I want to say, "Am I playing the same UT2004 demo as you guys?"
Assault is friggin awesome. Action packed and rockin all the way. Come on...Come on!!! You drive your assault buggy up to a armored convoy...break in, bust through, blowing up walls everywhere, ride a scripted vehicle across while laying support fire down, worm your way through enemies and defensive turrets, to swipe those missile-things.
Awesome. Instead of the "touch-and-race-to-the-next-point" capture points of the old asssault, they went with the "wait here for five seconds" method. That ensures that either 1) All enemies in the are are destroyed, or 2) you've got lots of backup and temwork going on. Anyone can pelt a guy standing still with a single rocket and stop it, even if they have a bad aim
Onslaught looks to be the real shiner for UT2004. The vehicles are enormously powerful, and rightly so. A vehicle should not be able to be taken down by weaponry designed for dealing with humans. That's why the included the anti-vehicle rocket. One or two well placed shots from that weapon and bye bye enemy vehicle! It even locks on, so you just have to get *close*. I personally love the point capture system. I don't mind that you can't capture any point in any order...it means you have to work together and 'push' forward. Push, huh? Yes, push! It's a vehicle based multi-path push system. Very very damn skippy. I've seen matches swing back and forth so many times that I believe anyone can win, if they coordinate themselves well enough.
Some of the other playermodels that they show in the loading screens look really interesting, and I can't wait to see what else they dished up. They've arranged them in groups again, instead of one big long list like before. The memu in general, while still not UWindows, is pretty good. The music even sets the right tone again, making it feel a bit more like UT. Did I mention voicechat? Text to speech? Voice recognition? Awesome.
My only gripe is that if I buy this, I'll be buying a whole lot of really good new stuff...as well as re-buying UT2003.