The Impact Hammer

I'm done exploring. Time to kill.

The weapons in Unreal Tournament have been much improved from the first Unreal. All of them give much better damage feedback than the weapons in the first Unreal did. They're also designed in such a way that veterans of other first person shooters will feel more at home while at the same time retaining that touch of uniqueness that characterized the original Unreal.

The first thing you'll notice about them is the high level of detail to which they're rendered. Epic went beyond the call of duty as far as weapon animation goes. Pretty much every gun includes some kind of reloading animation and a firing animation or two that do well to immerse you into the deathmatching and gun play.

Impact hammer

The impact hammer is your basic no range, "shoot me because I have no other weapon" weapon. You can still kill someone with it if you get lucky though. The bad news is that it does not have any range. Like the Quake 3 gauntlet, you have to get right up on the guy if you want to hit him. However, what makes the impact hammer nice is that you can charge it up and thwack someone really hard. To charge it up, you hold down the fire button and let go when you're ready to nail someone. As it charges it makes a rumbling whine, and the two tanks start to quiver. A charged up hammer can usually kill your enemy so keep your distance if an opponent tries to run up to you with one.

It packs a literal punch

Fisticuffs

Epic is currently experimenting with the secondary fire for the impact hammer, including the possibility for rocket-jumps. They've also mentioned the possibility of giving it "airfist" properties - the imact hammer will shoot out a medium-range cone which will "reflect" any projectiles back towards its source.

One bad thing about the hammer I noticed was that I kept getting it confused with the flak gun. They're both colored the same, so sometimes I pull up the hammer and try to shoot people thinking it's the flak gun! Don't make that mistake because you'll just end up dead and looking silly. Supposedly the guns are going to be changed around a bit so you won't make that mistake as easily.