UNREAL TOURNAMENT

                  Review by Michael Raven

Unreal Tournament. I was slightly cautious about this, after the
'great' Unreal which failed to work on my PC, and the patch I
needed was unavailable thanks to the website doing some filing.

However, Unreal Tournament worked for a change. Instead of the
normal shoot-em-up in a Doom or Quake or Half-Life stylee (sorry
I've been listening to too many Radio 1 DJs) you play the well
known multiplayer games like Deathmatch, Team Game and Capture the
Flag, but against the computer! The computer players are very
effective and have a wide range of settings. They are very
intelligent and difficult to defeat - even Skilled, which is only
a middle setting, is too hard for me.

There is also a wide range of weaponry, some very different to
those normally seen in games of this type. Favourites like the
pistol, machine gun (minigun here) and rocket launcher are of
course available, but add to them pulse guns, sniper rifles,
impact hammers, green gunk guns and assault rifles and you have
more of a view of the weaponry on offer. Also, each weapon has two
different ways to fire it. For instance, normal fire with a rocket
launcher will shoot out a high-speed rocket. But secondary fire
will chuck the same rocket like a grenade, which will wait a few
seconds before exploding.

In the main tournament you have to progress from one type of
battle to another, so you have to complete a number of Deathmatch
games before they let you play Domination (this game has you
defending a number of control points), and so on.  Each computer
'bot has a background that you can read.

Apart from the tournament game you can play any of the practice
games, if you want to try out your mods before unleashing them
on-line.

One of the most entertaining games is Assault, where you have a
number of objectives to complete while the defenders try to stop
you. Once you've completed the objectives the teams are switched
and you have to defend against the attackers!

Although I haven't tried on-line multiplayer you can certainly
play Unreal Tournament over the Internet, and has such useful
things that let you download specific mods, skins and levels
automatically, so you don't have to configure your system before
jumping in.

At www.unrealtournament.net you can download all kinds of extra
skins, levels and mods, which typically do things like make
rockets that bounce off walls, but there are hundreds of different
ones to download and try out.

All in all, this is an excellent game which doesn't need the best
of PCs (I only have a P200 with 96mb RAM and 16mb 3D graphics
card) to run.

Rating: 93%
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