Played on:
Windows
Pentium M 2GHz CPU
2GB DDR2 RAM
GeForce 7800GTX Go
Minimum:
2GHz CPU
512MB RAM
nVidia 6200+ or
ATI 9600+ Video
Recommended:
2.4GHz Dual Core CPU
1GB RAM
nVidia 7800GTX+ or
ATI X1300+ Video
Epic Games might have made Gears of War their primary game franchise, but the one that gave them their fame - Unreal Tournament - has not been forgotten. Epic's been working for a few years now on Unreal Tournament 3, a follow-up to their first person shooter series that started out as a story-based game but moved to the "Tournament" name and gameplay once competitive multiplayer shooters became immensely popular.
And UT3 is a pretty impressive new iteration in the series, as it uses Epic's powerful Unreal Engine 3 to give us maximum visuals with smooth, stable frame rates. Granted, most of the game is pretty similar: we've got a slightly tweaked arsenal of the same classic UT weapons like the Flak Cannon, ASMD Shock Rifle, multiple-rocket firing Rocket Launcher, Redeemer, Minigun, and more. Just about all of the unique things that made these weapons great return, although a few small things seem to have been changed. Dodging and double jumping are back, too, and the movement feels quite a bit like past UT games, although I'm sure that purists and expert players will find things that my mediocre skill level hasn't yet.
The story in Unreal Tournament 3 moves away from brutal sports theme to an all-out war, with the premise that the ability to respawn when you die has changed the way the war is fought. Now, your "games" are actual battles between hardened soldiers who have tons of experience since they aren't replaced by a fresh recruit every time they get killed. This setup works pretty well for me, as it provides a pretty good explanation for battles involving dozens, rather than thousands, of combatants at once. Unfortunately, that's about as far as the suspension of disbelief goes.
In UT3, many of your favorite shooter rules have been given story-based whitewashes to try and hobble together an over-arcing plot. There are still Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch modes where you're supposed to reduce their Respawner charges or something like that, but you're actually still just killing your way to a given fragcount. These make some sense, but the Capture the Flag modes sure don't seem very warlike to me. Epic tries to explain how capturing "FLaGs" (the name stands for Field Lattice Generator now - this is me rolling my eyes) will help you win a battle, and it's just plain stupid. But it's the new Warfare gameplay mode, which is the ultimate culmination of this game's teamplay, that finally seems at least something closer to the idea of all-out war. Not only do you need to capture and hold points across a large map, but your ultimate goal is to do enough damage to your enemy base's power core to cause it to explode. And of course, you'll have to defend your own at the same time.
The single player mode in UT3 includes low-resolution, pre-rendered cutscenes to advance the story which, after seeing the impressive in-engine cutscenes in their last game, Gears of War, is a bit of a disappointment. Plus, this story tries to go on about the war against the Necrids and such and how your character is going to get revenge on some queen of the Necrids blah blah blah. Maybe it was the fact that Gears obscured so much of the story and its main character's past that it seemed so engrossing, but here the story really does feel like a tacked-on excuse to go jump into deathmatches.
First person shooters without any stories generally don't do well, but I kind of wish that Epic had just stuck to their original plot-free UT idea instead of this. It really seems like they just threw all this babble in since that's what you're supposed to have in a modern-day shooter, and it would have been nice to break that trend and just have a straight-up action game with no story and lots of killing people. At least you can jump online with your campaign and get four people together to all play while totally ignoring the plot. It's not really the same experience as, say, Gears of War's online cooperative action, but you can still definitely work together and start kicking ass as a team pretty quickly.
