Unreal Tournament 2004

What is it - The hardcore first person shooter for hardcore gamers.

Game profile - no other game have this much to offer.

The good about it - massive muliplayer community.

The bad about it - little expensive then competitors.

I rate it - 9.4/10

The beauty of Onslaught is that, because you can usually only attack two or three power nodes at any given moment, the action becomes very focused on a few locations. An in-screen map shows which nodes you control and which are under attack, and it's possible to teleport between any two nodes that you own, so it's usually pretty easy to locate the action and get there within seconds. This is a nice improvement over games like Battlefield 1942 and PlanetSide, where you could often spend a lot of time trying to reach the fight... instead of actually partaking in it.

To that end, Onslaught also introduces a new set of vehicles to the Unreal franchise: the Manta hovercraft, the Raptor fighter, the Hellbender jeep, the Goliath tank, the Scorpion buggy, and the Leviathan, errr, super-tank. The implementation of the vehicles is near-perfect -- they're easy to control, and loaded with options. You can switch between first- and third-person views or jump between different seats in each vehicle with the touch of a button, and the camera is fully controlled with the mouse, so you can swing around and zoom in and out for any view of the action you could possibly want.

Oftentimes, the tide of battle will swing in one side's favor, but in the ensuing tug-of-war, things can drag out to the time limit. This sends the game to sudden death, with both cores draining based on the number of nodes each team controls. Other maps lend themselves to more volatile battles, with the cores being connected and attacked in parallel. In every case, it's easy to understand which team is leading and what you have to do to win. Unlike the abstract system of a game like Battlefield 1942, onslaught's scoring system is concrete, and a glance at the power core health meters and the minimap reveals how a match's momentum is swinging.





























































Unreal Tournament 2004 will remind you how satisfying explosive, extremely fast action gaming can be. The smooth engine and core gameplay inherited from UT 2003 make a great foundation, and the onslaught and assault modes take the whole package up another notch. And, to help you come to grips with a multiplayer world increasingly focused on teamplay, the voice chat features can make any team game better by facilitating real tactical coordination. Then, just when (or if) you start to tire of all the official maps (and combinations of maps with the library of preset mutators), there are community tools to make creating and installing custom content as straightforward as possible. No other multiplayer-focused action game has this much to offer.

I would chose this game for me ofcourse.

Far Cry

What is it - the jungle game with full jungle environment and hard battle without any teammates.

Game profile - The only and only game of this class that had dominated the market.

The good about it - if you haven't visited a jungle before. It can give you a little taste.

The bad about it - sound of guns aren't realistic.

I rate it - 8.6/10


The only question that comes to mind after playing UbiSoft's latest FPS is where can we go from here? Far Cry is, in everyway, the best first-person shooter I've ever played. From the sublime, deeply textured and truly immersive graphics to meaningful audio and the type of artificial intelligence that makes you question whether you really are playing against a computer - Far Cry heralds a new age of FPS with a game that is nearly perfect in everyway.

Crytek has improved the shooter genre in just about every way possible. In Far Cry you play as Jack Carver a tour guide with a military background who loses his charge, a photographer hottie who he spends the rest of the game trying to rescue. The plot, while seemingly shallow to start with, evolves into something much deeper, offering up a complex story line and some startling revelations.

The first thing I noticed about Far Cry when I started playing it was the smooth frame rate and over the top textures. The graphics are truly the best I've seen to date, and Crytek didn't accomplish this feat by setting the game in a stark environment. On the contrary, the whole game takes place on a lush tropical island that features such startling beautiful graphics as a shimmering lagoon you can swim in, a jungle choked with vegetation that you can push threw and plenty of buildings and baddies to interact with. These detailed textures are blended with a lighting effect that has got to be the best to date - allowing sunlight to shoot through palm fronds and casting shadows from approaching bad guys. One of the most startling aspects of the game's graphics is that Crytek's engine supports a view distance of 2 kilometers. That means you can be crouching on some island hill top with a sniper rifle and pop a bad guy two kilometers away with the help of a zoomed in scope. The effect is overwhelming.

The sounds are just as impressive and are used equally well to both place you on the island and help you survive getting off of it. Insects buzz in your ears, gunshots echo around you and enemy mercenaries quietly discuss plot points and game details that could spell the difference between life and death.














































The game also uses an advanced physics engine that makes most of what you see fully interactive. In other words, when you bump into a table not only does it move, but the cans and cups on top of it fall over and roll to the ground. I kid you not. At one point I was able to push wooden crates into the water and watch them bob, then I killed a guy and knocked him into the water. Not only did he bob lazily in the lagoon, but a cloud of blood slowly spread out from his body. The only draw back in the engine is that not all things are as destructible as you'd expect, but I guess there has to be a limit somewhere.

