Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict - IGN (2024)

For potential buyers, this means a few things. A) Unreal Championship 2 is a great combat game. It's born from the desire to engage in tense, epic battles. If you like first-person shooters and you adore fighting games, you may very well like this even balance of the two. B) It's difficult to find the split between the fighting and the first-person shooting; UC2 is a fusion of both. C) This is not a story-driven, single-player game. UC2 is meant to be played with friends and especially online, though it makes a healthy attempt to serve up a solid single-player mode. The message is this new combat-fighter-shooter is about to steal hundreds of potentially meaningful hours from your once well-adjusted life.

Single Player
Although it's been said many times over, Unreal Championship 2 does things differently. It's both a first-person shooter and it's a third-person fighter, yet when it reaches its peak, players will switch between the two regularly to defeat their opponents. Epic Games' title blends several things: it enables players to switch from the first- to the third-person perspective with the touch of a button. You can just as easily switch up between using guns and a melee weapon. To play the game from only one perspective or to use only one form of combat is to miss the whole point.

The story is actually better than I thought, though I admit, my hopes weren't high. What's good about the narrative is that, despite quite obviously being an assortment of battles strung together in the loosest sense, Epic doesn't hide that fact or waste your time with overly-stupid dialog. Some lines are funny, some less than intelligent, but either way they're always short and sweet. Furthermore, the battle variation is good, the enemy AI is great, and there are real personalities behind the initially empty fighters. Anubis is a hot-head with a chip on his shoulder, but he's also a ferocious and likeable fighter (who's surprisingly not a dick). There are colorful characters along the way, such as Sobek, Anubis's friendly Barron Legion Sergeant, or Hyena, an enemy sniper with disturbingly unhealthy laugh, who keep things mildly interesting.

There are five levels of difficulty, and even on the second level, the AI is strikingly tough. AI opponents are rambunctiously aggressive. They're smart, too, reacting quickly to repeated patterns, and they stay alert. You'll almost never see a computer opponent confused or stuck on something or making itself an overly obvious target. If anything, the AI is too aggressive, which might scare off some potential buyers. But with all those levels of difficulty, you should be able to find your way.

The single-player level design offers good changes in pace and intelligent variation. You'll find yourself in many different styles of battle, be they sniper-only, melee-only, one-on-one bouts, team-matches, or capture-the-flag games. Epic, however, doesn't do well explaining these modes; there are some trial-and-error moments of frustration.

While Ascension is basically a training ground for the multiplayer modes, it's a mostly well conceived one. You won't get a dramatic story out of it, and some of the presentation is rough, but overall, it's solid stuff. More importantly, it's an effective and fun training ground for multiplayer combat.

The other single-player modes are Tournament and Challenge. Tournament is like Arcade mode. You can select any of six initial fighters (eight others are unlockable), and fight anyone else. Challenge mode is a brutally tough set of 15 matches where the odds are stacked against you, whether that's an uneven match of opponents against you or steep kill quotas. The best thing about Challenge is that if you beat it, you can honestly say you're a highly-skilled UC2 champ. The worst thing you can say is, damn that's tough! And shake your fist at Epic. Last, if you beat it, you'll unlock Mortal Kombat's flagship thunder god, Raiden, as a playable character. He retains a collection of MK moves including teleport, lightning, torpedo, and that old electrocution fatality.

Fight! Fight! Fight!
Speaking of moves, it must be said that with all of the innovation in UC2, there's a very steep initial curve to climb. In order to feel comfortable and ambitious enough to fight online, you'll have to put in serious hours alone. And once you do, you'll notice interesting things about the hybrid combat. This is a quick and devastating game. It's not for the slow or timid. The controls aren't like any others. They're distinct, with lots of subtle moves, strategies, and enhancements. The learning curve may be a factor in whether you love or hate UC2.

If taken alone, the fighting aspect of UC2 isn't very good. The two basic moves, attack and strong attack, offer little to the pure fighting fan. I mean, that's the equivalent to simply having "punch" and "strong punch." Likewise, if separated from the melee component, the first-person shooter aspects of UC2 wouldn't be strikingly awesome either. But Epic's designers realized this. In many ways they've ensured both strategies fuse to become necessary in the core gameplay.

Second, adrenaline works differently here than in other Unreal games. You can pick up adrenaline, but you also can build it over time or earn it by reflecting enemy shots and killing opponents. Each character actually has six adrenaline powers, and some have distinct ones. Much like Bungie's simplification of a weapon system for Halo, Epic streamlined but didn't dumb down the use of adrenaline. You press a button on the fly, a quick branched menu appears, and you pick energy burst, repel, speed boost, invisibility, or whatever. This new efficiency is actually better than in the PC games, as it's quicker in heated bouts.

Third, while the block move is good, smart use of reflection can be devastating to the enemy. With the right timing, you can win otherwise difficult or even impossible matches by reflecting enemy fire. If your enemy is extremely good, he or she can switch into melee mode to deflect that same shot at you, and thus a potential volley ensues, the winner being the one who lives through it. It's rare, but it happens.

