So Good It's Almost... Unreal

By The Jackal

Like the Jerry Springer Show, the Unreal Tournament series has always been famous for its fast pace and gory visuals.

The rapid-fire action in the Unreal Tournament games have always delivered an adrenaline rush and have kept gamers occupied for some years, generating a dedicated following of core players. 

I'm not extremely experienced on the topic of Unreal Tournament since I have never owned a copy of my ownsome (just played at friends places etc.) but even without such in-depth hindsight I can tell you that this game is effortlessly eclipses its predecessors.

Unreal Tournament 3 is a fast-paced first-person shooter which includes masses of weapons, armor power ups and vehicles, all of which are carefully balanced to ensure the fragging experience is as just as it is bloody.

The general aim of the game is to spawn, kill people, die and re-spawn. It's not complicated but to be good at the game takes lots of practice.

But what makes Unreal Tournament 3 different from all the other first-person shooters out there? Two things - graphics and guns!

The guns and vehicles in this game are nothing short of awesome. I love the weapons produced by these sorts of futuristic games because they are really imaginative and have heaps of surprising and cool new features. 

For example, the Bio Rifle (an Unreal favourite) is an alien gun which shoots blobs of green slime over the battlefield and the enemy, and when these blobs of organic goo explode they do enormous amounts of damage that can kill very quickly and with lots of splatter. 

Furthermore, most weapons have a secondary function, and alternate fire on the Bio Rifle creates one massive build up of the slime, a massive blob that you can dispense all over a bunch of unsuspecting victims. It's gruesomely effective.

A number of weapons have returned from the Unreal Tournament 2004, such as Flak Cannon, Link gun, and Rocket Launcher, plus there's close combat weapons and super weapons like the Target Painter and Redeemer.

Most of the weapons included have aspects to them that we've all seen before, but with the amazing look and feel of Unreal Tournament 3 with a mixture of human and alien weapons is awesome.

The other aspect of the game that will really blow your socks off are the vehicles. 

There is some majorly destructive hardware included in this game and the vehicles really shine when you're playing the 'Warfare' mode, which I'll explain later. 

The Hoverboard, Axon Cicada and Translocator are vehicles worth mentioning for their outstanding originality and overall awesomeness.

The Hoverboard is like a hovering skateboard that you can hop on and glide around the battlefield effortlessly. It provides very little protection but comes in really handy when you need to get to where you're going in a hurry.

The Axon Cicada is my favorite vehicle in the whole game. It can fly over the battlefield while locking on to targets and shooting up to 16 missiles at once, and anyone who gets this vehicles attention is doomed.

The Translocator is more tool than vehicle, as it's used for teleportation around the battlefield. It works by shooting a chunk of circular ammo to where you want to go, you then right click and you'll be taken to where the ammo is. It's really handy for getting around the map and especially useful in Capture the Flag missions.

One of the most visually spectacular vehicles is the DarkWalker, which looks like its been ripped straight from the War of the Worlds movie. The huge mechanoid vehicle moves around on tripod legs, and has a very alien fuselage.

See a DarkWalker coming towards you, and you'll probably just look at and stare the first time as sizzles you into a sticky pulp. Next time run for cover or try to squeeze off a few rockets.

The online aspect of this game is intense, it's full-on, it's awesome, and all those other words I'm having trouble remember (even though I could only play on laggy American servers at the time - can't wait for more Australian gamers to log on). 

To call the action fast-paced is undercooking it. This game is fast. Real fast. So fast in fact that a 20 minute session can see hundreds of frags. The screenshots here look great (I hope - the editor sometimes publishes average shots), but they don't convey just how quick it is.

Playing against other people is a huge amount of fun and there is huge scope for clan groupings to be made for the game as well. I can see a lot of potential for this game in competitive gaming circuits and we'll probably see it in the big gaming tournaments of 2008.

The graphics? Where do I start... 

Astounding, amazing, brain-fryingly good, better than Quake Wars. It's a sizzling game with a look and feel that different from most of the new games available at the moment.

This game has absolutely amazing visuals and I have no criticisms of the textures or 3D models used in the game whatsoever. It looks a million bucks. Everything from the backdrops, to the terrain and especially the vehicles look superb.

The graphics are actually some of the best that I've ever seen on a PC game to date, which is saying a lot considering how good the latest batch of games are getting. The weapons and the vehicles animate well and look very substantial, while the level design and tilesets are equally attractive.

But like cosmetic surgery all this attractiveness does have its eventual sagginess. You'll need a very beefy PC system to run this game with all the setting cranked up high. My computer struggled to run the game on the medium settings (and this was with my graphics card severely overclocked). But even on lower levels this game will strike you like a golf club in the shins.

All I'd say is to make sure that you check the system requirements before you buy.