The game's artificial intelligence is also very impressive, with bad guys independently reacting to you and behaving, well, the way you behave. More than once I found myself in a prolonged gun battle with a single guy as we took turns running from cover to cover firing. They not only act like they want to kill you, but like they don't want to die in the process.

The multiplayer modes, while limited, are also fairly impressive. You can play team death match, free-for-all or assault on a small selection of maps. The physics engine isn't as full blown as in the single player mode, but the maps are equally lush and just enormous. In one map I found my way to the top of what I thought was an un-climbable mountain and spent the rest of the game picking off my fellow players with a sniper rifle - fun times.

Conclusion

Final words are 'buy this game'.

Wolfenstein Return to Castle

What is it? - the great fps game that combine horror and military action in a way that never had been before.

Game profile - It boosted the craze of PC gaming over consoles.

The good about it - both multiplayer and singleplayer is greatly developed. It means you get two in one pack.

The bad about it - terribly horror full, not for those who are little unfit.

I rate it - 9.2/10

Wolfenstein has played many role in gaming. Wolfenstein 3D is what put ID soft on the map. Wolfenstein 3D is what made PC gaming cool, what made action games on aPC better than those on a console. From Wolfenstein, we got Doom and Doom made networks cool. From Doom we got Quake, and Quake made Internet gaming cool and helped popularize the net in general. The Internet, as we all know, ignited and was the core of the longest sustained economic boom that America (and by default most of the western world) has experienced. Thus, Wolfenstein 3D is responsible for your current cushy job and the general level of prosperity we’re currently experiencing. That may be a “bit” of a stretch, but the connection is certainly there, somewhere.

Wolfenstein 3D took place during World War II, where you played one BJ Blazkowitz, a soldier on a mission to escape from the infamous…you got it, Castle Wolfenstein, occupied by the Third Reich . Apparently, anything and everything of value, including the Fuhrer himself, was located in said castle. Blazkowitz went through, taking down guard dogs (giant rats in the Nintendo-fied SNES version) , soldiers who cried “mein leben” (my life) in the most comic fashion and monstrous humans who ate hundreds of pounds of lead unleashed from BJ’s chaingun. Yes, poor old BJ had no rocket launcher, no shaft and no railgun. In a fit of pity, iD took the valued Wolfenstein license and allowed Gray Matter interactive and Nerver software to give the series a facelift.

Gameplay

Sometimes, no matter how perfect the recipe and good the ingredients, it takes only one mistake to ruin the cake. Take Wolfenstein’s AI, for example. Nazi soldiers are smart – if they hear gunfire while in a peaceful area, they’ll sound the alarm. They know how to use grenades and how to kick them back at the player if he throws one. They retreat, reinforce and use cover quite well.

It’s just a shame that every Nazi can shoot a black flea off a black, hairy dog at 500 paces. Amazing how they lost the war, really, with such fine aim. If we didn’t know better, we’d suspect that these soldiers got their aiming code straight from the bots in Quake III Arena. Take this example – halfway across a huge map, a panzerschreck wielding soldier walks in on a fight where you happen to be sniping at some poor saps. The distance is easily approaching a quarter of a mile, and the panzerschreck has never been known for its accuracy. Said Nazi slings his rocket launcher over his shoulder, squints an eye… and hits you dead-on. But that is surely a fluke, a bug with the panzerschreck aim?

Some of the game screens are below:



























































Maybe I’m losing my edge, but I find nowadays that the singleplayer game is quite important to me – more so than multiplayer. A merely average result, like the one in Return to Castle Wolfenstein, was disappointing after all the hype and promises. Even with the fancy graphics, the singleplayer could not score above a 75% - just slightly above the average game out there. If you’re looking for an interesting solo challenge, try Aliens vs. Predator 2.

With so many multiplayer options out there for gamers – the Tribes games, Counter-Strike, TFC, Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena – being a standout multiplayer game is tough and unrewarding. Even though RTCW has the best multiplayer we’ve reviewed since Tribes 2 (and definitely better if you prefer a real-world feel to your game), the plethora of other multiplayer options drowns out some of Wolfenstein’s thunder. Perhaps that is why though I feel compelled to score the online aspect of Wolfenstein in the low 90s, it adds only a mere 10 points to the 75% score the singleplayer game would get. Make no bones about it, however – Wolf is very likely to be the next big multiplayer hit. If that is your cup of tea, laying down the greenbacks for this game is a wise decision.