Home > Reviews > PC > #376

Unreal Tournament 2004 Review - PC

Unreal Tournament 2004 has been eagerly awaited ever since really the release of UT2003. Quite a few UT fans were a little disappointed by UT2003, as it missed out some of the most popular modes of the original UT, and some of the promised features such as vehicles and the return of Assault mode were left out of UT2003 at the last minute. Epic must have even known this at the time, so the pressure was there to make UT2004 the best of the series in every possible way.

Unreal Tournament takes most of what has been the best parts of UT2003 and UT, rolls them all together, and adds a whole heap of new and innovative features to keep any hardcore FPS fan happy.

Gameplay

While installing from the 5 CD-ROM's - yes 5! you'll have an initial agonising wait to get the game installed on your hard drive and start fragging. Why Epic declined to make this a DVD only release (except the special edition boxed set) is a little beyond me, and it really is frustrating having to put all those CD's into the drive. Its the era of the DVD now, and any respecting gamer that doesn't have at least some form of DVD drive in their PC these days is a little crazy. Thankfully you only have to do this once.

UT2004 follows the same theme as UT2003, with a very basic storyline, and single player tournament to wade through - in which you get to experience all the major game modes and get some good practice in. Unlike previously, you start with a budget, which you need to successfully manage (by winning matches mainly) and making fairly intelligent team management decisions.

To begin you get to choose your player and appearance, and then also pick each of your team members. Before each battle you can choose which of your rostered players you want to fight it out with you, and assign basic strategies such as "offence", "defence", "support", and the like. Each match you win a certain number of credits, which you will need to buy better players or heal their wounds after each battle. You also have some control over which arena you wish to fight the round out in.

UT2004 contains the the main modes such as Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Bombing Run, Last Man Standing, Double Domination, Mutant, Invasion, Assault, and Onslaught. The first six are pretty much as they were in the UT2003, and there is nothing really new here other than the fast action that has defined the series previously. Similar to UT2003, with each of the basic game modes offered there are various mutators that can also be added to each game type, such as only sniper rifles, big head, low gravity, and others to add some variety and extra entertainment to the standard faire.

Mutant is pretty much a "tag" game, (continued next page)