Review: Bombing Spree [beta]

Everyone who has downloaded a mod for Unreal Tournament should be familiar with Uncommon. Among other things, he is responsible for the brilliant Flag Domination and CTF4 mods, classics in their own right. Bombing Spree is a new gametype for UT2003, which expands and adds to regular Bombing Run.

For those of you that don't play Bombing Run (or UT2003), the rules are simple - two teams each have a goal, there's a ball (or 'bomb') in the map, and you can score 3 points by shooting it into your enemies goal or seven points for carrying it in. Bombing Spree keeps this format of play, with a major twist - instead of one ball, you can play with up to four in the map at once.

This alters the gameplay significantly. Instead of everyone focusing on one part of the map (where the ball-carrier is), now you have to be aware of where all the balls are at one time. The HUD shows the location of every ball, and each dot on the radar is team-coloured depending on who is carrying that ball. This is a great advancement of the Bombing Run HUD, and it allows you to easily see all the information you need with regards to which team has each ball and the location of each.

With multiple balls in play at once, this means that scores can go higher than Bombing Run in less time. It makes the game faster-paced - a new round only starts once all the balls have been scored, so it makes for a more intense game. One change over Bombing Run improves this gametype a lot - now, when you score with a ball, they explode redeemer-style. This makes it harder for one team to completely dominate the other - they cannot score all the balls one after another, because of the explosions.

While the theory is sound, the actual playing of the gametype isn't as good as it should be. This is mainly down to bot AI - they only seem to go after one ball at a time, and so it plays too similar to Bombing Run. I expect it would be better to play with human players, as they would likely go for whichever ball is free, and you would get all the balls carried at once.

The best thing about the gametype, in my eyes, is that it does not need new maps - it uses regular Bombing Run maps. It spawns one ball at the default placement, and then spawns the others somewhere in the middle of the map. This usually works fine, but on some maps with some numbers of balls you can have odd placements. The other option is to manually edit a BR map by adding the extra balls where you like - however, I did not try this.

All in all, this is a very nice enhancement to Bombing Run. If you are a fan of that gametype, I wholeheartedly recommend trying this out. The very small filesize is a bonus as well.


-Shuriken

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