The first game to knock the FPS king down still stands tall as the greatest bloodsport ever to grace a PC.
While it may not have looked good as Quake III, Unreal Tournament still looked pretty damn good. Using a spruced up Unreal engine, the game had high poly characters, great texturing, and buckets of blood as well as strange looking weapons and creatures. While many levels take place in stereotypical FPS playgrounds, they all looked good and there were a few that showed strange alien lands, gothic architectures, and oddly enough one of the best looking at the time, a space station with a small outdoor area in space. The graphics haven't aged well, but 10 years ago, the game looked incredible. The Unreal Engine continues to evolve, and becomes more and more impressive. You can bet your balls each time Epic makes a new Unreal game, your eyes will pop just as far out of your head as they did the first time you saw this game back in '99.
The gameplay is perfect, all of the weapons sound awesome and are unique - you will never run across random generic semi automatics or pistols, every weapon has their own unique charm. Even the more traditional weapons, the enforcer pistol, minigun, rocket launcher and sniper each have a twist to them. Practically each weapon is a two in one. My favourite is still the link gun, although the bio-rifle is cool. Unreal Tournament is also the only game with the razor gun, while not particularly accurate, was definitely fun decapitating people with its razor blades. They are balanced perfectly, and each have a unique strategy. You will often find yourself growing attached to a gun. The gameplay is addicting, and the AI is surprisingly smart. One of the best features of the bots is that you can still set difficulty levels, but you can turn on an adaptive process where the AI changes difficulty in game based on how well you are doing. This is a cool feature, because it means you don't have to constantly tweak difficulty, and it will smartly choose how to balance it out. Some bots will become weaker, some stronger, giving them each a unique feel. Playing with the bots are fun, but obviously the game is best online. This is still the most played Unreal Tournament game, seriously. You will still find people playing this one, and there are twice as many servers as UT2k4 and almost 4 times as many as UT3 or UT 2k3.
10 years later, Unreal Tournament still provides an unrivaled bloodsport experience. It was perfect then, and its perfect now. If you even remotely care about online first person shooters, deathmatch games, or bloodsports; UT is the game to get. And seeing as you can buy it from Steam for only 5 bucks, there is no reason you SHOULDN'T have this game somewhere in your collection. So grab a flak cannon, rev up your chainsaw, grit your teeth, and come get some.