Unreal Tournament 2003 has a new sports moniker that is present in all parts of the game from the intro to the announcer. Along with the sport theme comes faster pace combat making the new UT feel more like Quake 3. The weapons also get overhauled. The impact hammer is replaced with the shield gun. Its primary fire the same, but alt-fire is a shield. The enforcer is replaced by an assault rifle. The pulse rifle is renamed the link gun because you can link it with allies to cause more damage. The sniper is now called the lightning gun and leaves a trail like Quake's rail gun. The minigun gets a new armor piercing alt-fire. The ripper is gone, but the bio rifle, shock rifle, flak cannon, and redeemer return unchanged. And there is one new weapon, the ion painter; paint the ground a large ion cannon will blast the area. A new feature is adrenaline, gain it by pickups and kills, and when you have 100 you can pull off a combo that makes you invisible, self-heal, move faster, or cause more damage. You can also do a double jump. Game modes consist of Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Double Domination, and Bombing Run. Surprisingly Assault is missing. Domination changes in that you must control two points for a few seconds to score. Bombing Run is like football with guns, each team starts at each end with the ball in the center, the goal is to get the ball through the other teams goal. Easier said than done, when carrying the ball you cannot fire any normal weapons. Most of the maps seem either too large or too small for Deathmatch, but a new version of UnrealED comes with the game so wait a while and you can download the community's best maps. The game's graphic's are beautiful, but don't expect to turn them all the way up, the higher quality textures were designed for the hardware of the future. The bots return yet again with AI improvements. UT2003 wins by default as the new Deathmatch king since everyone else has gone team based.

Score: 7.7

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