Unreal Tournament III

Format PC

Developer Epic Games

Publisher Midway

Genre First Person Shooter

10 Comments

"Someone just tried to combo me with the Shock Rifle. Awesome."
A small pang of pride settles in as Epic Games' Jeff Morris announces to the room his respect for the unknown assailant. If you're reading this, Jeff, it was me. Yes, I was 'epic_test3', the one pulling off the old-school FPS tricks (wall-jumps, double-tap dodges, combos) in our little soiree in your multiplayer shooter, Unreal Tournament 3.

I have some history here: when the first UT came out in 1999, I spent four hours downloading the demo over dial-up, and even chose it over Quake III. When 2004 came out, I was there shouting "Use the Link Gun" to the newbs on the server, ducking as the recently added vehicles barrelled past. And the old skills are still relevant: UT3 may be shiny and new, but there's a classic deathmatch game under the sheen.

Epic have always been conscious about the fun factor: no spawn queues, no reloading and no expanding target reticule. Getting the player to the fight and giving them the biggest, baddest guns is their priority.

It's a model that's stuck since the dawn of UT, but they're tweaking it further for UT3. There's a new addition; a deployable hoverboard that whizzes the player across the vast maps they've crafted. It has no offensive or defensive capabilities, because having people fight on it changes the combat dynamic too much. Its main use is to help get the players to the fight as swiftly as possible.

In addition to being a nippy way to cross the terrain, it also enables you to tether up to any friendly vehicle and hitch a ride. This includes things like the Viper, a gravity-defying hoverbike that can jump ungodly heights. String three or four people on to this and you practically have a dropship. My kind of tactics.

Epic estimate that roughly half of the people who bought UT2004 never took it online, preferring instead to take on Epic's brilliant bots. For that group, they're adding a campaign mode that takes place across a large number of the multiplayer maps, where you and a team of three AIs will take on a server full of bots. It's slightly more involved than their previous singleplayer addition in UT2004, which took place in a tournament setting.

The campaign is made up of a series of fights on a branching mission tree, where you choose a fight - say, picking a side mission that'll net you a bit of Necris technology. The choices you make will affect future missions as well, so there's a slight layer of tactical decision-making to it all. For those of us who do want to play with people, you can replace the teammate bots with up to three other people on the fly, and take on the missions co-operatively.

Back to multiplayer: there's a new mode, Warfare, which is a mash-up of the old Onslaught and Assault modes, where two teams are fighting over linked nodes. There are only two nodes live at any point, in order to force the teams to clash over them. The ultimate goal is to get to the other team's power supply, using captured nodes to your advantage. They may give you extra vehicles or provide a spawn point for the orbs - the powerful globes that make capturing further nodes easier.

Within the battle, you can pick a role: orb runners, for example, are tasked with getting the orb into the next node on the chain; special ops will be flitting between all the sundry items on the map, hitting unlinked nodes for potential upgrades (not all nodes are linked) and destroying barricades.

The power supplies are protected with Epic's take on the hoary old favourite: the mounted gun. The defensive spam cannons in UT3 are mounted on rails, so you can move their position and better protect the vast area the power supplies cover, as well as chase the annoying, sneaky players who think they have a sitting duck.

Warfare's strength is bringing teams into battle: even with the vast maps, multiple routes, having the nodes as flashpoints and people on the other team assuming roles you have, personal little battles still form. As an orb runner there were constant battles with other runners right at the glowing neon nodes as we each tried to get the orb into the node.

That's not to say those who want to just get fragging won't be well served. The big picture in UT3 is that fighting is fun, be it in little one-on-one encounters or a Dark Walker vs Scorpion tank. The Walker is truly a sight to behold: tripedal, spitting out a cutting laser beam that instantly kills anyone underneath its intense gaze.

We ended a playthrough early by getting into one in a game that was mostly deathmatch, except for when the Walker was dropped into the map and the fight became a dash to grab it. The three-legged beast is slow moving, but as every gob of laser spits out, you drag it across the world.

Leaving a glowing trail of plasma wherever it touches, it incinerates everything. If your enemies do make it past the laser and get underneath, the alt-fire drops a bomb right between your legs.

My favourite vehicle is the aforementioned Viper. It's that perfect distillation of fun that Epic are trying to ram down our throats. Its worth is demonstrated in a CTF map called Sandstorm: a U-shaped desert map where the two home bases are blocked off with a huge cliff between. For the most part the fight is funnelled through a choke point, where the cliff ends, and where both teams pass through a tunnel to get to the bases.

The Viper can take off thanks to two wind-catching fins that stick out of the back when you hit the jump button, although it depends on speed. So, instead of zipping through the tunnel, I speed the bike straight at the cliff and launch into the air over the cliff. But it gets better.

The enemy has a Dark Walker at their disposal, which is a great defensive weapon if you choose to just park in one spot and spam the end of the tunnel with the laser. But the Viper has an alternate fire, where if you hold the button down you'll get a zoomed-in viewing reticule and a countdown.

The bike launches from under me, leaving me to drop a huge height, but it's now a missile that's powerful enough to take out the Walker. As I land, the map's twist hits; a sandstorm that cloaks the level and the flag bearer can make it back to his base under cover. As I'm near the opposition's flag, it'd be rude not to.

There's a beauty to Unreal's maps, with the designers unafraid to fit a theme into their lore. If it works, it's in. You'll move from neon streets to towering bridges to fighting on high rises and space ships, and this time the levels are being designed to complement the vehicles. For example there's a demonstration of the Paladin,
a sort of defensive bus that can deploy a shield in front.

The shape of the shield fits into certain points of the chosen level, like in the doorways that house the nodes of a Warfare game. The shields fit precisely, the perfect meshing of form and design. Of course if that's too sensible, you can always use a slow-mo cube.

It's the reason I chose UT2004 over the Quake series way back when; UT has a sense of silliness, and it's never better illustrated than by the big jelly cube of slow time that you can deploy from an engineer vehicle. Anything entering it - people, vehicles, projectiles - will slow to a crawl. You can fire rockets into it and then circle to watch them come out the other side.

Plopped over a flag it makes a perfect defensive deployable: there's nothing scarier than having fought through a pile of guys to get to their flag only to have the world slow to a crawl as you're about to hit paydirt. And within the cube the beauty of UT3 is revealed; you can move about, time cloying at your body, the rockets scoring through the gel.

UT3 is fighting neck and neck with Crysis for the prettiest game this year. And while Crysis has gorgeous vistas to behold, there's nothing finer than watching the slow animation of someone caught in a time bubble, dodging the rockets like a magician's assistant dodges swords.

So many FPS games tack on online shooting as an afterthought. It's good to know Epic are focusing on an area that's often hardly given a second glance. A good, solid multiplayer game will last you far longer than a single-player, and UT3 looks like it has the staying power.

Craig Pearson