At a glance...

Previewer	Platform	Publisher	Developer	Players	Release Date	Screenshots
Matt Bailey & Dave Wickham	PC	Midway	Epic Games	1-32 (LAN, Online)	23rd November 2007	Here

Unreal Tournament 3 preview

Unreal Tournament 3 may be launching tomorrow, but we thought we'd give you a heads-up on the game following our play time at the game's recent European launch at Omega Sektor in Birmingham, ahead of the eventual review. Both Dave and myself got to spend quite a bit of time with a finished version of the game, and will be giving our thoughts below. Despite playing a completed edition we're not looking to tell you what works and what doesn't with the game - that will be saved for our upcoming review, which will be done after more extensive play-testing. So, instead, we'll give our initial thoughts, some notable things that have changed, and what the new campaign mode seems to be about.

Matt's View
I have to admit I was a bit sceptical about Unreal Tournament 3 following my first play-thorugh of the game's beta demo. Not that there was anything particularly wrong about it (well, apart from the iffy menu and broken "@" key for UK keyboards), but as a veteran – and in fact a fan – of the long-running FPS series, things just didn't quite feel right. I couldn't put my finger on it - maybe the pace wasn't quite there, the shooting didn't feel "Unreal" enough, or quite possibly my PC just wasn't up to the job - but whatever it was, my doubts were very quickly put aside when I got to play the complete game at the launch event.

From my first deathmatch I felt I was truly playing the successor to the excellent Unreal Tournament 2004, and essentially it's a more refined version of that multiplayer-orientated FPS, now running on the visually impressive Unreal Engine 3. The weapons have been tweaked and spruced up, with a curious arc for the flak cannon's alt-fire that may not please some fans of this firearm. The deathmatch experience was highly enjoyable with a large range of maps available. In fact, there was a large range of maps across the modes - DM, TDM, CTF, Vehicle CTF and the new Warfare mode. This is noticeably less modes than the previous game, but Epic have said that they wished to focus on getting right a set of modes people actually wanted to play. So out went Double Domination and Bombing Run completely, with Onslaught and Assault replaced by the new Warfare Mode.

Warfare is a mode that deserves some attention. It's likely to be one of the most popular modes, considering what it's replacing, though it could gain criticism in some quarters. This is because it's really an upgraded and expanded version of Onslaught, with the possibility of objectives at nodes, rather than any classic goal-driven Assault action. The lack of Assault was a key criticism in UT2003, necessitating the new version just over a year later which featured this popular mode from the original game, but there's still hope here. While none of the Warfare maps we played were much more than Onslaught played over a larger scale (with a few tweaks such as the orbs which allow you to instantly capture a node), the modding community may be able to deliver us more, with the core features allowing for the possibility of classic Assault - and indeed Onslaught - levels to be created in the future. The tools will ship in the box, don't forget.

It remains for me to say that while I'm not giving a final opinion here, I can definitely say that even after playing for just one day that this is a must-have for fans of multiplayer FPS action. Whether it's a game for all PC gamers, or even just FPS fans in general will have to be decided in our upcoming review.

Dave's View
Having not actually played the demo before (*hears gasps from the audience*), this event gave me my first hands-on go at playing UT3 without having to deal with any expectations. Much like Matt, though, from the second I started playing, I knew that I was playing a title worthy of the Unreal Tournament badge. I felt right at home with the gameplay style after three and a half years of UT2004, even with the new Warfare mode which Matt covered earlier.

Matt's already mentioned about the absence of Assault mode, with it instead being merged with Onslaught into Warfare, and so with this comes one important question on everyone's minds: how will the map making community manage to create annoying race maps and trials maps? It just won't be the same without accidentally joining a trials server, complaining to the person who chose it, disconnecting, finding a new server, connecting, finding it's a race map, ad infinitum. Thankfully Epic seems to have realized this flaw, and have included not one, not two, but three different versions of Torlan, giving extreme edition map makers more than enough room to compensate.

But anyway, going back to the more serious side of things, one feature which UT3 does have over its predecessor is a campaign mode... well, sort of. In reality, judging from what Matt and I played, it's a series of standard matches against bots, with a very loose storyline made to somehow fit around objectives like capturing the flag. Presumably Epic even made this harder on themselves by removing assault mode, since that was the one game type which can have a good (well, comparatively good) story attached. But still, it does provide a nice introduction to new players, even if it isn't all that much more than what's existed previously, and we'll have to wait until we get the game ourselves to see what later stages are like.

Whilst this is a preview of the PC version of UT3, and it was certainly the dominant platform at the event, there were 6 PS3s set up in a room with large screen HDTVs running a development build of UT3. Later on in the day, Matt and I grabbed the opportunity to try it out for ourselves. Obviously it was pre-release code, and there were certainly noticeable bugs, but looking past that the game ran fairly well, though as with most FPSs having to use the analogue sticks slowed down gameplay somewhat, with less ability for twitch reactions.

Looking back on what I've written, it looks like I'm attacking UT3 - I'm not, I just don't want to echo what Matt's already said. It's certainly an impressive title, and I can't wait to see how the modding/mapping community receives it after its release.

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