games: Unreal Tournament 3

I hope all you 360 FPS twitch gamers out there are doing a little dance of joy right now, because Unreal Tournament 3 is finally here! Now it’s done fantastically well in sales figures and reviews on the PC and PS3, and having tried it out on the 360 it’s easy to see why.

First up, the engine deserves adoration, kisses and little fluffy teddy bears to be sacrificed in its name.

It’s a solid and responsive game and the graphics look fantastic with no pop in or stutter, despite the level of detail and frenetic pace of gameplay. The design is also top notch, with guns, vehicles and maps all aesthetically strong, eminently playable, and nicely varied. 360 players also get 2 new characters, and 5 new maps, bringing the total number of maps split over the various modes to a whopping 55!

There are 6 different match modes - deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, vehicle capture the flag, warfare and duel. The new warfare mode is a really cool development of the old Onslaught gametype - in simplest terms each team is trying to attack the other’s power core, and to do this you must first gain control of power nodes to make that core vulnerable. This multilayered objective ensures a highly dynamic match with lots of different strategic options available to different team members, and can be dressed up in various different circumstances to create very different games.

The other new match type is vehicle capture the flag - a nice variation which not only gets you to play around in some kick ass vehicles which all feel very different, but also puts you in much more expansive maps. In all games where there are vehicles, you’ll automatically get a hoverboard mapped to your x button so you’re not stuck running for 10 minutes to catch up with the action every time you respawn.

And gameplay is fantastic. Some people will whinge about not being able to plug a mouse and keyboard into their 360 like you can with the PS3, and yes changing weapons or maneuvering vehicles is the tiniest bit more clunky, but in general the controls have been scaled to the 360 absolutely brilliantly, and you can tune the controller quite subtly to your preferences, so I really don’t think you miss it.

It’s very responsive and the pace is spot on - fast and furious - and sustained by a liberal amount of weapons, and health and ammo pick ups. And a little word about the guns - in a lot of FPS games I tend to find one gun I like and stick to it, but here, the weapons are all so nicely designed, that while the link gun is definitely my mainstay, I find myself switching around between the others a lot more.

As well as the instant play, there is also a campaign mode, which supports online or local co-op. The story isn’t fantastic, and it is still essentially a bunch of matches strung together with cut-scenes, but it does serve to flesh out the world and its characters a bit and will give your matches objectives and context which is kinda cool.

And while never quite as intense as playing with or against other real people, the AI is really very good, and with four difficulty levels to campaign and eight AI profficiency settings in instant play you can also fine tune it to quite a high degree. You will definitely get a lot more out of this game if you take it online, but for those who aren’t subscribed, the AI is good enough that it won’t be a wasted purchase. And of course you can play local multiplayer too, and on the 360 you get an exclusive 2 player split screen option - it’s a bit squashed for my liking but nice to have the option.

So downsides? Well it’s not really Epic’s fault, but the 360 version suffers from Microsoft’s policy of not allowing user generated content, a particularly strong blow as the number of gametypes is less than previous Unreal Tournament games.

And while the matches themselves are full of adrenaline-pumping action, the victory screens are a little anti-climatic in most modes. In warfare you see your opponents core exploding, and something like that would have been appreciated for deathmatch and others.

But this really is nit-picking in what is a fantastic game that just feels right. It will give fans of FPS multiplayer matches hours and hours of fun. Yes, it just sneaks in there, it’s a five star game.

For the best of the rest:

IGN:
US, November 21, 2007 - Epic’s Unreal Tournament 3, actually the fourth version of the series on PC, represents a blend of progressive and old-school elements. It’s a nod to fans of the original UT, released in 1999, with the return of weapons like the impact hammer and enforcer, which replace bits of the arsenal from UT 2004 like the shield gun, lightning gun, and assault rifle. Moving beyond the ballistic loadout, we see Epic pushing forward their most distinct draw, the warfare mode, an augmented version of UT 2004’s onslaught. While so much of this game will feel familiar to series veterans, particularly in the deathmatch and team deathmatch modes, it’s with the vehicular, large-scale combat that UT 3 makes its largest strides forward, though it still doesn’t move that far ahead. Mostly, it’s about delivering to fans what made the series so good to begin with: insane, ultraviolent combat, gorgeous graphics, and the most nerve-searing, vein-throttling action around.


Game Spot:
The Unreal franchise has had a comfortable home on the PC for many years. On the other hand, Unreal Tournament 3 is the first game from the franchise to hit a Sony console since the original Unreal Tournament landed on the PlayStation 2 in 2000. PlayStation 3 owners will be thrilled to hear that this version of UT3 is for the most part everything the PC version was when it was released in November. Aside from some online hiccups, it is fast, furious, and fun to play, and never fails to impress from a visual perspective. As a result, it stands up favorably against the other strong multiplayer shooters available on the platform.

Euro Gamer:
The marketing motto for Unreal Tournament III seems to have been something like “simplify and improve”, at least if you listen to Epic’s bossmen speak their brains. They’ve told us that they wanted to take the best features from all the previous games and make it faster, tighter and (presumably) more macho. Or maybe that’s just fallout from the enormous success of Gears Of War…