Hi. I’m Jector and I’ll be your guide for the new Unreal Tournament 3 released by Epic Games through Midway. This is the 5th installment of the venerable Unreal series using their new Unreal 3 engine to power it. As expected, it is very pretty and has a lot of good things going for it. There are some bumps, however, so please keep your seat.
UT3 was originally slated for an earlier 2007 release and was, indeed, originally going to be called UT 2007. Then Epic put UT on the back burner in favor of completing the well received Gears of War. Whether this did or didn’t affect the final product remains to be seen, but the delay didn’t help UT3 as it made people impatient and brought it into competition with Crysis, Ubisoft’s latest release. Regardless, the final product is very entertaining and holds much promise.
Graphically this is an incredible game. They really did a good job making UT3 gorgeous to look at. This is likely the main reason the engine has already been licensed for an animated series. The water shimmers, the textures look alive, and the structures seem real. It has numerous special effects that are quite stunning though they do seem to overuse a couple of them, most notably the visual distortion effect that shows up around a number of weapon’s actions. It certainly looks cool to see the air shimmer around every other explosion, I’m just not sure it’s warranted and it kind of takes away from the effect when you see it so often. I suppose they are just proud of their baby and are trying to show it off to the gathered masses. It's certainly worth showing off.
The game play handles quite well. Characters move as expected, not seeming too clunky or like they’re not touching the ground. This is a "twitch" game so movement is faster than the more realistic FPS games, but not to an extreme extent like Quake or Doom. Most will find UT3 playable with modest gaming skillz. The vehicles have been tweaked a bit from the previous game. I find the driver’s weapon in the revamped Hellbender truck a bit too effective on pedestrians. The new Viper hover bike is very fast and has an interesting kamikaze function. Darkwalkers are slower than a snail on a salt lick but devastating when they get to their targets. There is also the new hoverboards that everyone has in Warfare mode, allowing people to cover ground quickly, even with a captured enemy flag. The catches are you can’t use weapons while 'boarding, and if you take a hit you do a face plant and drop the flag. In the time you take to pick yourself back up, you may be overrun by your pursuers. In addition, you can Marty McFly with your board; zapping a friendly vehicle with a tow line to haul you around much more quickly.
In addition, you can Marty McFly with your board; zapping a friendly vehicle with a tow line to haul you around much more quickly.
A good team will send in a ground-pounder and a fast vehicle to cap’ a flag and tow the carrier back to friendly territory in astonishingly short order.
UT3s weapons decently match each other; though making the default pistol a little more accurate would have been nice. I miss the pistol from the original UT because when you spawned into a firefight with only that ranged weapon it gave you teeth instead of making you scramble madly away looking for a boulder or rocket launcher to hide behind. Just a personal quibble, though, and you can do decent damage up to medium ranges with two pistols. Most of the venerable weapons from the previous series made it back into this one; notably the aforementioned pistol replaces the SMG which had barely usable grenades and appalling accuracy. The lightning gun is missing, likely because it was not different enough from the sniper rifle to warrant its inclusion, though I will miss watching my downed enemies twitch on the ground from the electrical after-effects. I know, I know; I'm a very bad person.
One of the most entertaining weapons has to be the Redeemer. This thing is like a tac-nuke strapped to a rocket. It’s very slow; so slow, in fact, that it can actually be shot out of the air with a well placed round. But if it gets to its target or just in the near vicinity of its target; goodbye body and hello respawn cue. One time I finished off an injured opponent by merely showing him a picture of the Redeemer.
One time I finished off an injured opponent by merely showing him a picture of the Redeemer.
The splash damage from this beast is incredible (don't carry it around as a close-support weapon, you'll always remember the first time you ready it too early and instinctively pull the trigger after rounding a corner to find someone in your face). The real sadists, however, will use the secondary fire function. This launches the missile with you viewing the world from its nose camera. The mouse will control its flight as you guide impending doom around corners after your desperately fleeing prey. Words can't describe the joy of watching the view go to static as your missile impacts someone's nose. I know, I know, already!
