Unreal Tournament Revisited

Is this blasphemy?

Last week, FiringSquad posted an Unreal Tournament Preview based on a recent beta copy sent to us by Epic. What we found was a finely polished game that was head and shoulders above previous development releases or display demos shown as recently as a few months ago during E3.

In fact, though it may be based heavily off the original Unreal, there is very little about Unreal Tournament that is reminiscent of the original Unreal, and in my opinion, that's a very good thing!

Though we're certainly pegged as brainwashed id Software drones (especially with Thresh's influence on our gaming habits), we do cover a lot of games, and each game stands on its own merits, despite the obvious comparisons to a genre benchmark. We feel that Epic has done an amazing job tuning the game so far, and being relative veterans to the FPS development community (hey, it's already their second title!) they've shown that they can learn from their mistakes, and they've got the vision to make a multiplayer FPS shine.

Typical Quake 3 scene

UT offers something different

In fact, we decided to put Unreal Tournament under the FiringSquad magnifying glass, and take a scrutinizing look at what we think Epic did right, and how they're making Unreal Tournament into a smash-hit deathmatch game.