|
|
Unreal Tournament 3
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 23rd November 2007
Singleplayer
So, at last we get to the slightly less interesting, but by no means bad attraction which is the singleplayer campaign.Things start off well in the singleplayer scenario – there’s an impressively epic introduction cutscene which has square-jawed men and buxom-bosomed ladies fighting together to repel an alien incursion. Explosions, lasers, and characters which are two-dimensional but still quite interesting somehow, the intro really has it all.
The plot is simple. A small team of soldiers led by a man named Reaper and his sister are enlisted into the Special Corps to fight back against the Necris over a fairly large campaign. The Special Corps are being directed by Malcom, the hero of the series and a decorated Unreal Tournament Champion. There’s immediate rivalry between Reaper and Malcolm, as Malcolm is seen as nothing more than a mercenary for hire and not a real soldier.
The game does its best to explain why the format of the singleplayer campaign mirrors the multiplayer game. As part of the Special Corps, Reaper will spend a lot of time in team battles and gets access to a large array of vehicles – so far so good. It’s an adequate enough explanation for why he gets to run around with a load of tanks but no army.
Reaper is the main character in the singleplayer campaign
Where the believability falls apart is where the game modes are ham-handedly forced in. It was always going to be a difficult challenge – like getting smoke into a beer bottle with a baseball bat and, while Epic has done the best it can, it still fails miserably. Having Capture the Flag matches explained as strategic attempts to capture enemy FlaGS (some sort of field generator, the acronym for which is so awful I can’t repeat it) feels especially mug-fisted. It’s crude and just a little bit laughable.
Yet, strangely enough, that’s OK. If we wanted a truly intense and believable war game then we’d go play Call of Duty 4. UT3 isn’t about the singleplayer at all and the fact that it's there and that Epic has tried its best with it is admirable and good even if it still feels so cheesy that the French won’t eat it.
The gameplay itself is fundamentally the same as the multiplayer except that the levels you fight through are preset and get progressively harder. It makes a great introduction to the game modes and the difficulty curve is perfectly paced so that you are constantly pushed but never strained. I never saw a single bot error either – the A.I. is as perfect as you’d expect and even on lower levels of skill the enemies still move around intelligently and realistically, giving a nice gentle challenge.
Conclusion
Unreal Tournament 3 is an excellent game and there’s no doubt in my mind that it’ll be the backbone of PC multiplayer gaming for a fair old while – alongside Team Fortress 2, of course. Frankly, it knocks Enemy Territory: Quake Wars out of the water like the limp fish it is. Then it beats it to death with something embarrassing and probably slightly rude. Fill in the blank for yourself, you filthy perverts.
Of course, no story would be complete without a damsel to rescue...
However, because it’s a multiplayer game primarily, it has the problem that if the community for the game doesn’t take off then the game itself is a wasted purchase.
Yeah, I don’t think that that’s a problem which UT3 will face either. With a firm community already ready to get behind the game and keep the servers populated, plus more people ready to port over the old mutators as well as make new ones, it stands to reason that UT3 will be one of the best multiplayer games of the year.
Topping it all off is the server connection services. It has a few annoying things – only letting you search for one game mode at a time, for example and not just scouring all servers to see which ones are populated – but by and large the system is excellent. There’s already hundreds of servers ready to go and our own is already prepped, if rumours from around the watercooler are to be believed.
Superbly balanced, even on the worst and most annoying maps and somehow in spite of some game-breaking vehicles, UT3 doesn’t really offer up a whole lot of immediately new stuff, but it doesn’t matter. It’s Unreal and it’s awesome to the max.
