Unreal Tournament 3

Title: Unreal Tournament 3
Platform Played On: Xbox 360
Release Date: July 7, 2008
Date Played: August 2008
Time Played: 8 hours
Completed (Y/N): Yes
Score: 2/5


Opinion:
I never got into alien gun/unrealistic physics Quake 3/UT type of competitive shooters and always leaned more towards realistic shooters(Counter Strike, Battlefield and Day of Defeat). However I had a blast playing UT2003 and UT2004 with a bunch of my friends in the dorms.

When I saw the preview coverage for Unreal Tournament 3 I was pretty excited. The graphics looked amazing, and since UT2004 Epic Games released Gears of War, a critically acclaimed 3rd person shooter. UT3 was promising to be amazing.

Oh boy, how disappointing it was when I fired it up for the first time. Granted I did not really follow any official statements prior to its launch, but the lack of a campaign with memorable characters and coherent story was pretty surprising. Epic showed us with Gears that it can have a great deep story, so it was all but expected (at least for me) that they would have something of the sort in UT3.  Nope, what we got was a set of multiplayer maps with bots loosely tied together with meaningless narrative.

It literally felt that Epic focused all of its efforts on Gears 2, and told 5 guys to put out UT3. It felt nothing more than a dozen levels thrown together by some artists with some dialogue thrown on top.

The new mechanics did not feel that great either. The hover-board was supposed to make the game even more fast paced with the ability to get from point A to point B at a faster rate, however I didnt find myself using it much because of the level layout, and when I did use it, it didnt seem like it added much.

The core gameplay remains the same from previous installments of Unreal Tournament, with same guns and general feel.  Therefore UT3 does not feel fresh and new, and in fact feels pretty stale. Sure it looks great, in fact it looks amazing, with a lot of detail in characters and environment. However a good cover does not make a good book.

Overall I did not have fun with Unreal Tournament 3 at all, I was expecting Epic Game to WOW us with the next step in the franchise that revolutionized competitive FPS, an not a rehashed, barely updated version of nearly a decade old game.