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By Contributing Writer Mike Bean Rating: Awesome I've never been a huge fan of first-person shooters, but Unreal Tournament only took about 15 minutes to suck me into its addictive web of fun and carnage. It is clear that Unreal Tournament was designed to do one thing: Deliver frantic, deathmatch-style gameplay with the Unreal engine. Mission accomplished. Unreal Tournament's single-player mode is level after level of well-designed arenas, fast-paced action, and downright nasty weapons. This is also the best-looking game I've seen all year, but as a result of the powerful graphics engine, the slowest computer that you can have if you want to get good performance is a Pentium 2 with 64MB of RAM. If you're going to make a single-player mode that's meant to play like a multi-player game, you'd better have excellent Artificial Intelligence, and Unreal Tournament definitely does. I have seen the computer "bots" ambush, run away, circle-strafe, snipe, bomb, and work together, and that's on the easiest difficulty setting! There are a good amount of difficulty levels, ranging from novice to God-like. As teammates, the bots lack very little in terms of intelligence. This is especially refreshing considering how stupid computer teammates usually are in video games. The bots really seem to make a sincere effort to do what they're told, and they react quickly and reasonably to changing situations. If you find a bot's post abandoned, you can reasonably assume that the bot died while defending his post, re-spawned somewhere else on the map, and is working his way back. It might sound corny, but I couldn't have beaten the game without them. Regrettably, I can't recommend playing this game online if you fall into the "56K and lower" Internet connection category. The lag effects the game way too much in multi-player, to the point that it's not really worth it. There's not much reason to play the multi-player mode (and tolerate the lag) when the single-player mode is so much faster and just as challenging. Fortunately, the single-player mode is good enough to be a must-have game in own right. The only people that I wouldn't recommend this game to are those who genuinely object to violence in video games, because in terms of violence, Unreal Tournament is about as bad as they come. On the other hand, if you're a gamer who's interested in deathmatch-style gameplay, ask yourself two questions: Can your computer run it? Do you have a pulse? If so, go get it. Send your thoughts on this review to mike@mastergamer.com
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