Introduction

Developer: Epic
Publisher: GT Interactive
Release Date: "When it's done"
Official Website: http://www.unrealtournament.com

A challenge from Epic

The action gaming community has been abuzz for months in anticipation of Unreal Tournament's release. With some segments of the community disappointed at the lack of "gee-whiz" new features and weapons in Quake 3, many gamers are looking to Unreal Tournament to deliver something different. Can it? It's been a few months since we last saw Unreal Tournament at E3. What's changed? What can we expect from the gameplay? What's the deal with this insta-gib mode? Have the weapons been tweaked at all? And of course, the all important question: How does UT compare to what we know about Quake 3? We'll delve into these and other questions.

Nice detail on the sculpture

Head shot with ripper = kill

What is UT?

Unreal Tournament is not Unreal 2. UT still uses the core Unreal engine which has been highly modified since the release of the original Unreal. OpenGL support has been added in but the game is still more at home with GLide and D3D, and runs a lot smoother in those two APIs at this point. There is a single player game in UT, but it's not your traditional "run through the map and shoot all the baddies" type of game. UT focuses on arena combat, and in single player you're going up against bots that get steadily smarter and deadlier as you move up the ranks.

Back the **ck up

UT's 'shaft' stays straight

On the multiplayer side, Unreal Tournament boasts a wide variety of different game types aside from straight deathmatch. Built in support is included for team deathmatch, Capture the flag, and other games like Assault, Domination, and Last Man Standing. What's interesting is that Unreal Tournament uses a GUI menu system to allow players to tweak their settings, preferences, game types, and everything. No more dealing with cryptic console commands because just about everything is there in the menu.