Unreal Tournament
System: Playstation 2
Publisher: Infogrames
Developer: Epic Mega Games
Released: October 27, 2000(PS2 Launch Title)
Genre: Action-RPG
Capabilities: Dual Shock Compatible, Multi Tap, I-Link Compatible

The Game

If you’ve never heard of this game before, it’s a first person shooter, based on the excellent, award winning, PC version. This game came in right on Playstation 2 launch day, as well with Timesplitters, another first person shooter on launch day. So will this title come up winning in the long run? Let’s get onto the review and find out.

Graphics

Wow, this game’s visuals simply blew me away. All the guns are detailed down to every little bit. The animation of the guns firing is one of the best parts, the pulse gun leaves a flashing beam of blue as it fires by, and the rockets explosion can be easily seen from any distance. The arenas are also surprisingly well done, you battle in spaceships, courtyards, and basically anything else you can imagine. The variations of all the guns are simply outstanding, and even though there aren’t as many guns in here as in Timesplitters and Perfect Dark, I do love those limited amount of guns more than the others in the mentioned games. I have heard reports of this game having noticeable slowdown happening often, but as far as I have played this game, I haven’t seen much of any slowdown whatsoever occur, unless there’s a billion rockets exploding at once. The game’s menus have a weird theme to them, the background is all clouds and blue sky’s, implying that this is some family oriented game, which is pretty much the exact opposite of what this game really is.

Sound

Really isn’t much theme music to the game during game play to keep you in an eerie, suspense mood. Most of the guns have their own sound effects, and most of them get the job well done. The players yell at the other arena combatants as you frag them down with chants like “You Suck” and so forth. That is pretty much it for the sound, even though it doesn’t sound like much, try hooking the game up into a Dolby Stereo system during the middle of a game, and I’m sure you’ll think different.

Game play

The game controls are quite odd. There are 10 different control style layouts to choose from, so you are sure to find one of your choosing. The best one to me, is the default one, which is a mixture of controls from Turok and Goldeneye. Too bad there is no customizable control whatsoever. There are lots of different ways of controlling your character like jumping, strafing, pitching, turning, and so on, and took me a good while to nail down a control scheme for all these options. The PS2's controller with 2 joysticks actually seems more like a disadvantage than an advantage by making turning around seem impossible all together.

The Game only has a handful modes. There’s first a practice session where you can just move around at your own pace and get the controls down. Then there’s the single player where you go through various missions trying to gun down aliens, but the single player campaigns seem more like multi player gaming with just fragging a certain amount of enemies with certain limits and rules applying. This uncommon single player game play is probably because the game is based around the multi player aspect like it’s PC counterpart, so don’t get disappointed when you get around to playing it expecting a lot. I actually got use to it and enjoyed it quite a bit. The other mode is the games heart and sole, which is the multi player. There are a few scenarios to do like all out combat, or capture the flag. And up to 4 players can compete with each other on one PS2 console, or up the amount to 8 players when you use the PS2 I-Link Cable to connect two TV’s, and two PS2's. Even with all the tiny screens, the action seems just like playing a game over the PC.

Replay Value

Well the multi player action is what this game is all about, and the experience of playing it does deliver in it’s own aspect. The support with the I-Link is good in theory, but by adding up the totals of two televisions, two PS2's, two copies of Unreal Tournament, 8 controllers, and two multi taps, and I’m sure you’ll be one of those few people who can chuck out the $3000 to afford all this, let alone have 8 friends in your house at once. The single player mode is good to play for a little while, but can become tedious over time. The multi player is great, but most of the arenas are smaller than what I usually play, plus you can only have up to 3 computer opponents on screen at once if you’re playing with 1 player, and 2 with 2 players, and 1 with 3 players. And you can’t have the 10 computer opponents like in Timesplitters running around also.

In Brief

+: Spectacular Graphics & Sound, Intense Multi player action with up to 8 people playing at once

-: Single player lacks, Not a whole lot extra to keep you playing, The 8 player experience can run you up to $3000

The Final Ratings Rundown

Graphics: 9.5
Sound: 8.8
Game play: 7.1
Replay Value: 4.3

Overall: 7.4

Rounded to fit GameFAQs Score: 7

Comments

Unreal Tournament is a great conversion for console, but most console fans probably aren’t use to the PC type of FPS’s like Quake and Unreal and will opt to go with Timesplitters instead. Both this and Timesplitters have its ups and downs, with Unreal with better Graphics, Sound, and Gun Variation, and Timesplitters with better controls(customizable), and game play. So depending on which type of FPS games you like more, the choice is up to you for Unreal or Timesplitters. But I’m waiting for the Dreamcast version because it has online play.