Something went wrong somewhere.
Unreal Tournament brings back Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag as they were in the original Unreal Tournament. Domination and Assault return, but are heavily modified, and a new game mode called "Onslaught" are introduced, along with several minor modes, most notably "Invasion", and "Bombing Run" which I won't go over in this review.
Domination is now known as Double Domination, and instead of capturing and holding three points on the map and steadily increasing your score until it reaches a set number, Double Domination has two points on the map that you need to capture and hold for ten seconds. If your team successfully holds both points for ten seconds you win the round, DD is basically a "best two out of three" kind of game. I personally didn't care for this change, but I wasn't the biggest fan of the original Domination, either.
Assault's idea is the same, but UT 2004 features maps which have well over five objectives attackers need to complete. Vehicles are also introduced to some of the Assault maps. Whether UT 2004's Assault will appeal to you or not comes down to how much you liked the original's. The original Assault maps were fast, simple, and a blast to play. UT 2004's Assault maps are drawn out, and tedious.
Onslaught is the new kid on the block. In Onslaught there are two teams that start out in their base, the objective is to destroy the enemy's base Power Node. To do this you need to capture smaller power nodes across the map until you have a path of them from your base to the enemy's, then you can damage the base node with vehicles and conventional weapons. It's an interesting game mode, but I personally didn't find it very entertaining.
The graphics are obviously improved. Character models are more detailed, textures are higher res, there are more visual effects to gawk at, etc. The visuals are probably the only portion of UT 2004 that I would call an improvement over the original game.
The audio is satisfactory. The voice selection is wider, but most people use the same voices, so it ends up sounding just as repetitive as the original UT. You can also choose from five different announcers in UT 2004, but most veteran UT players most likely go with UT Classic like myself. The other announcers just don't have as much style as the original. The music has gone downhill, the composer couldn't seem to go with a single style so you've got heavy metal, techno, and symphonic music all in one. The music is consistent in one way, it's consistently bad.
I find it hard to recommend Unreal Tournament 2004. UT 2004 comes packed with a lot of content, but it's not as high in quality as the original's. Some like it, some don't. I think what it comes down to is whether or not you liked the style of the original. The original had very nice maps, UT 2004's are more generic, and not nearly as imaginative. The original was faster paced, and weapons did more damage, UT 2004 has fast movement but the guns are dumbed down. I'm not going to bother going on, I'll just sum everything up in one sentence: For this Unreal Tournament fan, Unreal Tournament 2004 was a colossal disappointment.