Review: U4E for UT2K4 (MSU Version)

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Jesco

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[ Transscript of review for U4E for UT2K4 (MSU Version) | Posted by Bean on 2004-07-03 | Score: 8.5 ]
Man has U4E ever come a long way from Version 1 for UT2K4. The team hasn’t just polished the mod. Imagine polishing stone to the point it shines, and never stopping until it’s done. Then imagine a hundred walls being done in this way and you get the idea of the tremendous effort everyone’s put into U4E.

Usually I go into detail and describe every weapon in a weapon mod, but come on, there’s got to be about 20 here. I’ll just explain some of the juicier ones to show you what you’re missing.

The Phasor: Oh is it ever back. Primary fires a thin but powerful beam of energy that reaches one hell of a distance. Pick up more Phasors to power up your beam. With weaponstay on, you can just grab them off the weapon base. With weaponstay off, you\'ll need to kill a Phasor user to get one. Secondary does something different this time around. Instead of changing power levels of the phasor (not currently something you can do) it fires a phasor blast. Lower levels do less damage and require long recharge times and the higher levels do more damage and fire faster. Very impressive weapon.

The BFG: The fireball-spitter itself. Holding primary launches a barrage of BFG fireballs, and holding secondary launches the big green orb of doom. This iteration works a little differently: when it hits it creates a vacuum and then blows up. And it still “heatsinks” meaning if you’re on the wrong end of one of these, the energy tendrils that you got in UT will lash out and drain your life in a hurry. All this for the cost of 20 ammo.

Fleshbomb Rifle: I know it’s supposed to do a lot of damage, but it does at least 20,000 damage... so this weapon has received a gigantic visual overhaul. No more is it the “block with the block on it” model in UT, now it’s a sleek red rifle with a proper scope that looks like it could be one hell of a sniper rifle model. Secondary zooms to get a better view at your target(s) and primary launches a hitscan dart that sticks into anything soft and fleshy, like, um... flesh... I guess. It will stick into robot armour too, so thank God for that. Must be using cheap low-grade armour or something.

When these darts find their target, they start their victim’s skin (or armour...) boiling. After a few seconds there is a large explosive reaction and it causes a redeemer-sized explosion. Very fun weapon to use, but does it really need to do over 20,000 damage? I’ll get to that in a bit.

The last “really awesome” weapon isn’t a weapon so much as REALLY REALLY fun. It’s called the IAM, or the Industrial Anti-gravity Mover. Holding primary does nothing, until you realie you need to be in range of something like a person or vehicle. When you get in range, the IAM kicks into gear and grabs a hold of your intended target. Now this is the tricky part, but once you learn it you can have some real fun. While you are holding on to your target, flick the mouse forward to look up really fast and let go of fire, and you’ll catapult your target over your head. This can be extremely fun. Try it on Mantas! Scorpions and Hellbenders tend to blow up if they flip end over end with this thing.

Secondary tethers YOU to the end of the beam. Try aiming at the ground on a 60 degree angle or so, then flipping the mouse down to look down fast and letting go of secondary. You can go absolutely flying across the map. Screw the vehicles in Onslaught, this is the fastest way to travel. But wait a minute, now that you’re up there in the air you aren’t going to stay there forever. Down you come! This is where you look straight down and before you hit the ground, use secondary again to “grab” the ground and stop your fall. If you time it good enough you can use the IAM like a pogo stick to fly around the map.

This is just a small, small taste of what U4E has to offer. There’s pistols, five types of grenades including shrapnel, flying and gas, there’s a Katana, there’s the awesome Quicksilver which doesn’t suck like it used to in UT, and there’s a Dollbomb. Can’t forget the Dollbomb. Even then this is only about half the arsenal. (And I’m on a page and a half, see why I’m not going on about all of them?)

There is also a QSG but they made it next to
worthless. Primary fire now fires a freakin projectile instead of the insta-beam, and secondary still raises a shield but it’s so hard to see out of it’s worthless. The whole weapon is just one I’ll never touch again after this bastardization.

That’s just WEAPONS. You’re going to NEED all that firepower if you tackle the redone U4E Gateways game mode. Currently bugs limit you to setting only 5 of each kind of gate through the in-game menu, however you can change this manually in the U4E.ini file under the section that starts with [u4e2.gateways] (its right there) and changing the number of each gate to whatever you want. DON’T use the in-game menu to alter this number or you’ll break it and have to re-do it manually again.

So the premise is, there’s these gateways (size and number configurable) that spawn monsters (how many, how fast and what kind configurable) that you have to destroy. Destroy all the gates to win the match.
Sounds easy until you come across a huge gate.
Thousands of health points later, and you’ll quickly be saying “well gee that’s not as easy as I thought”.

Think the monsters are a walk in the park? Come on, this is U4E. Not content to just use the stupidly omniscient Epic monsters, the team made their own “more realistic” ones. They have a certain distance they can see, and if you’re out of that range you can attack with impunity, until they get wise to you that is. There are the tiny little blobs that are more of a nuisance than anything, ranging up to these big freakin elephants on steroids called Goros. They run after you and nail you with those big tusks. Fortunately they seem to be blind as bats because if you stand still they run up to you and then... sit their asses on the ground and scratch themselves. I’m not kidding, they have a “sit down and scratch self like a dog” animation. They also seem to have strange eyesight. Sometimes they can see you from across the map, and other times you can get to within three feet of them and they’ll be scratching themselves.

Not enough carnage? Try Vehicle Gateways, played on Onslaught maps with vehicles. My current setup is playing with 10 huge gates, 5000 health each, all spawning Goros, set to open all at once. Lots of running and crapping my pants in fear. Well, not literally, but you know.....

Of course, no mod is perfect no matter how much people might want to think it is. U4E berzerk is probably a really dumb idea to be in U4E. The idea is that when you kill, you get mad, and the madder you get the more Rage you build up. (Man, this sounds familiar. Where have I heard this before?) When you hit a certain amount of Rage you start using your fists. This might not be such a bad idea in and of itself, but when you start firing and see how fast the hands move, well....it just looks stupid. Good idea, but it’s out of place in this mod. Besides, is it rage or idiocy to use your hands against a guy with a BFG? Yeah. Give me the gun please.

The QSG is a waste as I alluded to earlier.

The Fleshbomb Rifle model looks great, when it
actually lights up. I think it’s made of some kind of reflection-resistant material that only the light of a thousand suns can light up cause the damn thing is always too dark. See the pictures. Standing in one spot I have one weapon and standing in the exact same spot and switching weapons gives me this. Once Max told me that this was his best model. Well, there’s visual proof that it’s not.

Pistols. Why? Why do we need these? That’s right, it’s such a hard choice to make between “pistol” and “phasor”. I really have think THIS one over.

The Grenades should go farther the longer you hold the fire button. Utimer has said he is working on this last I heard, so that’s good to know.

Well I’ve tried to at least touch on all the major points, but U4E is so huge I could go on for ten pages and still not cover everything. There’s a world to explore out there, and it’s unreal. Forever.

--Nemephosis
 
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