Maybe I am just impatient but one game I feel like I have been waiting forever for is Unreal Tournament by Epic Games. It is most likely because it was announced way back in 2014. I understand games take a long time to develop but an arena shooter like Unreal is ripe for the modern age. It would fit cozy in the new world of E-sports and it's been a decade since the last Unreal came out. Lucky for us there is a Pre-Alpha available in the Epic Games launcher. I loaded it up, set my clock for an hour, and jumped back into the world of Unreal Tournament.
The Experience:
The best and most pleasant feeling was when I got into the tutorials and it felt like what I was hoping for. I was in an Unreal game. It felt right. The weapons looked right and the controls felt smooth and fast. That is what I loved about Unreal Tournaments of the past. While Counter-Strike offers you the slower precision combat, Unreal is a twitch shooter that tests your reflexes as you are flying around the levels.
This particular FPS is filled with non-conventional weapons. In exchange for your AR15s, you have pulse rifles, rockets launchers, lightning rifles, and a plethora of other weapons to help make your enemies explode and explode they will. When you spawn you start out with a pistol and you will make your way around the arena, which will hold more guns, health, and shields. There is a lot of strategy in picking fights in just the right spots to be able to retreat to some health or more ammo mid-fight. It also helps to know where these are so your enemy can be greeted with a nice grenade round when they make their way towards them.
There are tutorials and single player challenges available but I tried out the two multiplayer modes in Deathmatch and Blitz. Deathmatch is your classic 5 players free for all while Blitz is your reverse capture the flag game where one team will be trying to land the flag in the other team's base. Blitz is played in 6 rounds, each team taking three attack and three to defend. You will gain stars based on how fast you were able to plant the flag and the defending player only get 5 lives a piece. This makes it so you have to play smart if you want to defend and will punish those player trying to us rocket suicides as a defense.
Deathmatch was fun but I enjoyed the hell out of Blitz. It's such a cool game mode and the 5 minutes of each round flies by before you know it, that is if you make it 5 minutes. This game is a team game so you will want to work together. It might feel like some players can one man army it but one rogue rocket can end a killing spree pretty quickly. I really like how they also implemented the flag moving back in increments after it has been dropped. This doesn't screw the attacking team, gives some breathing room for the defending team, and saves both sides from campers.
The main issue is this game is still very much in Pre-Alpha. I had a few game crashes in Blitz, which took me out of the game but luckily there are enough players on right now you can just jump right back in. The skins are all pretty generic too but since the game will be free on launch I have the feeling that is where they will be making most of their income from. I just hope they stick to the promise of aesthetic loot only, this game wouldn't play well with items that have to be upgraded.
Other than those crashes the game looks good so far if the levels aren't a little bland. I am definitely keeping this one on my pc to jump into a game from time to time. It's really an enjoyable arena FPS and I have high hopes for where it can go especially with it coming out in today's highly competitive E-sports world. It's a game that stayed away from the hole of character ability and classes and just stuck to what it's best at. It works and if they stay on this path the game has a bright future.
TL;DR:
Unreal Tournament is returning to the world of crowded arena shooters with the elegance that makes Unreal Tournament so great. It's a twitch shooter at its best and so far looks promising. You might want to be a little more patient for it though, it is in pre-alpha still and I crashed a few times. If you are an Unreal fan, it's not a bad idea to at least try it out.
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