Unreal Tournament III

Profile · Posted 2002-10-06, 02:28 PM

In traditional shooter fashion, Unreal Tournament 2003 offers up a disposable background story that you can forget as soon as you start playing. The real point of the game is simply to viciously frag your opponents. You can challenge other players in four core game modes in either Internet games or on a LAN. You can also play offline with and against computer-controlled bots in a ladder-based tournament or in single matches. The bots' skill level can easily rival or even surpass that of most human players, depending on the difficulty setting you choose. You can also give them orders in team games, and they'll effectively carry them out, though there's apparently no easy way to bind commands to single keys as in the original UT, which makes them too hard to issue quickly in the heat of battle.

The selection of game modes includes straightforward versions of deathmatch and team deathmatch, as well as capture the flag. While it's great to see those classics return, it's a real shame that the developers only took the time to include two other game modes, and not very inventive ones at that. The original Unreal Tournament's domination mode has been replaced with double domination, in which your team must hold two control points concurrently for at least 10 seconds to score. And as a replacement for the original game's late, lamented assault mode, UT2003 offers a less-than-revolutionary new mode called bombing run. This is part of the designers' half-hearted and rather unconvincing attempt to make Unreal Tournament into some sort of sports game franchise. In bombing run, your team tries to grab a ball from the center of the map and then carry it to a goal in the enemy team's base. The fact that you can't shoot your weapons while carrying the ball, but can pass the ball to teammates, keeps things somewhat interesting.

One of UT2003's brand-new features is adrenaline, which you stockpile by grabbing oversized pills floating about the maps. When you collect 100 adrenaline points, you can perform keyboard maneuvers that let you temporarily turn invisible, increase your speed, boost your health, or do extra damage. These can have a major impact at crucial moments in team games like capture the flag. Even without adrenaline, you can perform a number of special jumping and dodging moves that expand on the dodges from the original Unreal Tournament. In addition to dodging quickly forward, backward, or to the side as you could in the original game, you can also double-jump and jump off walls in UT2003--new additions that help skilled players dodge incoming fire and get around the maps more quickly

Thanks to Gamespot.com for the info.