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ChaosUT is a large collection of new weapons and features that turns Unreal Tournament inside-out. The Game of the Year edition is packed with all sorts of new goodies that'll have your fingers scrambling across your keyboard to find exactly the item you need for that particular moment.
You'll find a very useful mod menu for ChaosUT, allowing you to setup things like game settings (including using relics or not, respawn protection and duration, weapon replacement method, sniper dot, use of the grappling hook and whether or not you drop the flag when using the grappling hook), turret settings (more on the turret later), key mappings for the grappling hook, kamikaze and kick actions, and turret change weapon command, and whether or not to use zoom stops (3x, 6x, 9x), or just zoom fluidly.
Weapons:
- Bastard Sword:
Primary: Melee weapon!
Secondary: Block (even some projectiles!).
- Crossbow:
Primary: Aim, shoot, and kill. Can also be used as a melee weapon.
Secondary: Zoom (with or without preset zoom stops).
Ammo: Regular Arrow-Bolts (good), Explosive Arrow-Bolts (better), Poisonous Arrow-Bolts (enemies that you hit may spew a green goo at you... avoid it, as the damage is substantial)
- Proximity Mines :
Primary: Immediately active, they will hop around laughing and roaring, while they hunt for a victim. Some weapons can harm them....but which ones you have to find out for yourself! :)
Secondary: Stealth mode, will stick to what you shoot it at and lower its face shield to hide and wait for victims to approach.
- The Flak2 (AKA: The Claw):
Primary: Fires flak ammo and proxy mines at this time, more ammo will be available in future releases. If you're out of ammo, you can use it as a melee weapon.
Secondary: This playerpush mode shoots out a proxy at a very high rate of speed, still in its eggshell. They will slow with floor and wall collisions, and once they slow to a certain speed the shells will open and the proxy will activate. Hitting a player with one of these causes a big push (hence "playerpush") and some striking damage. Once the proxy activates it will target whatever is in range (including the unfortunate who just got knocked back).
- Chaos SniperV2:
Primary: Like regular UT sniper rifle, plus ricochet action (whoop!). This is a more balanced weapon than the original UT Sniper.
Secondary: Zoom (with or without preset zoom stops).
Ammo: Normal sniper ammo with ricochet feature and deadly Rocket-Propelled Bullets or RPB’s These are extremely fast, leave a nice smoke trail which points back to the shooter, and can penetrate multiple unarmored targets.
- The Vortex:
Two seconds after hitting the ground, this devil starts to "vacuum" and compress its organic surroundings into ONE point...this means: PLAYERS!! So, for the next 15 seconds, stay out of its way! The Vortex kill zone ranges about 100 feet in any direction from where it's thrown.
- Sentry Turrets:
So big you have to beam one to your location (and you can only do this once), Sentry Turrets are the ultimate fighting machine (well, besides your well-equipped self!). Weapons are either either standard Exotec(tm) rockets or high-speed energy bullets. Be careful where you beam a Sentry Turret; if there's not enough space for it to occupy, or if you try to located it on a flag base, Domination control point, player start or a teleporter, it'll initiate a self-destruct sequence that you'll not want to be around....
Features
- Grappling Hook:
One press of the hook button fires the grapple, which will dig in to any solid object and begin pulling you toward it. A second press stops it, and you can actually swing back and forth like Tarzan. Once you're hanging, you can press another key to climb up the cable. These key bindings are already set up in ChaosUT, and you can change them at will.
- Kamikaze:
This is a great way to clear out a flag base. Kamikaze explodes all your rocket ammo (you need at least 10 rockets) at once. The more you have, the bigger the explosion, but the longer it will take to initiate. Try a flag run with your buddies, you first, them trailing behind. Get yourself into their base, hit the Kamikaze key, and wait. And you thought the Redeemer blast packed a punch!
- Kick:
You can kick enemies, translocators, attacking proximity mines, whatever. Kick, kick, kick. Always lots of fun.
- Spawn Protection:
When you respawn, you've got a default of five seconds of near-invulnerability which should allow you to get out of the way, perhaps picking up some of the nasty ChaosUT weaponry. While protected, you will have a pleasing colorful glow surrounding you.
- Armour Shards:
Cool-looking armor shards add 5 points of armor to your player. Trust me, you'll find them useful.
- (Anti)GravBelt:
These belts will provide you with a 75% reduction in gravity, allowing you to jump higher, farther. Try 'em with the jump boots!
