Unreal Tournament (multiplayer) (PC)

UT is brilliant. It's a shoot em up with the normal, easy to use, controls and excellent graphics. There are loads of weapons, each finely balanced so one gun won't let you win the match but it will help you. The weapons range from the standard gun, the Enforcer pistol to the Redeemer, a mini-nuclear warhead launcher (WOOHOO!). All of the weapons have secondary fire modes. These are brilliant. You can zoom in with the (luxuriously excellent) Sniper Rifle but the credit for best secondary fire modes goes to the Redeemer. It fires the rocket but you leave your body and pilot the rocket. You can fly into amazing places and then find a victim and drive the warhead straight into them. The only downside is that your body is defenceless while in the rocket. The game types are:

Deathmatch: Run around killing everybody until someone hits the fraglimit, winning the match.

Team Deathmatch: Run around killing everybody on the enemy team (but not your own team). The team which reaches the fraglimit wins.

Capture The Flag: Two teams. Two bases. Two flags. Run into the enemy teams base, grab their flag and run back to touch it to your flag. Easy. Now do it while ten mad enemies are chasing after you with miniguns. Exactly. First team to reach the fraglimit wins.

Domination: An interesting match. Your team must touch flags (they are fixed in position). Then when touched they turn your teams colour and your team gets points. But the flags turn the enemy teams colour if they touch them so don't let that happen. First team to reach the scorelimit wins.

Assault: This is loads of fun. One team is attacking, the other defending. There are set objectives for the attacking team which they have to accomplish. When they manage to complete it teh teams chagne around and the defenders must beat their time.

The variety of levels is excellent with oilrigs, submarine pens and space ships as well as loads of others. Playing it single player is a lot of fun also. You can play a Tournament mode where you progress through the game with your teammates until you get to the final challenge levels. These are very hard deathmatches and finally you face the big boss, Xan, in a one-on-one fight to the death.

The learning curve it sets is brilliant. If you play first-person shooters a lot you can jump straight in and still have a challenge or if your'e totally new to them then the game slowly raises the difficulty until you are good enough to be playing on the internet.

This game is excellent when you play it on the internet or alone (with the best AI I've seen in a game so far).