In Unreal Tournament 3 you play the role of James "Reaper" Hawkins who’s part of team Ronin and he’s joined by his sister Sarah "Jester" Hawkins along with two other team mates Terrence "Othello" Marshall and Jeremiah "Bishop" O’Connor. You and your team along with other allies begin to move against the Necris, who destroyed your home colony along with others, in an act of revenge.
Unreal Tournament 3 now offers a compelling campaign mode in which team Ronin, a group of mercenaries, battles through enemies to take revenge on the Necris for slaughtering friends and family on their home colony. Campaign ends up running players through the familiar game types, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Vehicle Capture the Flag, Duel, and an all new game type Warfare, in which players compete to destroy the opponents Core by linking together nodes.
An interesting function that has been added to the new campaign mode for UT3 is the Card system where players may be rewarded for doing missions in campaign with a card which allow players to use cards before matches to give them additional reinforcements or others may harm the opponents. Many cards can be saved for later use while others need to be used before the next match. There’s also an Instant Action feature that allows players to compete against bots of varying difficulties that you can set to polish your skills.
Multiplayer offers the ability to join a Quick Match, a Customer Match, or to host a match of your own. During custom or quick match players are able to choose player match for some casual play or ranked match for a more serious experience to see where you can place among the world. For specific settings on quick and custom matches there’s Split screen, enabling or disabling another player on the same console during quick match, Match type, Game Mode, or Pure Server in which rule changing mutators are not enabled. Whether its campaign, instant action, or multiplayer there’s the ability to split screen with a friend to tackle enemies with improved team work offline or online.
Something I’ve noticed during multiplayer that could be annoying and frustrating would be the fact that you can spawn at the same spot after every time you die, for instance being spawned at a spider rifle atop a map where most of the map is enclosed and the sniper rifle has little on the map though after each time you die you’re spawned there making it difficult to get another weapons while other players are running around with flak cannons and rocket launchers. While the single player campaign is nice and that UT3 has a story line so to speak, it becomes a little dull and boring even with the Cards to spice things up because it’s the same game types with the maps you would see on multiplayer.
Though despite the very small amount of things that may become annoying game play is solid and delivers stunning graphics in comparison with the previous Unreal Tournament. Controls have a small learning curve to them but are easy to use afterwards.
During game play there’s a large assortment of weapons to help you dispatch your foes many are old familiar guns such as the Flak Cannon or the Bio Rifle, a few of the weapons have be redesigned with different types of firepower like the Enforcer which will be your trusty pistol with single and semi-automatic fire that you start with at every match. One of the handiest weapons is not only the Tri-Barrel rocket launcher that allows players to load three rockets then fire them at once but the Link Gun which gives players the capability of offloading energy to a friendly target, boosting their output, and being able to repair vehicles and nodes along with the weapons capability of lobbing green blasts of energy at your enemies.
New designed vehicles are a huge improvement considering there’s a large amount of them to help give you the upper hand in combat. Two of the most basic forms of transportation that players will have constant access to is either the Translocator, a teleportation device in which players will launch a disc then press the button they launched it with at the point they’d like to teleport to or the Hover board which pretty much explains itself, while riding the hover board players have the ability to hook onto the back of a vehicle for quicker movement and also jump if the occasion calls for it. A few other larger vehicles and a personal favorite of mine is the Axon Manta which is a hovering vehicles mounted with two fans on either side, allowing the ability to leap up into the air or drop lower to the ground to avoid obstacles or chop running enemies to bits. Another vehicle of mention is the Necris Scavenger, while piloting the Scavenger you’re enclosed in a nanoblack sphere allowing you to roll over enemies and through obstacles with destructive force. Tentacles can also be partially deployed and spun at a high speed then fully deployed and allow you to jump high up into the air or walk through and over terrain.
Between the vehicles and weapons a lot of attention has been paid not only to graphics and animation, which has undergone a huge improvement, but the application and use of each weapons or each vehicle for all the possible play types. Making nearly every vehicles or weapon useful because on some occasions a rocket launcher or a tank may not be the best approach to the situation which is where possibly a sniper rifle or a lighter faster vehicle comes into play.
In conclusion Unreal Tournament 3 offers familiar game play with a higher quality of graphics, more vehicles, more weapons, more game play objectives and modes, and a new single player campaign. While there is a single player campaign players may tend to go pass the campaign right into multiplayer action once they get the hang of controls and the new game types since campaign is unfortunately very similar to multiplayer game play but UT3’s multiplayer capability is still very strong with lots of capabilities.