ChaosUT GotY is handled, as many UT mods are, through the use of mutators. The main mutator is the ChaosUT GotY mutator, which allows you to play it on any map, any gametype, and even in combination with some other mods. There are three basic mini-mutator selections you can make, all requiring that you are using the main ChaosUT mutator. SwordMelee, which makes everyone's primary Melee Weapon the Bastard Sword, SwordArena, which replaces all weapons with Bastard Swords, and removes all ammo pickups, and NoHealth, which removes all health pickups.
Once in gameplay, be prepared to do some fancy fingerwork. You may find that you want to just 'allow' the use of the ChaosUT weapons as they come up, as this will preserve your already aching fingers. For example, if you're auto-switched to the Shock Rifle, and there's an enemy in front of you, my suggestion would be to simply use it, rather than hit the '4' key to get at your ChaosUT Crossbow. You see, if you've set the ChaosUT config to 'Cycle' (default), you can access the ChaosUT weapons by hitting the appropriate weapon key, which will cycle between any regular UT weapons and the appropriate ChaosUT weapon. As mentioned earlier, you can set up the ChaosUT weapons to replace their UT counterparts, rather than force you to cycle through. One disadvantage is that you won't have any energy weapons with which to recharge your Sentry Turrets, so you'll be feeding them rockets exclusively.
Sentry Turrets are interesting. They only fire at enemies (yes, they can distinguish between teams) and opposing team turrets, unless you shoot one, at which point it will decide that you're not all that friendly, and should be dealt with. If they run out of ammo, it can get fun, because the first person to touch it becomes its 'owner'. So, if your Turret runs out of ammo, and an enemy touches it, you'd better get out of sight!
Another interesting thing you can do with Turrets is as follows: say you run into a room, and there are two turrets there guarding that piece of geography for the opposing team. If you can cause one turret to mistakenly shoot the other one, a battle will ensue! In this manner, you can get them to destroy each other! This may take awhile, as Turrets have about 500 health units, but man, it's a cool thing to watch!
Care must be taken when using the Vortex. Throw it, and head for the hills! Even though they won't *directly* damage you, once you get caught up in the swirling, deadly radius of an active Vortex, you might as well kiss your sweet butt goodbye. You only really have a second or so to get out of there.
I spoke with Fred 'Frederico' Peeler about ChaosUT GotY, and asked him what new goodies the Chaotic Dreams team is going to be working on. Some things that are in the planning stages include making the Grappling Hook cable cuttable (wouldn't it be nice to slice it with a Bastard Sword?), adding a Flame Thrower, increasing the intelligence of the Sentry Turrets, adding some animosity between Proximity Mines and Turrets (they hate each other in the Quake version of ChaosUT), subclassing the bots to add some new, interesting AI and some new gametypes, to be named later.
Frederico, who did ChaosUT Quake 2 programming as well as UT, mentioned that there's an enormous improvement going from coding Quake mods to UT mods as related to using UnrealScript. UScript, being object oriented, allows mod authors to subclass, keeping their fingers out of the original code, and simply modifying what they choose to modify. As mentioned, future bots in ChaosUT will have subclassed intelligence, and you can go a long way modifying things like projectiles using UScript. Very handy stuff.
This feature would not be complete without mentioning the great sounds and textures that accompany ChaosUT GotY. Burps, laughter, sneezes, even a little 'Hee Hee', recorded by HolyMoo's young son, all add to the fun. The Proximity Mines and Turrets, in particular, are chatty without being annoying. HolyMoo (proclaimed by Frederico as the 'Mother' of ChaosUT) does many of the voices, and is superb.
You'll also find some very cool textures in this mod, credited to HolyMoo in the superb accompanying documentation (you will want to read through all of it carefully, while enjoying the super screenshots the team has provided). The new textures add some ambiance to the CUT maps that enhances them significantly.
ChaosUT is not for everyone, to be sure, but if you have the manual dexterity (and, perhaps, some new key mappings), it's well worth the effort. Reloading of the Crossbow is too tedious for it to be very useful as a short-range weapon, and the arrow-bolt speeds are too slow to have it be a very effective long range weapon. Proximity Mines have been significantly improved since the last beta, but could be even more speedy. Snipers may not like the ChaosUT Sniper Rifle, as it is not as unbalanced as the original UT Sniper Rifle, but I found it to blend in well with the game (I love the Rocket-Propelled Bullets, with their trails and ultimate explosions).
All around, ChaosUT GotY is a wonder-filled, eclectic mix of weapons and features that is sure to keep you busy for a long, long time. I look forward to future developments in this mad world of mayhem!
ChaosUT Website
ChaosUT Forums
Download ChaosUT GotY Edition
Play ChaosUT
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