BU Reviews: UT2004

Eh, a fair review. It does tend to ramble a bit, but you do at least address some of the pros and cons relating to the UT>UT2003 debate and how they apply to UT2004 as well as the basic look/feel/playability.


Still allow me to provide some fuel for "Review 2.0: The second look." (I'll try not to fall into "Flamewar: DCXXVIII" territory, but people will see what they want too.)

Flak Cannon (Primary) = The new spam. Just sit back from long range and fire away....the UT Flak had a very short 'spamable' range, but the UT2k version has such long range that you can now spam damn near across any map. The Onslaught/Assualt maps make this very obvious, while it wasn't that big of a problem in the crappy 2k3 maps.

Scaling/Viewing still off: It seems the solution for the UT2k3 tiny maps problem was to just shrink the player and not make the maps bigger. There were some other adjustments made to be sure, but the end feeling is that everything is smaller than it should be. (Maybe I'm just spoiled by UT...)

Team Skins. Still a big nasty problem with many skins being almost impossible to identify in many situations. How UT can get this so right and UT2k3/UT2k4 get this so wrong is a mystery to me. I know many people dis this argument as whining...but then again they dissed many of the UT2k3 complaints and we know how popular ut2k3 ended up.

Weapon balance. Changes were made that helped some of the weapon balance compared to UT2k3...but I cannot help but feel that they still haven't gotten this right. Eg. Many people (like in this review) say that they like the Sniper in UT2k4....excepting those who actually liked the UT version of the thing. After playing with it, I come to realize that it is pretty much just a lightningless Lightning Gun. Different graphics but same effects. (I like the sounds for it better though.)

Ammo/Health. I'd like to know where it is! Just about every map is almost completely empty of any ammo or health...and it doesn't respawn fast enough to be of much use if there is any. Worse problem is on the onslaught maps...it's almost better to suicide than it is to bother with trying to resupply. The green light may be lit, but I am not getting crap for more ammo even if I am completely empty. (And yet you have enough AVRiL ammo to outfit ten teams at once in every map.)

Adrenaline...it's still there....and so are the stupid combos to activate them.

I could go on with much more, but in essense I think I can boil everything down to one sentence that covers pretty much why UT2k4 is actually popular compared to UT2k3:

"Onslaught and Assault are damn fun, even if everything else carried over from UT2k3 still sucks donkey balls." ...I think the #of servers based on gametype is enough justification for this statement...

I don't have the game yet, but after seeing those screenshots, I think I'm qualified to say that this game is significantly better then last year's offering.

Onslaught is new, and has vehicles. People like new things, especially if those new things have vehicles.

The real test for ONS will come in 6 months time. Will there still be as many ONS servers? Will the other gametypes gain more servers? Only time will tell. I play for Ci's Euro ONS squad, and there's more to ONS than just big terrain maps and vehicles. You need solid tactics and strategies to do well in competitive ONS play.

Moving on, I think UT2004 is the best environment for 1v1 play today. Sure, Quake 3, and Quake 1 before it had DM down (Q2's DM never did anything for me, although Q2CTF rocked), but I've been playing lots of 2k4 1v1 and it just plain rocks. The 1v1 maps (especially DM-1on1-Spirit) kick multiple shades of ass, and maps like Gestalt, Oceanic and Deck17 feel great to play in 2k4. I was never into 1v1 in the UT and UT2003 days, but 2k4 has roped me in for some reason and I don't plan on cutting out anytime soon.

UT2004 also supports seperate mod dirs, rather than chucking everything into the base dirs and mixing it all up. Games like Quake have had this for ages, and it's good to see the UT series including it at last. I hope mod makers will use this, because it'd be rude not to.

UT2004 is also spawning sub-genres such as stunting, which I also play a lot of and without 2k4's out-of-the-box and immediate vehicle support wouldn't have happened (or have happened as fast as it did).

Overall, I think UT2004 is fun. I've played more of it in two months (demo, then retail) than UT2003 over the last year.

Excellent stuff here from the BU team. I'm impressed.

I'm even more impressed with the screenshots, which I'm using as wallpapers.

If anyone just wants eye candy to drool over, all the screenshots used in the review can be found here:

http://www.beyondunreal.com/main/ut2004/ut2004shots.php

If anyone wants the original BMP for any one of the shots, let me know.