Unreal Tournament 3 - PC
Alright, since I don't see any reviews of this around, let's get bashy.
Graphics
I cannot complain at all about this: it's beautiful, but it eats lots of computer resources. It's runnable on old piece of hardware, but quite frankly on my ATI Radeon X1600 it looked like Doom 2, on my current video card, which I haven't memorized yet, it's more comparable to Crysis. It uses quite stunning new effects for a change, although most of the time, these effects also make you wonder what the fuck killed you because you couldn't see anything.
Gameplay
The singleplayer mode deviates from those of the old Unreal Tournaments, in fact, this isn't even Unreal Tournament, it's more like Tabula Rasa with less RPG and more big stompy robots. In the campaign, you proceed through designated points in a fabulous unnamed planet, which makes it seem like some ghetto war for turf where you can collect protection money. A noticable thing is that the two characters who give you briefing have a black english accent thing comparable to that of MC Hammer. Otherwise, the game follows the quite pleasant shoot'n'kill-shit-esque approach of the last 4 games with the same usual gamemodes. Which is getting quite old.
The protagonist is a non-ghetto guy (for a change, yay) who has a sister (that means no sex in the game, probably), and is ordered around by two times ex-champion Malcolm who you probably fought in the last round of each Unreal Tournament previously and also bears the previously mentioned ghetto speech. The game also seems to promote spontaneous declaration of war on innocent people, which is quite good if you ask me.
Oh yes, the game stores your campaign offline and online seperately. So if you start a campaign online then login server goes down (which happens pretty often) you're pretty much fucked unless you fancy starting a new one.
Artificial Stupidity (AI)
This is so long that I have to separate it from Gameplay. Basically the game features the EXTREMELY UBERDUMB and the EXTREMELY WTFPWN AI.
The earlier ones are also known as "teammates" although "blockers" would be a better expression. These uberdumb ai guys cannot take down a single guy who only has an impact hammer in 5v1, grab the flag in CTF then run around and fight stuff, get stuck in walls quite often, get inside vehicles then drive them into a wall and don't do anything for quite a while, or the most annoying aspect, in VCTF, they get in FUCKING vehicles then while I'm bringing home the FUCKING flag on a FUCKING hoverboard they FUCKING drive in front of me yelling "LOLZ!!!!111 I COVER you're ASS!!!11". Speaking of which, they have a useful habit of telling you the position of the enemy. Or it perhaps WOULD be useful if they'd like tell you where they were. When they spot a significant enemy anywhere in the map, they yell "Enemy <lol> here!". I'm still trying to figure out where the fuck is here.
The latter ones are those who use aimbots, wallhax, instagib enforcers and everything else at the same time. You may also know these bots as "the opposing team".
Sounds'n'shit
I cannot think of any complaints here. The sound effects (along with visuals) are well-timed and also well in-place. Voice acting is great, despite the fact that most of them is unnecessary, except for the campaign stuff of course.
Multiplayer
The game suffers from minor master server problems and other major retardation. First of all, the login server crashes quite often, quite an inconvenience. If you ever manage to log in you will notice two things in the server browser: The pings are quite high. I know. I joined a 2k ping server and it played normally. And that there are little servers. Oh yes, Epic messed up by releasing early without redirect support. Practically, this means only completely vanilla servers appear in your server browser. If we put all this aside, the multiplayer is quite enjoyable, adrenaline-rising, fast paced, and although it's full of douchebags as usual, it won't really affect your experience. Unless of course they're stealing the goliaths and ramming them into mountains.
Overall
Despite all the Yathzee-style bashing on the game, I believe it's quite enjoyable. Pros are the new storyline, which finally isn't another random tournament event, the stunning graphics and sound effects, cons are the rather irritating AI and multiplayer system, but despite these, the good is still seriously outweighing the bad, and at the end of the day, you realize you are playing quite an enjoyable game.










7.5/10: "Sweep first, buy if you like."