Murder Simulator (Unreal Tournament (PC))

Member Name: jeremyf

Product:	Unreal Tournament (PC)
Date:	17/06/00 (33 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Best first person shooter yet, great multiplayer play

Disadvantages: Gets boring, nothing REALLY new here

There's been a lot of talk in the US about kids who play these games and then think it would be fun to shoot their plasma rifle at kids in their choir class. With games like this it's not that far a stretch! :(

Ever since Doom games like these have evolved with more realism, more gore, more killing, and for almost everyone who plays them, more fun. However, if you played Doom or any game like it, you've pretty much played this game.

Unreal Tournament is based on the concept of so many games like it: find other people and shoot them (preferably in the head, so you'll get an exciting "HEAD SHOT!" message). Sound fun yet? Well, there's a lot more to it.

Unreal Tournament, while using the tried-and-true formula of so many games before it, has some minor innovations. The game is extremely customizable. You can customize what you look like, what levels you're playing, the gravity of these levels, "teams," and a capture the flag mode (which is almost as popular as the "deathmatch" mode, but still involves a great deal of killing!). You can have pistons or chainsaws, and you can turn your "translocator" on and off, which lets you transport around the level and even allow you to kill your enemies by "telefragging" them -- transporting onto them.

There are so many addons on the net or in stores with an almost infinite amount of new levels, looks, sounds, and weapons that it seems like many games in one.

So what's a game of Unreal like? Well, you can play versus the computer, but that will get boring really fast. Unlike many games before it, Unreal has a built-in Internet games feature, which allows you to click a button in the game and hundreds of games pop up with thousands of people ready to cyber-kill you. This is where the real fun comes in: killing your friends. :(

If your friends don't fill up a level with bodies fast enough, you can se
t the game to add "bots" -- computer-controlled people that look and act just like other players (although you can usually tell by their generic names that they're computers, and, hopefully, by the rather predictable way that they play).

There are all kinds of weapons in Unreal Tournament which range from the regular pistol to a bio-rifle to the popular rocket launcher. None of these weapons are really useless (except maybe the pistols); I've done pretty well in games against pretty good players with the Piston (which almost automatically kills people if you have it ready and you run up to them). There's even a "nuke cannon" which you can control that blows up a huge radius, often killing many people in one blow (if you don't get killed first). The sniper rifle is another annoying weapon, which has a long range sight (a la Goldeneye for N64) that allows you to zoom in and shoot at things at long distance, and is very powerful if you shoot them in the head.

That leads me to some annoying aspects of Unreal play. You'll almost always find a joker who thinks it's fun to sit on some building or in some tower, unseen, and fire their sniper rifle, nuke cannon, or rocket launcher and innocent people running around beneath. They usually don't win, but it's godawful annoying having to stay indoors because you can just get a blow to the head without even seeing your enemy.

While the system requirements are high, you don't need a machine built specifically for this game to play it. The video card's the most important piece of equipment, but if you have a regular old video card like me, without a 3D accelerator (like a Voodoo card), it'll probably run ok. It ran ok for me, but it was a tiny bit jerky and I had to lower the resolution a lot. Just don't expect to play this on your old P90. If you have a 150mhz Celeron or better with a newer video card, it should be fine.

All in
all, Unreal Tournament is a pretty fun game -- for a while. For the hardcore murderers, they could take any game like this and play it well into the night -- every night. For you and me, it'll get boring. Not necessarily really fast, but you'll get tired of running back and forth grabbing the other team's flag and jumping your way back to your base. This is even more likely if you've played games like this (which are pretty much the same without the extra features and graphics).

Get this game if you have plenty of free time to kill people all around the world; if that's not your thing, find another game where running around shooting at stuff isn't the major goal.

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