Friday morning, 11/15, I drive 25 minutes to the nearest EB to pick up my copy of Unreal Championship. I wanted to buy it there due to Eb's liberal return policy. I feared the game may not be quite up to my standards, especially with Splinter Cell and Metroid being released 4 days later. EB didn't have the game in yet (come back in 2 hours he says...) so I went to a nearby Toys R Us, got the first copy out of the back and drove home happy.

Then I played the game.

I know good console shooters, you my friend, are not a good console shooter. In the last 2 years I have owned Unreal Tournament, Outtrigger and Quake 3 for Dreamcast, Halo, Agent Under Fire, Max Payne, Time Splitters 2 and Ghost Recon for Xbox. I found some redeeming value in every one of them. I'm still looking for one in UC.

Gameplay:
The controls are fine. The sensitivity is just right (and very adjustable), there is targeting reticle (unlike in Time Splitters 2), there is jumping and weapon switching is easy and quick. So thats not the problem.

The single player mode, as expected, is truly awful. UT on Dreamcast had some very fun single player matches. Now, I haven't finished all of them on UC so maybe I'll get to fight with snipers with low gravity at some point, but the first 35 matches are all ridiculously boring. You play 7 matches of each game type, whoopie. Deathmatch is ok but CTF is lame. Your partners are idiots and don't understand any concept except ''run to my pre-programmed waypoint whether I have a reason to or not''. I played a 10 minute match and scored once. 4 on 1 just doesn't work well with CTF. Double Domination is slightly better but suffers from the same ''my partners have mental issues'' problem. I much prefer Domination from the old UTs. The new game mode, bombing run doesn't seem very exciting to me either though some people really do like it. To me its just CTF with passing, big deal.

Ok, so the single player suffers because it is basically just adapted from multiplayer. But Kev, you say, this game wasn't designed for single player, it was designed for online play! Oh, really? Well, thats a shame because they screwed that up too.

The online play handles up to 16 players assuming you find a blazing fast server, don't want to talk to anyone, and deal with frequent lag spikes. But that isn't even my complaint. I except Live games to lag for awhile until all the kinks are worked out. Dreamcast online gaming improved by leaps and bounds in the one year it existed, Live will too.

The problem is that with 16 players, nobody cares A) who they are shooting and B) who is shooting them. You have 16 characters, who may or may not be bots (the computer fills in drops with bots but neglects to tell anyone). Nobody really has a strategy, and how could you with 16 folks doing 16 random things? The game is better if you cap your game at 6-8 players but there is still one major, major flaw that makes the multiplayer really bad.

Some genius developer decided it would be cool to make the characters unique by giving them a favorite weapon. Sounded like a good idea to me at first too. Basically the idea is that WHEN YOU GET THAT WEAPON (note the emphasis) your character will either shoot it faster, do more damage or have more ammo than would a character who had a different favorite. Sounds good, gives some differences between characters. The problem, and I still can't get over how stupid this is, is that YOU START WITH YOUR FAVORITE WEAPON ALL THE TIME. For example, I chose a dude with rockets as his favorite. Every time I spawn into a game I come packing a load of 12 rockets. All I have to do is fire off all 12, get 2 or 3 kills then let someone kill me. I get the kills and I come back with 12 more rockets.

HOW LAME IS THAT? Why even have the actually cool Impact Hammer (the alleged default weapon)? Nobody uses it. Almost everyone online uses rockets which further adds to the randomness of the gameplay. I can just fire 3 rocket bursts into areas and pick up kills without doing a thing. How wonderfully challenging! On a similar note, I have never seen anyone online use the following weapons:
Bio weapon
Assault Rifle
Impact Hammer

Another problem is that when you join a game you just jump in to the middle of it. If it is a 50 kill game and some guy has 46 kills when you join, guess what, you just picked up a loss on your ranking buddy. Would it be so hard to have a lobby? Ghost Recon does. Whacked does. MotoGP does. You end up jumping in and out of games with ZERO continuity from one to the next. If I wanted to play against random opponents in random games I could have stuck with the crappy single player thank you very much.

Graphics:
Well, it stutters like mad, frame-rate drops abound, load times are horrible and the character models look terrible at any kind of range. Thankfully the maps look pretty good and some of the weapon animations are neat. The bodies look pretty cool when they explode too. Overall though, nothing impresses much.

Sound:
Blah, lame. Time Splitters 2, a multi-console game, has incredibly stereo sound and a thumping soundtrack. UC has neither. Additionally, the promised custom soundtrack option is not present. You are stuck with the random bland techno the game spews. The voices suck too as half the time I dont have a clue what my partners (computer partners I mean) are saying. What a pile.

Round Up:
How can an overall score be lower than the sum of its parts? Mostly the hype. This game should have been good but it isn't. There might be some fun here if you have a big LAN in your house so lag and communication issues are ignored. There might be some fun here if you've never owned another shooter. Mostly though, this game is a terrible disappointment. Get Ghost Recon instead.