Starting January 24, gamers are losing access to the online services of Epic Games titles like the original Dance Central trilogy, the original Rock Band trilogy and associated spin-offs like Green Day: Rock Band and The Beatles: Rock Band, and perhaps most significantly, the Unreal series of games.
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Before Epic Games became known for the Fortnite battle royale, one of its biggest franchises was Unreal. The Unreal games are first-person shooters that have been used to showcase Epic’s Unreal Engine technology. The original Unreal was primarily a single-player experience with a multiplayer game mode attached, but future games in the series would increasingly focus on the online multiplayer aspect, especially the Unreal Tournament games.
Unreal Tournament 2004 Reviews
Epic Games produced four Unreal Tournament games: Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, and finally, Unreal Tournament 3. There was an attempt to reboot the franchise with a fifth Unreal Tournament game, but that project has long been abandoned. All the games in the series received mostly positive reviews, but Unreal Tournament 2004 earned the highest marks of them all. Sitting at a 93 overall rating on review aggregate site Metacritic, Unreal Tournament 2004 is comfortably in the top 100 highest-rated video games of all time, discounting repeats and re-releases.
Unreal Tournament 2004 has a single-player mode and players should still be able to play multiplayer through LAN, but the game losing its online functionality is still heartbreaking, especially since it’s one of the highest-rated games of all time and an important part of the industry’s history. While the game is not nearly as popular as it was when it first released, there are still those who play Unreal Tournament 2004 online who will no longer be able to do so come January 24.
The good news is that Unreal Tournament 2004 has alternative game modes for fans to try, even after the online multiplayer servers have been shut down. While it’s primarily focused on multiplayer, Unreal Tournament 2004 has a single-player campaign of sorts for players to go through as well. This “campaign” is really a way to train players for the online multiplayer portion, so while it’s not as substantial as other first-person shooter campaigns, it should still at least allow gamers to get a taste of what Unreal Tournament 2004 was all about after Epic Games shuts the servers down.
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Source: Metacritic
