Epic Games‘ Unreal Tournament 2004 is the third game in the Unreal Tournament series, and is an updated version of its predecessor, Unreal Tournament 2003.

In addition to many subtle changes to the game there are a couple of significant new features that make this something special, and that’s the inclusion of vehicles and the ‘Onslaught‘ game mode.

Whether you’re playing alone, with bots, or with actual other human beings, Unreal Tournament 2004 can be played multiple ways. There’s a single-player tournament campaign in which you must prove yourself as a player, and then as a team leader, rising up through the ranks. And then there are the ELEVEN other game modes that can be played single or multi-player. The play modes are: Assault, Onslaught, Bombing Run, Capture the Flag, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Invasion, Double Domination, Last man Standing, Mutant, and Instagib CTF. If you want to see the rules for each game mode, then look at the game’s Wikipedia page, but it’s safe to say that some of them are quite clever and well worth checking out.

Players can double jump, and can also double-tap in any direction to do an evasive move, which are skills worth mastering as they can give you an edge in battle.

As usual in UT you can fiddle with bot settings (to make them tougher or weaker); you can add mutators (features that significantly affect gameplay); you can collect adrenaline to use for ultra kills, and you can pore through game stats if you want to.

As far as online games go: there are no official servers any more, but there may be private servers available if you look hard enough. It doesn’t help that Unreal Tournament 2004 – along with all the other Unreal games – is currently (at the time of writing) still not available to buy online. Either Epic has dropped the ball on Unreal, or it is playing games with somebody. Probably Gabe Newell and company…

If you do have a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 (I bought mine on GOG.com years ago), then it’s still a decent game to play now. As I recently found out when getting these grabs.

More: Unreal Tournament 2004 on Wikipedia