So yea after many hours of downloading I finished the bonus pack from Epic and I must say wow. We've been treated really well and are getting what most companies would sell in an expansion pack for free, and there's a good chance there's at least one more coming from Epic. I'll go from bad to good here since there's more to end on. My biggest gripe so far is that the added announcers and OGG player seem to be really useless additions. The announcers are mostly a matter of opion I suppose, and my opinion is that none of them are really worth the download space beyond the option for a female announcer. The OGG player lets you choose what you want to lsiten to from anything in the music folder and seems unnecesary as the default music for most maps is the best and I don't know of any freeware that lets you encode your music to OGG.
Oooo, paragraph break for those who don't like my long unbroken posts. ;-) As the areas that fall short on improvement were already quite acceptable the rest of the bonus pack only adds further luster. The ten new maps are broken down as 6 DM, 1 DDOM, 2 CTF, and 1 BR of various sizes and styles. The maps are all very stylistic with great flow, and themes ranging from a junkyard filled with twisted metal wreckage, to a desert canyon with patches of lush vegitation, to a tomb made of ice with lofty ceilings and waterfalls. As with alot of the maps that you get at retail, many of the maps populated heavily by static meshes have points where quick movement can cause you to become lodged on the wall for a moment and an easy frag. Minor complaint as this is easily avoided as the maps are learned more thoroughly.
On to the biggest additions the new gametypes! Last man standing is pretty much the same as it was in the original UT with each player having a set amount of lives and the last one alive is the winner and provides good fun for those looking for a quick match. Mutant provides the biggest twist of all the modes by decking out the player who gets first blood with pretty much everything short of the super weapons. They then have to kill the other players to refill their slowly degraging health as all the other players are tasked with hunting the mutant so they themseleves can become the mutant. A very neat twist, though not perfect as in shorter games the first mutant will usually win as it can sometimes be hard to find the mutant even with the use of the modes radar, but is still rip roaring fun.
Now this is where we move from just good to the best thing since crustless bread(or so I hear I really can't vouch for crustless bread). Invasion takes an standard DM map and puts you and some teammates (bots or humans) and then spawns in wave after wave of various monsters from the original Unreal to attack you. Your given control over which mosters spawn in which rounds, the duration of the round, and the difficulty of the round (modifys the monsters hp as far as I can tell). Let me tell you this gets incredibly intense and challenging as you get up to the 6th level or so in a small arena. This is definitly where it's at for those of you looking for that pulse pounding, dripping sweat hand shaking experience. Of course if you just want to frag a whole lot of stuff then I suggest you combine this with Mr.Pant's Excessive Overkill and start around wave 6-8 or so for pure fragging insanity.
-Trevor
-amusedtoe
Oooo, paragraph break for those who don't like my long unbroken posts. ;-) As the areas that fall short on improvement were already quite acceptable the rest of the bonus pack only adds further luster. The ten new maps are broken down as 6 DM, 1 DDOM, 2 CTF, and 1 BR of various sizes and styles. The maps are all very stylistic with great flow, and themes ranging from a junkyard filled with twisted metal wreckage, to a desert canyon with patches of lush vegitation, to a tomb made of ice with lofty ceilings and waterfalls. As with alot of the maps that you get at retail, many of the maps populated heavily by static meshes have points where quick movement can cause you to become lodged on the wall for a moment and an easy frag. Minor complaint as this is easily avoided as the maps are learned more thoroughly.
On to the biggest additions the new gametypes! Last man standing is pretty much the same as it was in the original UT with each player having a set amount of lives and the last one alive is the winner and provides good fun for those looking for a quick match. Mutant provides the biggest twist of all the modes by decking out the player who gets first blood with pretty much everything short of the super weapons. They then have to kill the other players to refill their slowly degraging health as all the other players are tasked with hunting the mutant so they themseleves can become the mutant. A very neat twist, though not perfect as in shorter games the first mutant will usually win as it can sometimes be hard to find the mutant even with the use of the modes radar, but is still rip roaring fun.
Now this is where we move from just good to the best thing since crustless bread(or so I hear I really can't vouch for crustless bread). Invasion takes an standard DM map and puts you and some teammates (bots or humans) and then spawns in wave after wave of various monsters from the original Unreal to attack you. Your given control over which mosters spawn in which rounds, the duration of the round, and the difficulty of the round (modifys the monsters hp as far as I can tell). Let me tell you this gets incredibly intense and challenging as you get up to the 6th level or so in a small arena. This is definitly where it's at for those of you looking for that pulse pounding, dripping sweat hand shaking experience. Of course if you just want to frag a whole lot of stuff then I suggest you combine this with Mr.Pant's Excessive Overkill and start around wave 6-8 or so for pure fragging insanity.
-Trevor
-amusedtoe
