Unreal Tournament 2004

What a difference a few years makes. When the original Unreal was released in 1998, many gamers dismissed it as an over-hyped piece of eye candy. Despite a development time stretching back to at 1996 (www.unrealtournament.com lists research beginning in ‘mid-1994’), constant delayed launch dates and a flood of information about the game built expectations beyond delivery. Nowadays, developers Epic have the ability to churn out a new Unreal Tournament game like clockwork every year. The big difference is that this year’s UT doesn’t so much take its cues from Quake or Tribes, as in the past, but rather the likes of Battlefield 1942.

First, the basics of what you can expect with any Unreal Tournament title, starting with weak model handling at medium distance or greater. Models once again give a misleading impression of being wispy and insubstantial at this range. It’s hard to decide whether it’s the animation, or the way the UT engine renders models at a distance, but they look spidery and tend to scuttle across your screen, rather than menacingly darting in and out of view.

There is the customary overload of weapons and alt-fire modes, enough that binding all of them in any coherent sequence is an exercise in memory management more than dexterity. Love em/hate em inclusions like the Redeemer and the bio rifle are balanced by ongoing slick favourites like the shock rifle and the minigun. The lightning gun continues to be a curious addition. Its slight firing delay belies its similar effect and usage as the sniper rifle, whose presence is criminally scarce. The alt-fire zoom mode of the lightning gun is an especially garish excursion into bad taste, blocking most of the screen with effects that wore off rapidly last year; the intervening period hasn’t made them any more attractive.



This trend is reflected in most of the weapons. Once again an overdone array of weapon effects overwhelms proceedings. which for the stripped down competitive crowd can be a nuisance. Sometimes you just want to be able to point and shoot at your foe without getting the gaming equivalent of a New Year’s fireworks display whenever you walk into a crowded firefight. As the graphics engine is a large helping of more of the same from UT 2003, this is largely unavoidable however. If you’re the type of person who likes to turn the graphics volume up to 11, there’s plenty of eye candy here, and given the vintage of the engine, it’s not likely to overly tax most decent to high spec PCs. But as you waltz through the dynamically lit, sparkly, glistening textures on max detail, don’t complain if you’re so blinded by the coronas that you can’t tell the difference between a nearby light source and incoming projectiles. At least you’ll die in style, right?

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