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...continued
Steve's
a bit skittish when it comes to getting into a
fight, so you can adjust the bot's temperament to
cautious from a selection of normal, aggressive,
berserk, cautious and avoidant. Steve is also a bit
handy with a flak cannon, so you simply select this
as your bot's favourite weapon. He's also kind of
Goth, and fortunately, there are eight skin types,
including the Gothic Necris. Another problem with
Steve is he's about as useful at UT as a one-armed
bandit in the jungle, so you just set the bot's
skill to novice, knock his alertness down to zero
and wipe out his accuracy rating. Et voila, a new,
fighting fit (or not), virtual friend.
Not
only have you built yourself a new pal, but he's
also backed up by such fantastic AI that it's easy
to forget you're not playing against a real human
being. You can even mix the styles of bots up so
you can feel like you're playing a whole group of
people, with varied skills.
As
an example of the extremes: at novice level, the
enemy Bots just run around, collect a weapon, stand
still and fire it, so you can easily blow them all
away. At godlike, the opponents somersault over
you, pick up the health you wanted, and then turn
and blow your face off. They also engage you in
fights and sweep back, and as you approach they
collect health. The bots at the highest level seem
to have intimate knowledge to each of the levels,
which makes them deadly adversaries. Somewhere in
the mix, there is the skill level you can play to
be challenged and a level for you to have a laugh.
The bots are also very individualistic -- sometimes
they become engrossed with another bot, allowing
you to get them from behind. Others seem to have it
in for particular characters, hunting them down
without any regard for anyone else. The bots also
use the terrain to great effect, especially when
you set the bot to be preferential to
camping.
One
of the nicer features of the game is the Mutator
list that allows you to set some predefined quirks
into the game. The Fatboy Mutator, for instance,
turns the leader into a fat duffer, while the loser
runs around like an anorexic pipe cleaner. Low
Gravity makes you jump higher, and fall slowly.
These add-ons instill a little quirky fun into the
game. Any number of mutators can be activated in
the game, and they are easily configurable when you
start up a new LAN/Internet game or practice
session.
The
weapons in UT all seem well balanced, although the
rocket launcher is a little weak. As in Unreal,
each weapon has a secondary firing system. The most
likely weapon you will want to use is the Redeemer
missile, which, when launched in secondary fire,
allows you to guide it via a video camera around
the level and into a particularly evil opponent. A
nice feature is that some of the weapons actually
have a working ammo counter, so you can keep a
quick track on what's in your clip at a
glance.
Three
time-limited power-ups are available to you.
Invisibility is the most intriguing, your body
reflects light as you move with the power-up, but
remaining still allows you to disappear from view.
The others are rather commonplace: the shield belt
is added protection that absorbs a good amount of
damage and the weapon enhancer (can you say,
"quad"?) powers up your weapon, turning your simple
pistol into a one-shot kill deal. As is the
standard, these more effective power-ups are neatly
tucked away in places where you have to either
expose yourself or perform some tricky moves to get
them.
The
graphics, as you would expect, are immaculate. The
best example of this is the deathmatch level,
Galleon, where you can see the water ripple and the
distortion of the wood beneath it. In the Phobos
satellite station you can spend a good five minutes
looking at the planets and the asteroids
surrounding the station. The physics of some levels
are subtly different. The assault level called
Hi_speed is a speeding train, and if you are on the
flat bed carriages you jump up and are gently
pushed back by the force. One deathmatch level set
on three high towers has a low-gravity effect that
allows you to gracefully leap between each tower,
reminiscent of the movie, Matrix. The Heads Up
Display is great, and provides a bounty of
information, such as current position held in a
deathmatch, and how far from the top rank you
are.
The
sound is a mixture of good and bad. The 'good'
comes in the form of little comments that the bots
make when they kill or when teammates think you are
playing badly. This is great in team games, but
when you are whipping a single bot and they still
come out with the same bravado comments, it can be
a little annoying. It would be better if they
showed a lack of confidence when losing and really
rubbed it in when winning.
In-game
music is decidedly average. It's not inventive
enough to be interesting and not bad enough to be
offensive. Game designers need to learn from cinema
that futuristic films really need a full orchestra
for the music to be effective rather than a Jean
Michel-Jarre style synthesizers going off in the
background.
As
well as the poor Tournament mode, there is the
matter of giving orders to the rest of your team
members. The system is simple enough - press a key
and then click through a series of menus. The
problem is that this is difficult to accomplish in
the heat of battle. It would be easier if there
were keys assigned to each member and some simple
instructions bound to keys as well.
Despite
promoting Unreal Tournament as having an intensive
single-player experience, it will only satisfy your
fix until the next great LAN or Internet game comes
along. All the reported problems with D3D seem to
have been fixed, so you Riva TNT2 owners can buy it
with a degree of certainty - it ran fine on mine.
UT doesn't offer the veteran deathmatcher anything
that hasn't been seen before, but what makes the
game stand out is the high-quality amalgamation of
all of the features into one neat package. The
combination of several dozen professionally
designed levels, competitive bots, and entertaining
game modes will be hard for DM enthusiasts to
resist.
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