Okay, now that I've gushed about the weapons and vehicles and graphics, let's look at the game modes: 

Deathmatch
Team Deathmatch
Warfare 
Duel
Capture the Flag (CTF)
Vehicle Capture the Flag (VCTF)

On top of these game modes there is a decent campaign mode which can be played online, offline or on LAN. The additive of the campaign mode with the option to play online and offline is really cool and ensures that gamers without a net connection can get a lot out of this game.

The campaign game didn't excite me that much (mainly because I wanted to get into online deathmatch) and I though this game mode was nothing too special. 

The story line is hard to follow: it starts off with a human base being attacked by the Necris, a race of evil aliens. Three soldiers (all friends) are caught up in the battle and start killing the alien invaders. One of the soldiers is hit by an explosive and passes out - you play this soldier.

When you awaken, it turns out you have been enlisted by a third alien race/power and must complete missions for them in order to be sent to the front line against the original invading aliens. 

You join a team of allied soldiers and must fight in different arenas against different teams or people in order to gain respect from these “allies”. 

Basically the campaign is just an excuse to get you fighting other people in different arenas, to learn the game modes and so forth. I would have been better off just creating my own deathmatch/team deathmatch game instead of having to go through all of the cinematics etc... 

Although I didn't enjoy the campaign all that much, I must say that it would be pretty cool to play online and with friends etc... and not just against bots like I did.

But Unreal Tournament 3 is all about fragging humans, and the three most popular modes of play are Deathmatch, CTF and Warfare. Allow me to explain:

Deathmatch + Team Deathmatch: 

This is pretty self-explanatory for most hardened gamers. Deathmatch is where you play an all out war against all other players on the map. If it moves, kill it. 

The aim is to kill as many people as possible until either the time runs out, or you reach the kill limit. Bragging rights mean everything.

Team Deathmatch is similar except the rules apply to the whole team and whichever team has the highest amount of kills at the end wins.

Capture the Flag + Vehicle Capture the Flag:

Again, we've seen this game type before in various other games so it's does explain itself. Capture the Flag is a game type where you are either on the red team or the blue team and you must capture the other team's flag and return it to your flag base. 

Once you return the enemy's flag to your base, you gain a point for your team. Whoever has the most points at the end of the game wins. 

Obviously Vehicle CTF is the same as the normal CTF except with the additive of vehicles to the map, which really spices things up.

 Warfare:

This is one of the most awesome styles of game that I've ever played, as it incorporates vehicles, stationary turrets, defense, attack, Capture the Flag style gameplay and a large overriding goal. 

The aim of the game is for your team to capture a certain amount of 'nodes' placed around the map. What you want is to capture these nodes in a linking order to the enemies 'Primary Node'. Once you capture this you will gain access to the enemies 'Power Core', which you are tasked with obliterating. 

Destroying the enemies Power Core will result in a win for your team.

To capture these 'nodes' sounds easy. You just gotta run over the base of the node, and this will change it to your team's colour and it will start building a shield around itself. 

To help fully capture the node quickly you can use the Link Gun's secondary fire key which will boost the process (multiple people doing this at the same time will help build the node quickly, which encourages team play). 

If your enemy controls and node and has a 100% complete shield around it then you can shoot it with the weapons you have and then seize control of it. 

It's quite complicated to begin with, but once you get the hang of the 'Warfare' gameplay it's immensely enjoyable.

The only other game type I haven't played thoroughly is “Duel”. As it's name says, it's a 1v1 situation (usually played on a relatively small map) where you have to kill the other guy using the weapons scattered around the map.

This is really good if you have a friend (or enemy) who thinks that he or she is better than you at UT3. The ultimate one-on-one grudge match. As the Highlander would say, "There can be only one!"

Once criticism I have of this game is that it took me several hours to be able to even start up the game due to an error I kept having after I tried to boot it. This was demoralising. 

I had to search around the net for a long time before finally finding the answer on a website. If you buy this game and this has happened to you then you must check out these 2 links:

• Link 1

• Link 2

These fixes are for problems with the demo version but they worked with the retail version as well. Hopefully this will be patched by either Midway or Epic Games by the time you get the game.

Overall the experience was very good and this an exceptional start to 2008 for the gaming industry. The graphics are without par, the gameplay employs that classic fast-paced Unreal feel complete with the booming announcer who tells you when you're on a killing spree, and the various game modes provide even more variety for gamers.

There are some problems with the game, such as it's desire for an unholy amount of processing power and the incredibly annoying initial bug, but overall Unreal Tournament 3 has delivered handsomely and I think that this will be one of the hits of the festive season.

There's enough maps, weapons, vehicles, and game modes to keep you fragging for months and the sheer speed will unite your synapses like never before.

If you enjoy FPS shooters and have the PC grunt to run it, I'd highly recommend you pick up this game at some point. To put it neatly, it's an instant classic and a must have for online gamers.

Game: Unreal Tournament 3
System: PC
Players: 1-multi
Online: Yes
Developer: Midway + Epic Games
Distributor: Red Ant

Rating: 90%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)