Unreal Tournament 2004 Hands-On Impressions

While many new first-person shooters seem to be gravitating toward complex team-based games, Unreal Tournament 2003 distinguished itself last year with fantastic deathmatch and equally good-looking graphics. Epic Games is now putting the finishing touches on the massive number of additions the developer plans to add to the game in its next product. Appropriately titled Unreal Tournament 2004, the new game features all of the original game's content and has just about an entire new game's worth of additions. We recently got to spend several hours playing the game on a LAN at a press event, where Epic's Cliff Bleszinski walked us through the two new game modes: the onslaught mode and the assault mode (a popular mode from the original Unreal Tournament). From our initial experience, it seems safe to say that Unreal Tournament 2004 will provide immense value for fans of deathmatch-style multiplayer.

Unreal Tournament 2004 will make plenty of new additions to the previous game.

The returning gameplay modes in Unreal Tournament 2004, such as deathmatch and capture the flag, remain pretty much unchanged from the previous game. The developer has made a few minor additions, such as the dual assault rifles and redone weapon models, which we've covered previously, as well as the return of the Unreal Tournament sniper rifle. Though the sniper rifle continues to have a high rate of fire and very little kickback, just like in Unreal Tournament, in the new game, firing it kicks up a small cloud of dust that not only obscures your vision, but also reveals your position to other players. The new game will add 24 new character models as well, including new skaarj alien models. Finally, the new game will feature plenty of new maps, more than the 2003 edition shipped with. We played through a few deathmatch and CTF maps, and in terms of design, they featured settings like subterranean caverns and a mountainous area with Japanese-style buildings nearby. The previous game's maps had varied themes, designs, and visual presentations, and it looks like the maps in Unreal Tournament 2004 will follow suit.

The first new game type, assault, will be familiar to fans of the original Unreal Tournament. It was omitted from the 2003 edition due to time constraints, but thankfully assault will triumphantly return to Unreal Tournament 2004 with six new maps. Assault gives you a situational map with a number of specific objectives; one team will attempt to complete these objectives while the other tries to thwart them. We played the AS-Convoy map that takes place on a series of trains speeding across the desert; Bleszinski explained that this map was the spiritual successor to the popular High Speed map in the original Unreal Tournament. In some assault maps, you'll be required to hold a certain position by standing on a control point (and surviving) for several seconds.

The new game will feature two new modes: assault and onslaught.

In AS-Convoy, as attackers, we had to make our way up one train, hold a control point to extend a bridge to a second train, breach that train's cargo hold, and eventually steal a set of crucial missiles. All the while, the defending team was manning minigun turrets and taking potshots with sniper rifles. Unreal Tournament 2004 will include different kinds of turrets--minigun turrets, laser turrets, and an extremely powerful version of the ion-painter cannon. Though turrets are stationary, you can zoom in on your target with the secondary fire button (mapped to the right mouse button by default), and, like with the new game's vehicles, you can also take a first-person view by pressing the first-person button (mapped to F4 by default). Minigun turrets seem extremely powerful and damaging but don't provide much cover--we were easily able to ferret out turret campers with a well-placed sniper rifle shot or a barrage of rockets. Assault levels will also feature a weapon rack at various points on the map that you can simply run past to get equipped with several different weapons at once.

We then played a few sessions of AS-Mothership, a map that took place in and around a gigantic skaarj mothership. The map itself starts the attackers out in space vehicles (small fighter ships) that are tasked with disabling shield generators so that they can eventually dock within the space station, go in on foot and disable security systems (including an optional objective to knock out the ship's gravity generators, which turns the level into a low-grav map), and eventually destroy the ship's core. The defenders in this map were able to man turrets on the outside of the ship to shoot down incoming fighters, and they could also run to the hangar and pilot their own fighters outside the ship to engage in dogfights. The assault maps we played provided quite a different experience from standard deathmatch and will likely appeal to players who enjoy working toward specific objectives in games like Counter-Strike and Battlefield 1942 without having to deal with punishing realism or difficult flight controls.