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Unreal Championship's single player mode is a major improvement over its predecessor's. The mode involves building up a team of bots to go into challenges against other teams. This mode is pretty cool because you get to build up the bots on your team and improve their stats to make them better at certain aspects of the game. For example, if you want a character that is good at defense, just have him stay back and heaviliy arm and armor him. The only flaw with this game's single player is that like others in its genre, it is used merely as a tool to teach players the basics of the game. It is truly unfortunate that this game's solo mode serves only to prepare one for multiplayer.
Multiplayer, the mode in which this game shines brightest. The splitscreen mode works well, with rare slowdown, but the true way to play this game is through xbox live. If your willing to put down the dough for playing online with xbox, this is currently the best reason to do so. With the ability to play with up to sixteen players at once, and with chat options, multiplayer absolutely rules. To top it all off is the ability to allow multiple people to play on a single xbox over the net. However, there are a couple of flaws with online play. The fact that you are required to have broadband, buy the online starter kit, and pay for xbox live makes this game an expensive investment to get the best experience out of it. Also, playing with more than eight players leads to quite a bit of lag, which is unexcusable considering that everyone is playing with broadband. Besides these little nitpicks, Unreal Championship's online play is truly great and the closest a console has ever come to mimicking the online FPS experience that PC gamers have enjoyed for so long.
Although my review may come off as negative, I do not believe that Unreal Championship is a bad game. On the contrary, its is a very good game. However, this very good game feels a little bit too familiar for me, and the changes made to the Unreal formula really don't add too much. I'd say if you want a FPS to play multiplayer with, or if you've never played UT, then by all means purchase this title, but for all Unreal Tournament veterans, I recommend just sticking with UT and waiting to spend your cash on a more original title.
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Category:
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Description:
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Rating:
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Graphics
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Unreal Championship visually is most impressive. The animation is excellent, the effects are cool, the lighting is well-done, and the textures look very good. The only graphical problems are the ocassional slowdown that occurs when the screen is full of players and the overall lack of originality for most of the levels. Besides that, a very strong title visually.
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9.7/10
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Gameplay
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Unreal Championship has good gameplay. The modes are diverse, the single player is decent, and the multiplayer is very entertaining. Even the level's are fairly well designed. The thing is though, the gameplay is too similiar to that of the original UT's. This seriously hurts the overall experience for the UT vets.
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8.7/10
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Story
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The story in this game is pretty much non-existant. Its basically like, "You are in a tournament, go kill stuff." However, since the story does not interrupt the fast-paced action, it does not bring the game down at all.
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5.0/10
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Replay
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The solo play will not keep you coming back for more. The multiplayer mode will. Especially if you have xbox live and can play multiplayer whenever you want. For multiplayer, this game will keep you coming back for more, but as a solo experience this game will quickly collect dust.
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9.5/10
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Overall
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Unreal Championship is an excellent multiplayer title. It will provide hours of fun if you have friends around or if you have access to xbox live. Unfortunately, the solo experience is not nearly as good, and the changes to this game when compared to its prequel are mostly cosmetic. Also, the changes that were made sometimes are worse than what they originally were. The move to make bombing run instead of keeping in assault mode is a prime example of this. Overall, buy this if you want to play multiplayer or if you've never played Unreal Tournament for PC, but if you are a Unreal veteran, stick with the classic since it is the superior game in this situation.
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8.9/10
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