Gameplay

The actual play

When the UT2K3 demo came out, I was extremely excited over the possibilities. Yeah, the maps it offered weren’t the best, but the gameplay was frantic, fast and vicious. We hadn’t spent enough time with the game yet to see exactly what we liked specifically, besides the speed. After about a week of playing, we’re glad we spent so much time before the review to take a close look.

The movement speed of players makes for an exciting match, but there were other, more subtle changes in the maps that improved gameplay. Weapons aren’t a resource since they default to “stay” after pickup, but health is. Health items are very rare and scattered, making skilled play focus around keeping yourself alive. This works much better in dueling than it does in a FFA melee, since if anyone can get a good weapon in FFA but no one gets health, even the best player’s life expectancy is very short.

Damn that looks good

Eat my flak

My favorite gun

Game modes

The game is played in regular deathmatch, team deathmatch, double domination or bombing run modes. Double domination is like domination in that you need the capture control areas, but you don’t earn points by holding them. Rather, when both areas are under your control, a 10-second timer starts counting down until a point is scored. Bombing run is essentially football without the downs, or Rugby without a scrum. There’s a ball on the map and the ballcarrier’s weapon becomes the ball launcher, with which he can score a 3-point fieldgoal, punt or pass. He can also score a 7-point touchdown by running into the endzone… er… portal. If not for the map design, this would be our favorite mode of play.

UT2K3 introduces some new features as well. The first that you’ll encounter is “adrenaline”, which can be collected as adrenaline pills or earned by making kills. When your adrenaline hits 100, you can hit keystroke combos to go invisible, berskerk or move faster. These gained abilities have a timer after which they run out, or they’ll stop when you die. It’s pretty gimmicky if anything, we’d prefer them without the adrenaline pills. Like dodge moves, there are now double-jumps and wall-jumps. Again, they’re more gimmicky than anything – there’s no skill involved. Even strafe jumping takes more ability than a double-jump or wall-jump. That’s not to say they’re not fun and useful, just don’t expect pros to go on the bandwagon until they become skill moves that take a lot of practice to execute.