Weapons - What's new?

Already been covered

In our previous Unreal Tournament preview, we pretty much covered what to expect from the weapons and how they all work. You might want to consult that article for the general idea. Here we're going to cover what's new or what we might have missed the last time around.

Freeze!

Notice the molten hot metal coming out

Rocket crispness

Foremost on the minds of many action gamers (at least the ones raised on Quake) is "how good are the rockets?" In default mode, the rocket had a weird firing delay after the trigger was pulled. This is probably because of the tertiary fire mode that allows you to hold down the fire button and load up more rockets. This time around we discovered a switch in the console that allows you to turn on "instant fire rockets." Holding down the button no longer loads up extra rockets, so you give up that ability - instead, rockets fire instantaneously. What's cool is that turning on this mode improves the crispness of rocket firing a good deal over the default mode. This switch appears to be client side so you can turn it on regardless of what the server dictates.

Impact hammer

One of the things we complained about in the older build that we played was that the impact hammer looked too similar to the flak cannon in color. It was sometimes confusing to figure out what you were carrying. It appears that Epic has fixed that problem so there's no mistaking your "shoot me I have no bullets" weapon (impact hammer) from the ass kicking Flak Cannon.

Ouch - he caught all of it

She backed into the wrong corner

Flak Cannon

Many of you know that the flak cannon is a sort of combination shotgun and grenade launcher. The primary attack fires off molten particles of metal that can bounce off of walls and floors. This has been tweaked since the last time we played so that the particles do decreasing amounts of damage with increasing distance. In our testing we noticed that long range sniping with the primary attack is rather ineffective - you really have to get in closer.

The Ripper

Not sure if this is new or not, but if you're able to get a head shot with the Ripper, it's an instant kill (via decapitation) just as if you shot them in the head with the sniper rifle. It's fairly hard to do, but once in a while I can go on a decapitation spree by running up to bots while aiming the Ripper just a little higher than normal.

The Enforcer

The Enforcer no longer needs to reload after 20 bullets. This is a welcome change, considering that none of the other weapons need to wait for a reload.