With so many shooters on the Xbox, it's hard to recommend UC2
Unreal Championship 2 tried something new. Rather than provide the same Unreal Tournament experience again, Epic went added a 3rd person perspective and melee combat. Kudos for attempting to buck tradition, but it just doesn't work. UC2 is still a frantic frag fest, but it feels stilted and slow.
If there's one thing that UC2 has in spades, it's a cool visual style. There's a sort of futuristic Egyptian theme working in the game that provide a few "wow" moments, as well as quite a few "is this Stargate" ones. The graphics overall are very excellent. The game runs as smooth as silk throughout, and the characters are well animated and easy on the eyes. Each character has their own melee weapons; all of which look pretty cool. The animation for each character is very well done, and the levels are generally pretty interesting as well.
It's a pity, then, that the gameplay is as boring and repetitive as it is. Part of this stems from the third person perspective, but equally problematic is the lack of weapon variety. First, the third person perspective is more of a curse than a blessing. The switch to third person was done because melee combat is a big part of UC2. However, it's not well done. Each character has a couple of melee moves, but they're slow to execute, and hard to use without getting pummeled. If you choose to stay in third person mode when using ranged weapons, you'll find that it's hard to hit anyone with them. Even if you find that you are accurate with the weapons, you can only select two in a match. This seemed to be a way to keep people from hoarding weapons, but everyone basically uses the sniper rifle and flak cannon, so combat becomes very repetitive. You can go back and forth between third and first person on the fly, but this tends to be distracting.
All of that being said, there's some good competition on Xbox Live. Of course, you're going to be called a loser, the size of your manhood will be repeatedly mocked, and you'll listen to a lot of 10 year olds using words that would've gotten my mouth washed out with soap. But, what's a good XBL game without any of that? The competition is fierce, but finding a good game is somewhat tough. UC2 doesn't use a matchmaking system like Halo 2, so you'll blindly jump into servers and get what ya get. This is a bit frustrating, but it's no different than pretty much every PC FPS ever made.
I can't recommend Unreal Championship 2. It's not that it's a bad game, but it doesn't stack up against the vast number of FPS' on the Xbox. It looks great, has a good XBL following, and does try to play a little differently than other games. It's just that UC2 isn't fun.
