Unreal Tournament Two Thousand and Four

It is fucking great. Go play it now. The gametypes from UT2K3 are a pretty straightforwardly carried over, but the maps included seem to address my previous complaint from that outing, now they are bigger, meaner and hold more players.
*glee*
Assault and Onslaught are so bloody delicious any sort of adjective hardly seems appropriate. Its the digital equivalent of well baked Fusilli pasta with chicken meatballs, made in a lot of good cheese and tangy tomato sauce. Its like having pizza, beer and chocolate on the same day, and its also your birthday. Assault brings back all of the things we used to love from the first UT, and yes, the sniper rifle is BACK, baby.
Onslaught is nearly good enough to be a game on it's own: If it included a commander/RTS aspect and a class system, it could be packaged as its own RTS/action hybrid without any difficulty, and there's no reason to expect that the mod community won't give us that. Take all these things and throw in more new weapons then you can shake a stick at, and a complete list of a HUNDRED and six maps, you could find yourself engaged in this game for quite some time. Yessiree!
Although it ships on 6 CDs and eats up 5 GB of precious hard drive space.
So how does it fare on a LAN party? Awesome is a word that comes to mind. Remember the good times with the first UT? The fun hours, the high fives, the coordination, the VOIP support, the absolute amazingness of the game? Well, multiply that by a hundred and six. It rocks every game off the charts, including Battlefield Vietnam, and of course, Condition Zero ahs nothing on it. NOTHING. Do yourself and your loved ones a favor. Buy it, play it, mod it, map it, live it, and when you think you're good enough, come see me on a one on one.