The number of maps included in the game seemed a bit on the light side. This may be distorted in my mind from the number that came with UT 2004, and that wouldn’t quite be a fair comparison. UT2K4 was really an updated and expanded UT2K3, which meant they already had a number of maps and a vast majority of the coding done for them. That allowed Epic to focus on lots of additional maps, weapons, models, and such for 04. I do expect, and indeed Epic has already announced, that they will put out a good amount of bonus material for the game as they have a history of doing such. They also include the tools required to make your own maps and modifications which allows the community to put forth their own efforts, and many have already done so. I've found a good half dozen maps that are worth keeping. The game will not want for maps for long, although I still await the professional versions as they tend to have more polish.
Epic also cut back on the game types from UT2K4. They probably didn’t see enough people playing those games, but some I will miss. Bombing Run along with Double Domination were entertaining diversions and Last Man Standing put a nice twist on the standard Deathmatch putting the emphasis on survival over slaughter. Many people are bemoaning the loss of Assault as it had story-style objectives that felt more involved than most game modes. Epic, if not the mod community, will almost certainly put in some of the missing game styles as well as many others. The included UT3 games are Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch (natch), Duel (a 1 on 1 battle with a waiting queue for the winner of each round to play), Capture the Flag, and Warfare. Warfare is much like UT2K4’s Conquest where you have to capture nodes linking your base all the way to the enemy base before you can destroy their power core. The new kink is the powerball (snuck in from Bombing Run, apparently). The powerball lets its carrier capture a viable node instantly, even if it’s in enemy hands.
The powerball lets its carrier capture a viable node instantly, even if it’s in enemy hands.
It also can protect a nearby friendly node from damage. That allows the game to shift quite suddenly from one side to the other as a good runner can protect their primary node and then shift to attack and connect to the enemy node rather fast, especially if they're towed on a hoverboard. It’s a blast to carry a ‘ball under heavy fire right into an enemy node and take it away from them. Really torques off your opponents, too.
There is a campaign game which is entertaining but doesn’t really draw you in. No real character development (and only one character you can play in it) and no true feeling of making an impact in the Universe as you go along. There is a sort of tacked on feel to this mode, which it probably was. UT has always had its feet firmly in the multiplayer and instant action area of games. Most games of this ilk don’t even bother adding this style in to multiplayer games, so it’s hard to fault them for not having a fully fleshed out campaign game. The one big surprise was the ability to play the campaign with up to three other people. This is a nice addition and would be an outstanding thing to see more of. It also lets you play the game with all the different mode styles instead of starting a server with only one game type. A welcome break from the normal grind of endless Cap the Flag games until someone has to kill the server and restart it with a different mode.
The user interface seems a tad clunky to me. There are too many clicks to get around when they could have included a lot of the scattered options and checkboxes on fewer pages. Some of the options I’ve come to expect from previous installations of UT are missing, as well. They seem to be clearing these issues up a bit with the last two patches, so hopefully it will be up to snuff soon. Spectator mode is inexplicably not available in games I start and there seems to be no pause function. Another issue is the lack of proper search options for servers. I can find no place to plug in an IP search, indeed I can’t find a way to even search for server names. Epic did put in a favorites list since release, so I’m awaiting further refinement here. At least they listen to the fan base and add in the bits that are needed since I've seen far too many games that were seemingly abandoned by their parent shortly after being released.
This game holds a lot of promise that will hopefully get fulfilled. I'm optimistic for this judging from Epic’s history of player service. It’s also early in the release phase, so I expect some sticky points. UT3 is snazzy, powerful, gorgeous, and in need of attention.
UT3 is snazzy, powerful, gorgeous, and in need of attention.
Epic can leave this diamond in the rough or dig it out and polish that baby up. In its current state I give it a 4 out of 5. Once they knock some of the rough edges off, we’ll see how much this gem can shine.
In addition, you can Marty McFly with your board; zapping a friendly vehicle with a tow line to haul you around much more quickly. 