Fourth, unlike either a first-person shooter or a fighter, UC2 offers gamers a robust set of jumps. With any character, you can jump, double jump, jump off walls for additional air (wall dodge), and ping-pong up narrow vertical alleys, shafts, and other strategically designed constructs to reach second, third, and even fourth story locations. There is also a zoom jump called Jump Attack. By pressing jump and then pressing attack, your character will bolt across the screen. This serves multiple purposes: attacking an enemy from across the room; leaping from ledge to distant ledge to grab a power-up; or to flee an enemy attack. Of course while attacking, this is tricky. If you time it right while on defense, you can side-step a jump attack, or you can block it and perform a quick attack in retaliation.

While all these elements -- the lock-on camera, efficient adrenaline, deflect, and the jump attack -- are unique and add greatly to the fusion of styles, I felt several times the need for more melee moves. When in close with greater enemies, I felt the urge to pull from a quiver of imagined grabs, throws, and combos that simply don't exist. That would have added a lot to my experience.

The weapon set is both new and familiar to Unreal players. Characters start with a set of two weapons, categorized as energy or explosive. You can choose a weapon from each category, and though you can't stop a match and switch out because you've made a poor choice, you can pick up a dead enemy's weapon.

Some old favorites have returned. There's the shock rifle, ripjack, rocket launcher, flak cannon, stinger, and a newfangled grenade launcher. Epic has again balanced its weapon set well, as each weapon has two, three, sometimes even four alt-fire modes. These come in the form of seeking missiles, stinger shots, and super-charged rockets. The slow regeneration of ammo helps to keep things in balance.

Multiplayer
For the most part, Epic's title sticks to old multiplayer favorites. Fighters have a choice of playing deathmatch, team deathmatch, survival, or capture the flag. The two new additions, Overdose and Nali Slaughter, are simply great (and they're playable in both single-player and multiplayer modes). Overdose engages players in a cannonball run of sorts, wherein you must grab newly-generated spheres and deliver them from one side of the map to the other -- alive. Nali Slaughter encourages you to slay as many pacifistic creatures as possible before your enemy outdoes you in a limited time. There are more than 40 (yes, 40) maps to cover, so it's unlikely you'll get bored any time soon.

The map selection is just plain generous. With 40-plus maps, plus downloadable ones coming in the future, Epic just wants to spoil you. The level designs favor mid-sized maps. There are few, if any, large maps, and many offer the distinct risk of falling into an eternal pit of hell. Or a never-ending chasm, or a bottomless lake. Take your pick. It's the designers way of telling you not to jump attack carelessly all over the place.

The online play is tight. We played most bouts on SysLink, and the only significant issue was waiting to load matches. Online, there is, as always, some lag. But with UC2, this is kept to a minimum. Otherwise, the fighting is spectacularly fast. UC2 has that uncanny ability to deliver an amazing sense of adrenaline. Hours flew by before I realized it was way past bedtime.

The ranking system is based on the game's five levels of difficulty, an option that's changeable in every menu, so you can up or lower your rank depending on how confident you feel. There is some cheat-proofing built in to the game. You get no credit for killing lower-ranked fighters. And you'll lose standing if you happen to die by a lower-ranked player's hand, an encouragement to always fight players of higher standing.

Graphics
Interestingly enough, before Midway picked up the publishing rights to UC2 and Microsoft had plans to publish it this fall, Epic's hybrid fighter-shooter already was gorgeous. With Epic having an additional six months, the shine and polish has it looking even better. The finished product offers an impressive set of visuals on all levels: from the lighting to the high framerate and speed at which everything appears; the particles, be they chunks of blood and flesh, or shards of energy reflecting off your melee weapon; or the wide range of textures on the characters, the backgrounds, or on the weapons themselves. Epic Games has honed this game to near-perfection.

On the whole, the game sparkles with sophisticated technology. According to Epic, UC2 approaches three to four times the geometry of Unreal Tournament 2004, and by using specialized shaders on characters, Epic gets additional lighting and reflections. You'll see excellent use of transparency, whether it's on buildings or used by the characters themselves, mathematically-correct water movement, and no hint of aliasing or jaggies.

There are no severe camera problems worth noting, though the targeting reticule can make things confusing. Occasionally, when targeting is on, enemies will zip up elevators, or run behind walls, and your camera will follow. Mechanically, it's a more than functional system; in fact, it's damn good. But as with any third-person game, the quickness of this particular game and its camera can be confusing and disorienting. Corners occasionally cause concern, too. Also, as the maps are generally small to medium in size, there is no real need for larger, open areas. Vertical shafts, elevators, and multiple tiered areas all add depth and variety to each map.

Sound
Epic always goes for super dramatic sound. There are sweeping, heavy themes created with what sounds like an orchestra, and everything is backed up with heavy drums and synth chords. The music perfectly matches the gameplay, adding rich background drama and a sense of fierce combative energy. As for special effects, UC2 is supported with excellent in-game Dolby Digital, so everything sounds sharp, from the thunk of grenades to the sharp yelp of death to the squishy explosion of an enemy's body parts as you pull off a coup de grace.

Most of the voices are over-the-top by design, but generally the voice acting is appropriate. Anubis, who's clearly a hot head, doesn't over-do it. Malcolm has a personality and adds good color commentary to the televised commentary, and it's really only the announcer who sounds like he should be voicing Sunday Sunday Sunday Monster Truck!!!! lineups. His voice is so over-the-top it's laughable. When you hear him announce LAUREN!!!!, well, it's just plain ridiculous.