Okay so I’ve been playing the holy hell out of the newest Unreal Tournament game, Unreal Tournament 3. It’s pretty darn good, great graphics, fast action, head shots galore, along some new game modes. I’ll first start out by examining each of the game modes and give you what I think are the pros and cons of the game.
More after the break..
The newest addition takes the assault and onslaught modes from UT’04, tosses them into a blender, and turns it on. The resulting effect is the Warfare mode. In this mode you have to link together power nodes from your power core to the opposing players power core. Much like the onslaught mode from UT04. They did however add a rebel node somewhere on the map. These nodes can either cause a timer to start, in which your team has to keep control of the node for a given time to receive a special benefit. For example, in one map when you control the node for 1 minute a Leviathan will spawn (the Leviathan being one of the most powerful vehicles in the game). If you happen to lose the node in that given time the timer will reset and you will have to defend it again for another minute or so. Besides the rebel nodes on some of the maps, there are also some maps that you have to capture a specific power node to cause something else in the map to open up. For example, on one of the maps once you capture the middle node a bridge extends, once the bridge is extended you have to drive your teams Goliath tank over the bridge and onto a pad that will cause the gate to the opposing teams power core to open up. If the power node in the middle is lost the gate closes and the team has to capture it back before they can cross over and continue to destroy the opposing teams power core.
Another new mode is Vehicle CTF. This mode is virtually the same as CTF, but Epic through in a curve ball, Vehicles. Unfortunately you cannot carry the flag in the vehicles. But this makes teams have to work together more, you can’t just run in solo and expect to grab the flag and capture it without getting blown to pieces from the opposing team.
The Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and CTF modes all stay the way they have always been. The biggest difference being the update graphics engine.
The vehicles have been carried over from UT04 with many new additions, most of which are the Necris vehicles. I have compiled a list of all the axis and necris vehicles below. There are also links with images of some of the vehicles so you can check them out..
The Axis lineup: Cicada, Goliath, Hellbender, Manta, Paladin, Raptor and the Scorpion.
The new Necris lineup: Darkwalker, Fury, Scavenger, Nemesis, Nightshade and Viper.
A lot of the vehicles that were in UT04 have been revamped. All of them fell more natural when you are driving them they no longer fell like you are driving a brick, which is a welcome change from UT04. Another thing that Epic has added is the hoverboard. This will allow you to get into the action fast even if you don’t have a vehicle you can also grapple onto any vehicles that are driving by and can use them to help get you there even faster. The beam that connects you to the passing vehicle can also be used to decapitate any players that pass between.
Epic has also reintroduced some of the weapons from UT99, the impact hammer is one that alot of players really missed. They did also take some of the weapons that were in UT04 out, a couple being the shock rifle and the spider mines.
Although they added some new features there is still a lot lacking. I still to this day don’t understand why they would take out almost all of the game modes that were on UT04. UT3 is missing, Invasion, Assault (although they did say that they merged this with Onslaught and called it Warfare its still not the same), Domination, and Double Domination. Sure these weren’t the most played modes that the game had, there was still a huge user base that did play them. Another problem that there is with UT3 is the menu. Sure this really shouldn’t make or break a game, having to deal with seven screens before you get into a game is aggravating. The whole online game search feature is terrible, half the time no servers ever come up and you have to click on the refresh button half a dozen times before any show up. One last thing that the game doesn’t bring to the table is the shear map size when you need to download maps from a remote server. Sure this isn’t all Epics fault but come on having to download a 50 megabyte map over 5 minutes really starts to ruin the experience.
The up side is that there are starting to become more and more user created maps and mods coming out, some of which are custom skins like the Master Chief and Marcus Fenix. Another good thing is that they didn’t slow down game play at all, it’s still as fast paced as it ever was.
The single player experience is very lacking. For a game that is called Unreal Tournament there is absolutely nothing to do with a tournament. Zip, nada, ziltch. Its pretty much about a group of people whose home was attacked by a group called the Necris, that get hired out by Malcolm (from the original UT series games) to fight against various corporations. This does get kind of boring after a while but I guess its just supposed to get you geared up the multiplayer aspect of the game.
Over all I think that this game deserves a decent score, theres not too many games that you can go into, frag for half an hour and enjoy the scenery while doing so (just as long as you don’t have to download any custom maps). If you are thinking about picking up the game find it on sale.
PROS: Fast game play, beautiful maps and textures, still the good old Unreal Tournament experience.
CONS: No new content besides some new vehicles, terrible single player mode, slow downloads and very few players online at once.
Overall score: 8.5/10
