Unreal Tournament 3 Game Review–Fun In First Person
I have to admit that when I played Unreal Tournament 3, I was expecting the worst. I was expecting yet another half-baked, warmed-over pile of leftover sludge in the form of a first person shooter, which are rapidly glutting the market in job lots. But actually playing Unreal Tournament 3, now available for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC, became something interesting–it became FUN.
In Unreal Tournament 3, you play as the Ronin, formerly the defenders of the Twin Souls mining colony until said colony was wiped out by an attack from the Necris. The Necris, just for background, are a subspecies of humanity that genetically modified themselves thanks to the Phayder Corporation as Black Ops forces par excellence. Anyway, the Necris launched an attack on Twin Souls for reasons that I’m not a hundred percent sure of, and left the Ronin without a home. They took up residence with the Izanagi Corporation on their home planet, and became a mercenary unit. Now, they need to curry favor with Izanagi to get the necessary resources and equipment to go hunt up the Necris and get some terminal payback on the homewreckers.
There are actually several OTHER races in the Unreal Tournament universe that will make an appearance in the multiplayer classifications and as ancillary parts of the story, including the Axon and Malcolm and the Thunder Crash team (or Thunder CASH, as Malcolm likes to call them), so you can’t fault this game for a lack of storyline. It’s got storyline almost in excess, really. But the gameplay is the important issue here–and surprisingly, the gameplay is actually pretty entertaining.
You’ll engage in a series of different kinds of fights, including straight battles, a duel system, and even a variant of capture the flag in which FlAG is actually an acronym for FieLd Ambient Generator, if I remember it correctly. That may be the most innovative use for an old retread that I’ve ever seen. It’s like someone took apart a water heater and made a woodburner stove out of it–this kind of recycling never fails to impress me, because even though it’s nothing new, it’s a completely new use for something old.
The controls are smooth, the arenas are sufficiently open that even I don’t get motion sickness very often, and with selectable difficulty levels you can customize the gameplay to feel like an invincible genius or like a hard-bitten warrior. Multiplayer is also well-present, and if you want a good party game, you could do a whole lot worse. Despite the fact that you’ll be essentially playing the same games over and over again–deathmatch, team deathmatch, VEHICLE deathmatic, capture the flag, et al, it’s still surprisingly fun, and it’s actually worth playing the single player version to get properly accustomed to the various maps for multiplayer fun.
There’s a lot to like about Unreal Tournament 3, and in all honesty, I don’t have this much fun with first person shooters often. For once, I can actually recommend a first person shooter, and that feels both strange and good at the same time. Hot action, a dash of adventure, and lots of shooter glee combine to make a title that even I can enjoy.