I’m not in any way an objective gamer when it comes to the Unreal Tournament franchise. I started playing it almost 10 years ago and have been deeply involved with it for a number of years.

I could write pages on the thousands of hours I’ve spent playing the games in the series and the level of involvement I’ve had in the community, but it’s a moot point. I will try to put Unreal Tournament 3 for XBOX 360 in perspective making no bones about the fact that I’m a fan of the series and not completely objective. I have no problem admitting that there have been some major mis-steps in this franchise over the years--some damned near unforgivable--but even then, every game in the series has had a real element of fun at it’s heart.

I’ve had immense disdain for First Person Shooters on consoles for years, though. There’s absolutely no comparison between playing with a Keyboard/Mouse and gamepad. Console junkies can argue until they’re blue in the face, but the facts are the facts. Shooters are less precise with a pad, and those that have invested many hours honing their skills with a keyboard and mouse are almost universally disgusted when picking up a console FPS for the first time.

All well enough, but with few or no exceptions there isn’t one game in this genre that works better on the console. The original Halo was a console revolution for shooters because it basically slowed and “dumbed” down the genre for console play. I make that observation with all due respect to the game and the franchise. Bungie did what they had to do to make a console based FPS work well with a gamepad and did so marvelously. For UT or Quake III players though going over into the Halo arena was kind of like putting on a pair of concrete army boots, wearing blinders and earplugs and losing partial control of essential motor skills, but once you got semi-used to the slowness of the game play, it had some serious entertainment value.

From Halo, which I still I still consider a little more of a strategy-based combat game with a sprinkle of “who ever sees who first wins” mixed in, XBOX’s first real attempt to bring high speed twitch shooters to the console was Unreal Championship one of the early XBOX live games. The game eventually got ported to PC as Unreal Tournament 2003. Don’t listen to the late-coming fanboys, this is the fact. Unreal Championship was planned as a launch title for XBOX Live, it wasn’t until later in development that is was decided to co-develop the PC version. In the last third or so of the development cycle Epic Games and Digital Extremes kind of split the duties: DE taking on the completion of Unreal Championship and Epic taking UT2, which ended up as UT2003. What was eventually released as UT2004 the following year is the game that UT2003 and Unreal Championship was intended to be…a twitch shooter sequel in the UT franchise with the addition of vehicle based game types. Slow development caused the vehicles to get dropped and put off for a year, so in the PC world, UT2004 was basically UT2003 with some tweaks, additional content and vehicles.

Unreal Championship was actually a pretty damned fun shooter on consoles. It was a completely different experience than Halo with no real single player story line other than a tournament-based ladder. It was really one of the first console games to do what they had been doing on PC in the past – have a game who’s dominant purpose was to get people online and gaming live against other gamers. It worked. It had a good community for a while and started a trend.

It was followed up by a mediocre-selling sequel, Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict. The unfortunate thing about UC2’s sales was that it is superior to the original Unreal Championship in almost every way. Unlike the other Unreal games it was a mix of First and Third Person Shooter with a heavy focus on melee combat as well all the great elements Unreal weapons play.

It was and still is an amazing console shooter and has the distinction of being the only truly unique game in the Unreal Tournament series to make no appearance on the PC platform at all. That was the true crime for Unreal series fans that had forsaken console play. In my eyes, UC2 was really the spritual forerunner of Gears of War. Both games head and shoulders above every other game that ever tried to balance weapons play and melee combat. For the record, UC2 is a bargain bin title game and is able to be played on 360. Might want to check it out. Last time I played a couple of months ago there were still some online games to be found.

Well, back to the merchandise at hand: UT3 on 360. Unlike Unreal Championship, UT3 is pretty much a straight up port of the PC version. The game looks incredible, but still not quite up to snuff with Gears of War as far as visuals. The amount of detail in the environments though is unparalleled in any similar 360 games I’ve played. It’s busy as hell visually and that makes it sometimes a little harder on the brain that GEARS.

One of the real surprises is how incredibly well such a highly detailed game runs in split screen, a mode of play that PS3 owners bitterly didn’t get. No one will fess up to why Epic Games couldn’t make split play work in the PS3 version (they had touted it up until shortly before release) but there must be some inherent difference in the hardware between the two consoles that is just keeping Sony’s machine from being able to deal with the latest Unreal engine at the level of detail required to double up the screen and still run smoothly. When Epic released the original Unreal Tournament back on Playstation 2 (ported from the PC version) they had to put together a set up low poly simple maps for split screen play because the console would chug in split screen with some of the higher detailed efforts.

The game-play itself damned fun…but so was the PC version. I rank UT3 easily as the best game in the series other than the original UT, though I waver and place UC2 right there with it. Make no mistake though, at the basic game-play level, if you didn’t like UT3 on PC, not much has changed. However, UT3 stands unique because it’s really the only console option out there on any platform that gives you the depth of game-play in addition to the speed. Epic really is trying to push the envelope of what you can do with a shooter on a console to attempt to duplicate the incredible experience of online shooters on the PC platform. While many PC players will moan about how the series is becoming more “console” in nature, whatever that means, I really see it as Epic trying to bring the PC experience as best they can to the console. I’m not sold at all on consoles yet as being a real alternative to FPS gaming on PC, but from a financial standpoint, that’s where the money is and I certainly can’t blame any developer for focusing their efforts there. I continually chuckle when I see the community moan about the move to consoles as if ANY game developer or publisher was in this for the charity of the fans at the expense of profit. Personally, I would have to applaud Epic for continuing to support the PC side as much as they have.

