THE GOOD:Many game types and weapons
Larger maps
Unlocking Malcolm, Brock and Lauren is pretty tough
THE BAD:
Takes up a ton of system resources
Changed the Sniper Rifle
Changed Domination style and removed Assault mode
Somehow seemed less 'fun'
SUMMARY:
UT2003 was the follow up to Unreal Tournament and again focused way more on the multiplayer element than a storyline. There was a single player mode again which was pretty much the same as it was in Unreal Tournament. Again the focus was more on trying to make the multiplayer option as good as possible.
When doing the single player campaign you would have to build up a team and every person had different statistics and they all were averaged out to give the team score. Fighting a team of robots is one of the hardest challenges because they have a very high average for the 4 statistics. You may notice that certain people are missing from the line up of people for your character selection. Malcolm, Brock and Lauren are missing, and I always used the Malcolm appearance in Unreal Tournament. To unlock these you have to complete the single player mode. The final challenge is a one on one fight with Malcolm that isn't easy on any difficulty. You can then use them in the other modes as bots, and they all have extremely high statistics and are the best three bots of the lot.
The Capture the Flag mode is still the same, as are the death-match and team death-match modes. But they have removed the Assault mode which is a shame because that was my favourite mode from Unreal Tournament. I wished there were more of those maps in that game, but here it has been removed entirely. Replacing it is the Bombing Run where you have to pick up a ball and put it through a goal. You get three 3 for throwing it through and 7 points for jumping through the goal with it, although there's usually a bottomless pit below it. You can't fire while holding the ball and you have to rely on your team mates to protect you while holding the ball. I didn't really play this mode a whole lot and I preferred Assault mode. The Domination mode has undergone a revamp. Instead of having to get to a certain number of points by controlling points, this time there are only two points on the map. You have to control both of them for 10 seconds to score a point, and then the points are reset to neutral. This restricts the gameplay of this mode because you frequently have to be in both places at once to save the points while in the old version of this mode you could wander around freely. I don't like these two changes to the game as they seem like they give you a lot less freedom and restrict you in some ways. They realised their mistake and re-introduced the Assault mode back into the sequel, UT 2004.
Some of the weapons have changed from the last game. The Rocket Launcher no longer fires grenades, and can only fire 3 rockets maximum. The primary fire fires single rockets and the secondary fire fires three rockets. The Sniper Rifle has been changed to a Lightning Gun. It still zooms in and does instant hits, but now a beam of lightning if left when you fire which allows people to trace where the shot came from making camping a whole lot harder. The Razor Jack/Ripper has also been removed from this game which makes random kills around corners much harder
The graphics in this game are extremely well done and finished. Even on the lowest graphic settings there is still a large amount of detail. This comes at a price, this game needs a whopping 3 gigabytes of space on your PC. So make sure you've got enough space and preferably a 1 GHz processor to enjoy this game in smooth fashion. You can play this online as well and there are always hundreds of maps on the go at once, although if you're on dial-up you might as well forget it. I played this online with a 56K a few times and it wasn't that bad, but I only did small maps. When I played it with Broadband I found myself playing much better as I could actually hit people.
But it seems like they were trying to be too fancy and include too much in this game. The removal of the Assault mode, change to the Domination mode and high system resources mean that I often play Unreal Tournament more than I play this game. It's a good game in its own right and is easy to pick up with adjustable skill levels. But there isn't the flexibility that the previous game had and I'd recommend the previous game over this one.
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