Today I got my copy of Unreal Tournament 2003 after ordering it online a few days ago. Not only did this save me a trip into town but also saved me almost ?10. After a lengthy install time and 2.5gig of my hard drive gone I was ready to play. My first impressions we great, the game is easy to use, easy to play and didn?t take too long to load (takes about as long as the original).

The graphics are stunning, the little effects make it look nice like swaying grass, moving clouds and more realistic gas textures. Though it took me a graphics card update to stop the larger death match levels from stuttering, but the 10mb download was worth it in the end with everything running very nicely on my GeForce mx420.

The overall play of the game is similar to that of Unreal Tournament, the graphics are a massive improvement and the guns have been upgraded. They have replaced the old sniper rifle with a more advanced weapon that still gives some nice headshots. The other amendments are that of the extra packs you can pick up. These now include bigger health packs and adrenaline, which if you collect enough gives you special abilities such as running fast.

The one feature I did turn off straight away was weapon bob, which to be honest just got annoying and made you feel like you were on a ship. It also took me a while tweaking the graphics settings to get everything working smoothly while trying to get as much out of my card as possible, however this normally has to be done for most games.

I was also disappointed with the lack of outdoors maps, this will probably be left more to one of the mods such as strike force but will mean a hefty download for me. The game is still in very early days, I had a quick look on the web for maps and couldn?t find anything yet the same I found about support which was also very limited. I can see ut2003 lasting for the next 2-3 years like its predecessor did, however it would be nice if the game was to get popular quicker then the original as it did seem to have a slow start.

Overall I think ut2003 is a very nice game which has great potential and flexibility within itself that can hopefully become a very successful and popular game. I have decided to give it 9/10.