives you
a chance to learn the levels, something which is particularly
important for the Assault and CTF modes.
Well, I have good news for you…
The game is perfectly playable in Direct3D mode at 800x600, even on
my lowly Riva-TNT powered 300Mhz Pentium II. And it looks beautiful
- the graphics are crisp and colourful, the models are good, the
textures and skins are mostly excellent, and the weapon effects are
damned impressive.
The weapons themselves are chunky and powerful, and as each has two
firing modes you get twice the fun. The goo gun (sorry, BioRifle)
is still hardly a weapon of choice, but everything else is top
notch.
The flak cannon doubles as both a shotgun and a shrapnel grenade
launcher, and works admirably in both capacities. The Redeemer is a
rare but impressive beast that fires a miniature nuclear missile
which you can remote control in the alt-fire mode!
And the sniper rifle, with its awesome zoom capability, is truly
the King Of Guns. Nothing can match the satisfaction of pulling off
a clean head shot on a moving target half way across the level.
The multiplayer code is silky smooth over a LAN or fast digital
connection, and works well even on a 56k modem. I found it playable
(in the loosest sense of the word) even with pings in the 300-400
range, and although any comparison is rather arbritary, the
internet play seemed to be at least on a par with Quake II.
In fact, apart from a few washed-out textures, the only real
problem I have had with Unreal Tournament is that sometimes it
crashes when I quit the game, forcing a reboot.
Given that I’ve only actually quit half a dozen times since
installing the game, that isn’t a great problem though! If I didn’t
have to write this damn review I’d still be playing it now…
Both single player and multiplayer are excellent, as are the
majority of the maps. The graphics are a match for anything else on
the market, and the game doesn’t need a supercomputer to run it.
And with so many maps, modes and mutators on offer, you really are
spoilt for choice. It’s a shame that Assault mode doesn’t usually
work very well online, but otherwise the game does exactly what it
says on the box.
If you’ve read this far there must be something wrong with you…
Go buy the damn game already!
