Unreal Tournament 2007: All About Vehicles (Part 2)

Axon Leviathan
"By far the king of the updated Axon vehicles is the Leviathan, which is basically a land-based battleship. It can seat five; the driver has a decent energy grenade launcher kind of thing, but it's got four additional turrets to the driver, each of which has its own weapon.

"If you don't have a full compliment of guys in the vehicle you can make some fun game decisions about which turret to use based on what you're facing. It's not hard to put weapon fire on this thing as it's about five times bigger than any of our other vehicles, so we decided to have this shield effect and it's sort of like Breakout - you'll get all this weapon fire coming in and you'll try to soak up as much of it as you can with the shields. So you get all four shields going at once and the vehicle becomes much more durable that way.

"By far the biggest thing about the Leviathan is the deployment mode. When you deploy you're not mobile anymore, you're sort of locked into place, but the driver now gains control of a huge cannon, which kills everything except another Leviathan.

"The Leviathan has absolutely no limit on range, so you can hit things both near and far away. There's only one Leviathan in any level - the goal is to get this thing into a good position and get a full complement of guys on the shields so you can actually last for more than a few seconds, and actually use this weapon to effect. The Leviathan will win the battle for you."

Axon Cicada
"One of the vehicles from UT 2004 that's got a nice update in UT 2007 is the Cicada. The air wars stuff in 2004 was surprisingly fun, so we really wanted to expand that concept in certain roles in 2007. The Cicada is close air support - it's not going to shoot anything out of the sky, but it's great for just laying the hurt down on ground units.

"We got inspiration from the Apache Longbow helicopter to have a lock-on mode, so the Cicada's slow and it's constantly under fire, but you can lock on to something, duke or do whatever you need to do as you load up the rockets and then, regardless of the direction you're facing, those rockets are going to hit exactly where you had targeted before.

"What we're working on now is actually having conformable terrain, so that you can actually lock-on, drop behind a hill and then have the rockets go over it."