Let's get creative... cos Epic certainly didn't
Now you may be sitting there thinking that I’m being unduly harsh on Unreal Tournament 3 and you may be thinking that I’m a complete bastard for just blowing great big holes in a game that a bunch of developers have worked years on. To some extent I do feel like the kid in that story, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. Am I the only reviewer on the planet who has played Unreal Tournament 3 and thought, ‘Hang on, this is the same bloody game all over again, just nicer looking!’, am I really the only one?So for some balance, let’s give some constructive criticism.
First, let’s look at the storyline. Unlike previous UT games, you get some cutscene stuff, this time telling you the story of how you’re a merc for hire who gets his ass whooped and is almost left for dead, then revived and healed and now working for a Japanese organisation in some daft global war. Which sounds ok until you find that each ‘mission’ is based around what is essentially multiplayer vs bot maps… So rather than attack an objective, you have to capture their flag three times, or dominate set points on a map... hardly what you would call a conflict, eh?
Click for larger imageThe gameplay itself is basically the same as previous UT games, most closely resembling UT2k4 in that you have access to vehicles and, on vehicle maps, the translocator is replaced by a hoverboard which you can sometimes grapple onto passing vehicles for a ‘Back to the Future’ style lift. But the bots are generally piss poor drivers and also stop at every opportunity to shoot at each other… not very helpful when two Hellbender’s decided to go head to head and you’re hanging around unprotected off the back.
What would have been good to see is some form of single player campaign… a set of proper missions with a proper storyline. For the single player all you have in Unreal Tournament 3 is a set of disjointed pseudo-missions that are just bot-matches in disguise. If Epic had been honest and just lobbed a tournament ladder in with you building a team up, hiring and firing like you could do in UT2k4 I’d have been happy… but this attempt at a ‘story’ shoe-horning it into the game is just annoying.
Click for larger imageSo how about the weapons? Well for sure you should always keep the old favourites, such as the flak cannon and the link gun, but how about something new? You could even use the old weapons and give them new properties that’d change how the game is played. How about if you’re hooked up to another player with the link gun, any damage he takes is shared between you both, even if he’s not using a link gun?
Or, and here’s a radical how about completely new weapons, like a speargun that can be used to temporarily spear opponents to the wall or floor? It could have a grappling hook function as alternate fire, though it’ll still use ammo if you’re grappling with it. Or some kind of leech gun that drains the health of whoever you hit with it, topping your health back up and when your health is max the alternate fire can be to drop health kits that your teammates can pick up but that are also mines if the enemy tries to grab them. Or how about a flamethrower that, as well as being a standard flame weapon, can lay down pools of unburnt fuel that anyone can set on fire making traps for the unwary?
And for the record, those ideas have come from ten minutes of staring at the ceiling, drinking a cup of tea. Epic have had three years and the best they’ve come up with is to just do the same stuff again.
Click for larger imageThe level design, through not being as formulaic as the rest of Unreal Tournament 3 is probably the best point in the whole game but this is still flawed. There seems to be a distinct lack of creativity, perhaps because of Unreal Tournament 3’s more Earthly setting. Maybe Epic felt that they wanted a more realistic version of Unreal Tournament where jump pads, zero-g and space stations just didn’t fit in? On the whole the maps are a lot of fun even though they all feel somewhat on the large side with pick-ups spread over a pretty large area.
All I can say is that some classic UT maps, such as Opposing Worlds, should’ve been included, but no doubt the modders are going mad with the included editor to fix this as I write.