Alden Bates' Weblog

I got Unreal Tournament 3 a couple of days ago. You may recall I had trouble getting the demo to work. Well, the game shipped with the setting in question set to the "not working" mode, so it appears that Epic didn't notice a large number of people having trouble with the thing. Anyway, I've been playing it a bit, so here are some initial thoughts.

The major problem I have with the game is what's missing. There's no spectator mode, nor are there a number of modes which I would have expected to be fairly easy to implement, like Last Man Standing. Here's another example - the stats screen which comes up when you hit F1 during a game:

In UT2004, this screen showed you your teammate's locations and orders, but apparently not in UT3. Note also the stupid "Player" moniker you're forced to use offline, which I believe Shamus mentioned a while ago.

The voice taunts are pretty cool. The Necris seem to have taken over the creepy slot vacated by the nightmare characters from UT2004, even down to some of their dialogue being delivered in the default voice (WTF?).

The levels are very pretty though:

Look at that water! It actually looks like water rather than a wobbly reflective surface.

One of my favourite levels so far: Sandstorm. The level is piled up with Necris vehicles, including the Darkstalker:

However every so often a sandstorm kicks up and it becomes practically impossible to see anything:

Yes, it's a little thing we like to call DEEP HURTING:

Ahem, anyway. Suspiciously, the bots are not hampered at all by the sandstorm, and will shoot you from the other side of the map regardless of whether you're visible or not. Tsk tsk.

The Warfare game type is pretty cool, and once you get the hang of it, isn't nearly as complicated as it seems from the description. It's pretty much like Onslaught combined with Bombing Run - you get the added fun of each team having an orb which you can grab, take to a node, and instantly capture it:

The hoverboard, fortunately, isn't nearly as useless as I thought it would be. The key in Capture the Flag is to jump off it as soon as the enemy starts firing at you, so as to avoid being knocked off and dropping the flag.

Building nodes in Warfare is a lot cooler than Onslaught. As you build them, bits of metal fly up from the base and cocoon the node:

Likewise, when you damage a node or power core, the metal armour falls off. Tres cool:

So far I'm rating it an 8/10. It'd rate much higher, but I'm irked by the lack of some of the features I really liked in the previous iterations of the games...