A year ago Epic games announced their new multiplayer game, Unreal Tournament, and the net community at large let out a collective belly laugh. The netplay code of the original Unreal was absolutely terrible for anything but playing on a LAN, the weapon balance and feel was way off mark and the deathmatch level design was merely average. It seemed like Epic had a difficult uphill struggle on their hands to make Unreal Tournament into a game that players would want. A year on and Unreal Tournament is finally out. Have Epic succeeded in creating a good first person shooter for play both online and off? We can quite certainly say yes. With a vengeance. And then some.
Of course, Unreal Tournament didn't really need a story but Epic decided to throw one into the mix for the hell of it. The United Earth Government legalized no-holds-barred fighting to quell violence in deep space mining colonies. Organized fights slowly became incredibly popular until they were Liandri mining's most profitable venture. You are one of the most recent warriors to challenge Xan, the Tournament Champion. Okay, so the story doesn't come near that of Outcast or Half Life, but it is a nice inclusion that helps get you into the game. Each opponent also has their own short bio that reveals an interesting nugget of information on their past and their preferred playing style to help you prepare for the coming match.
Games are also easy to get into thanks to the interface that will be familiar and easy to use for most computer users. Launching a game with any combination of mutators (small modifications to remove weapons, items, change gameplay styles etc.) and number of bots is easy and intuitive, as is finding a net game. The faster we can get into a game, the happier we are so this interesting new feature certainly gets our approval.
Epic also decided to include a few well-done tutorial maps that are helpful for getting used to the different gameplay modes and for new gamers. We decided to test the tutorials on two people new to gaming, codenamed Mother and Father. In short Mother found the tutorials helpful but really needed to go through them a few times to get used to the first person shooter setting as a whole. Father, who is more familiar and comfortable with computers than Mother found them useful and managed to win the next few rounds in the game with relative ease, albeit on the Novice setting with the occasional shout of "how do I change guns?" and "where is the floor?". While the tutorials won't be of great use to a complete beginner, they are useful for learning the new gameplay modes and more computer literate Novices will find them useful to help start them out with the game.