Plusses & Minuses Debuts: Unreal Tournament III

Massouken on July 14th, 2008

No, please don’t ever attempt to group us in with the journalistic scholars idiots over at the legitimate gaming review sites, but that doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to chime in on a game’s positives and negatives every Monday, right? Right! Welcome to Plusses & Minuses, your weekly assault on whatever game we feel needs it badly.

I’m not an Unreal Tournament gamer. I’ve played one title in the past, and wasn’t too impressed. While I see the attraction of a fast-paced, hyperactive, gory shooter chock full of guns that shoot pure lightning up your opponents’ asses and instantaneously turn them into smoldering skeletons, UT3 is basically the same run-and-gun, hope-you-shoot-someone-before-they-shoot-you game play we’ve been enduring since Quake. Sure, the space marines are less likely to pass a steroids test and the explosions are…er, explosionier, but if you’ve been playing PC-based first person shooters since the 90s, you won’t be surprised with what UT3 has to offer.

Then again, the promise of familiarity, with some neat tweaks (vehicle-based combat with 100ft tall alien death-mobiles, kick flipping with hover boards, using a gun to enhance your teammate’s n00b-pwning skills while you stick out like a hulking bulls-eye) thrown into the mix may be exactly what gamers want. Though UT3 doesn’t do much to improve the formula, it’s a competent, frantic shooter that will satisfy your lust for blood, guts, and mindless dialogue.

Plusses:

+ Multi-player is easy to jump into: Getting down with an online match and shooting rockets into the faces of burly, slobbering aliens is quick and painless.

+ Impressive Unreal Engine 3 graphics, though you’ll probably spend more time staring at your lifeless corpse painting the floors crimson than appreciating nerd-candy like bump mapping and HDR lighting.

+ Bonus content featuring new Gears of War 2 footage.

Minuses:

- Bonus content featuring new Gears of War 2 footage. I’d rather be playing Gears 2, so the video feels like a blow job compared to UT3’s over-the-clothes-petting.

- Respawning. Here we are with HD graphics and motion sensing controllers, and yet no developer seems to have a handle on a good respawn system. Expect to materialize in front of rocket-launching enemies and get gibbed before you can even move three steps…a lot.

- The campaign mode is piecemeal, forcing you to face off against bots in various match types while your AI partners do nothing but grunt and get killed…kind of like the elderly.