Overview
Unreal Tournament plays differently to most other online first person shooters. The emphasis is on speed and movement; gameplay always takes precedence over realism in the game's development.
A good example of this is the very large weapons, such as the rocket-launcher, able to be carried around and wielded with ease by normal-sized people, in most cases one-handed as if the weapon were weightless.
Players can also carry simultaneously on their person the full complement of seven or more weapons and max ammo for each without seeming to be carrying any more than what is in their hands.
Gameplay over realism may not please FPS purists, but it makes for a fun game with good replay potential.
Network Play
The network play when it works is good.
However, the ability to achieve peer-to-peer network connection is one of the drawbacks of the game. It has a built-in service for finding available network games, but it allows games to be hosted by computers that do not have the proper firewall settings to actually connect with external clients. Additionally, the firewall settings necessary to host a game are complicated, and may be unable to achieve using certain commercially available routers.
Therefore many games hosted on non-dedicated servers will show up as available connections, but only a small percentage actually allow others to connect and play.