And so there I digress again. For PC players looking at the 360 version, there’s 4 customs maps that are exclusive, including an inferior remake of the original UT’s Koos Galleon level…but don’t sweat it, it’s nothing special. And also, unlike the PS3 version, Microsoft will not allow Epic to open up the platform enough to allow user created content on the 360. This is a damning deficiency. With the PS3, there is a veritable unlimited number of downloadable maps that can be had. And these aren’t some 8 year old boy’s vision of a Halo3 Forge Map, there is professional quality content floating out there for people that want it. PS3 gets the content and 360 gets split screen. PS3 wins that round, though the lack of split is still a huge problem for them.

They’ve made some very smart improvements for UT players to adapt to console play with how weapons are selected. Weapons selection has always been a problem on consoles because unlike a keyboard player, you can’t bind everything to a separate button at a finger’s reach. UT3 gives you a weapons selection wheel to use or you can cycle the weapons. They’ve also given automatic binding to the melee weapon and the translocator. The translocator, for non-UT players, is an essential teleportation tool in CTF that you constantly will have to switch to and away from. In Unreal Championship having to scroll through weapons selection to use it made CTF very laborious. It really kills me sometimes that console shooters seemed to make the “carry only 2 or three weapons at a time” decision just because of the logistics of managing so many with a gamepad rather than as having a real game-play or style-based reason.

Overall, this is really one of the first substantial steps in duplicating anything approximating a good weapons play based shooter for the 360. Unlike Halo 2 and Halo 3 who’s heart isn’t in weapons play, but more in the strategy in running a map, the UT series is about hard fundamental skills and choosing the right weapon in the right situation. It’s still not there with the game pad, but I do “feel” like I’m playing the PC version except my hand hurts a lot more and I can’t hit shit…well, I can only hit shit a little in the PC version, I guess.

As for the vehicle based mods, the vehicles all handle a little wonky for me, but you have a couple of different control styles to choose from to find one you’re comfortable with. From an asthetic perspective though, there are few things as incredibly cool looking as watching the gigantic, tentacled Necris Darkwalker walk across a battlefield while frying foot soldiers. For my few bucks, it’s an iconic image in vehicle based PC gaming...and the damned thing is fun to pilot, too.

Next on the agenda, the community right now is there on the 360...I would say at least as healthy as the PC version at the moment. Players seem to be digging this game, and I’m happy to see that. Every time I get online there are populated servers of all game types, and I’ve been on all times of the day or night. It seems to still be in the early growing stages as well. Of course, the console generation is not a loyal bunch outside of a few exceptions, so it’s hard to tell how quickly the next big game will take players away.

The interface and menu system for the game carries over from the PC, though simplified a bit. On the PC, this menu system is clunky and wholly inadequate. The PC gamers have every right to hate it, but it’s just right for a console and game pad interface, so a huge detriment for the PC version is a very usable and user-friendly plus for the console version.
Also carrying over identically from the PC version is the absolutely horrific single player story-line. The cut-scenes look fantastic, but the story is utter and complete shit. It’s a very weak attempt at making a tournament/match based game into some sort of story and it doesn’t work really at any level. In previous UT games, Epic Games generally made no half-assed attempt at asserting anything other than this is a series of progressing matches, but in UT3 the results of trying to make some water-downed revenge and romance story line is such an utter failure it’s almost embarrassing.

Ultimately, the matches throughout it are fun, but these utterly ridiculous expositions for why in the middle of a “war” that a simple match style game of CTF is supposed to make sense kind of insults the intelligence (Field Lattice Generators -- the mod is now CTF: Capture the FLaG?) In UT2004 on PC, they started to get the right idea by building a tournament ladder that played like a sports game. You could buy and trade players and get challenged by other teams and individuals while building the skills of your computer based team mates. It was a start, and much better than UT3.

Now back to Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict. This was EXACTLY where the single player experience in an Unreal Tournament game needed to be. It was based completely around the Tournament itself. You were a tournament player and the story built towards a final series of matches to the end game. The cut-scenes centered around your entrance and motivations for being in the tournament building to a showdown with a former ex-girlfriend (sounds silly, but really worked). Peppered in UC2 along with the matches were some deathmatch styled non-tourney levels that all worked well within the story. For instance, in one stretch of the game, you are having to report for a match, but are being detained by a group of androids that are blocking you from getting to the arena and you have to fight your way through a building to get the arena on time. Another level was an ambush in the desert. It fit, it made sense. It’s no GTA style story line to be sure, but it was perfect for the type of game. I felt that they made a try with UT3 to create some cohesive story, but failed miserably where they succeeded so well with UC2.

In other words, don’t buy UT3 because you’ve heard they’ve finally introduced a single player story into it. Unless you like paying $60.00 for handful of pretty nice cut-scenes, there’s no reason to justify it as a single player game. The really painful part is that the opening cut scene is a huge attack on your colony where these ugly bastards come in and start shooting up the place. It’s a gorgeous and fun scene, but I wanted to PLAY in that cut scene. Let me grab a shock rifle and start using my 10 years of Unreal Tournament weapons experience to fight in an honest-to-God ground war. Hopefully, Epic will continue to work on a decent single player experience if they continue the franchise. I wouldn’t count on much there though until GOW2 hits.

To summarize UT3 as a 360 title, I think it has a lot to offer the genre on the console platform. It’s a rich, manic, fast-paced, fun shooter. While shooters are gaining popularity on the console platform there’s not much, if anything out there like this right now on the 360. I’ve already found myself putting more hours into than I thought I would. I would say it’s an easy no brainer if you’re into the shooter market. I don’t think you’ll regret dropping 60 bones on this if that’s your thing.

Tags: Reviews