YMMV / Unreal Tournament 2004

• Awesome Music: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Anticlimax Boss: The final battle in DM-HyperBlast2 becomes really easy, unlike in the first installment, since the player can get frags by pushing his/her enemies to the void. Plus, the match has a time limit of 20 minutes to win, and it's possible to win via timeout.
• Broken Base: The new movement system, which allowed for double jumps, wall jumps, dodge-jumps and combinations. Some felt these changes were welcomed additions, as they helped players travel maps faster. Others felt they added an unnecessary complexity to the game. Content creators especially complained because this obligated them to scale-up their maps. Epic eventually took the hint and removed dodge-jump for Unreal Tournament III and the Double Jump for Unreal Tournament 4.
• Breather Level:
  • In the ladders you get to pick which level you may want to play, at the cost of some in-game currency (and you can grind even more money by playing Head-to-head matches). Having enough money gives the player the benefit of bypassing difficult matches by picking easier ones.
  • The first rung of the Team Deathmatch qualification ladder (a 2-on-2 match) is this after the ridiculously hard Desolation and Irondust levels.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: A quick look at the last known snapshot of the UT2004 Stats page before its closure -dating nearly the end of 2018- and the UT2004Community Youtube channel (dedicated to footage from high-level tournament matches) during its last days reveal that you'll have a huge probability of finding a Deathmatch, Duel, Clan Arena or Team Deathmatch match taking place in DM-Rankin, DM-DE-Ironic, DM-1on1-Roughinery, DM-Deck17, DM-DE-GrendelKeep and some third-party remakes (including the "Fixed Editions" and "FPS editions" of these already mentioned maps). Outside of those modes the most popular modes are Capture the Flag and Onslaught, with CTF-FaceClassic and ONS-Torlan at the helm.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The different Skaarj Warrior variations in Invasion mode. Their blasts have a huge knockdown and can send you flying at considerable distances, which becomes a problem in open maps with cliffs (such as DM-HyperBlast2, DM-IceTomb, DM-Inferno, DM-Morpheus3, DM-Phobos2, DM-Plunge and DM-Sulphur) or maps with death pit hazards (such as DM-Deck17, DM-Gael, DM-Junkyard and DM-Insidious). And should they get in close distance to you, they retain their leaping strike and claw spin attacks from Unreal.
  • The Warlords and their homing missiles, also from Invasion mode. These missiles can track you anywhere (think the Vores and their homing sphere, thankfully the Warlords' missile have an awful turning speed) and you'll be busy fighting many other monsters from Wave 11 onwards to notice them.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Gen Mo'Kai. The race is just next to the Skaarj in terms of non-human characters' popularity.
  • The sexy female announcer is pretty popular for Youtube videos. Outside of it, on the other hand...
• Fanfic Fuel: Continues Unreal Tournament's tradition of having descriptions everywhere, yet leaving enough room for imagining how several stories took place.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Manta Running glitch in Vehicle CTF mode. It makes use of a non-intended "feature" in the namesake one-person vehicle to carry several players/bots in its wings. Thanks to this, it's possible to do faster flag captures. Made even worse when coupling this with the wing raiders being able to use the Link Gun to heal the vehicle.
  • In Single-player mode, you can use the ECE characters as initial members for your team. They have quite high stats compared to the rest of the initial choices, with only the low amount of available money to you acting as a barrier from getting them all. If you made sure to grind enough money to get them all, however, the Team Qualification Round and the early levels of the rest of the ladders become a breeze... provided you best all of them in a six-way battle priorhand. In fact, it's not uncommon for them to survive all the way to the final team battle.
• Gameplay Derailment: Despite appearing only in a few stock modes, (Onslaught, Vehicle CTF and Assault) vehicles are highly disliked for derailing the fast gameplay.
• Good Bad Bugs: A bug while playing with the "Weapon Stay" option disabled allows to keep a Charged Attack (BioRifle's and Rocket Launcher's alt. fires, Shield Gun's primary fire) while picking up another weapon instantly. Your actual weapon changes to the picked one, and when you switch back, you fire the Charged Attack.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the canonized map AS-BP2-Jumpship, you'll lead an Izanagi team who hijacks a Liandri jumpship in order to enter any space they want without a jumpgate. The Bonus Pack 2 was released in 2005. Fast-forward two real-life years later, and an Izanagi team, the Ronin, hijacks a spaceship and uses a jump portal to enter Necris territory.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the post-game announcements is "Flawless Victory", heard if a team wins without allowing the opposing team to score any points or if the winner of a Deathmatch manages to stay unfragged throughout the entire match. Later installments of the franchise, Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict, and Unreal Tournament III were published by Midway Games, the house (until Netherrealm Studios took over) behind the Mortal Kombat franchise.
  • A meta example: the Unreal fansite BeyondUnreal did an April Fools joke in 2004 announcing a lite version of UT2004 titled UT2004 LE for free. Ten years later, Epic Games announced a free reboot of Unreal Tournament.
  • Another hindsight entry involving an Assault map: AS-Glacier, which involves an Axon strike team raiding an Izanagi base which is also guarded by Malcolm's team "Thunder Crash". Several real-life years later, Izanagi forces led by Malcolm got the chance of giving Axon a lesson.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: In a case of History Repeats, the game was released in, well, 2004. The same year of that year's biggest "Game of the Year" and regular contender for #1 PC Game of all time and #1 PC Game of the Turn of the Millennium: Half-Life 2.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Mr. Crow, The Scrappy of 2003, loses the leadership of the Nightmare Black Legion to newcomer Abaddon. Then, when you finish the Single-Player as him, you unlock the TC-1200 for the Vehicle Arena mutator. For the record, the TC-1200 is a motorized toilet with low speed and no defenses.
• That One Level: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.

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