If anything, Unreal Tournament 2003 proves that
you dont need a lot of exposition to make a great game. Like its predecessor,
UT2K3 uses the premise of a futuristic landscape where high-stakes combat has become the most popular spectator sport of all
time.
This year we get a few new guns, an impressive
number of new battlegrounds, a long list of characters to serve as your own personal killing machine, and one of the flat
out best looking graphics engines ever seen in a video game.
About those graphics: Though obviously better on higher end computers, these visuals stand strong on any detail setting, ensuring
that if you have a fair machine, youll get all the bells and whistles you deserve in a first person shooter.
Besides the obligatory deathmatch and team deathmatch
modes, UT2K3 offers up a fast paced capture the flag mode, which needs no introduction, and a brand new concept known as Bombing
Run. Bombing Run is a sports game of sorts, where two teams compete to acquire
a bomb that they can throw into each others respective goal, detonating it, and scoring points. Its easily the most team based off all the modes.
It goes without saying that most people will be
buying this game for the online play alone, and thats understandable. The single
player mode is the same as what youll face online, but with bots that you can set to be complete morons, or indestructible
pillars of awesomeness. Personally, the single player mode just wasnt the kind
of spontaneous fun that I was looking for.
In the end, Unreal Tournament 2003 is a fun game,
but its fairly limited gameplay might turn some players off. As with most first
person shooters, after a while the guns, levels and strategies will become tiresome over time, but if youre into downloading
mods, youre pretty much set for life, right?
-James Napier
