Planet Unreal

Home | Articles

Unreal Tournament 3 Review, Page Two

Vehicular Manslaughter

This trend continues with the game’s vehicles. The standard set of Axon vehicles from UT2004 return and feel considerably beefed up by comparison. While the Anti-Vehicle Rocket Launcher (AVRiL Longbow) is back and adept as ever at chewing up vehicles, the days of poking Raptors and Mantas to death with the Shock Rifle are long gone. Taking down a vehicle when you’re on foot requires skill, as you’d expect it to.

A number of subtle tweaks to all the Axon vehicles have resulted in them feeling tougher, better and generally more fun to use than their UT2004 counterparts. The re-fire rate on the Raptor’s missiles has been upped to a brutal level. The Scorpion now fires what can only be described as magnetic balls of death which track to enemy vehicles. The Hellbender – UT’s great big lumbering death bus – is now a two-person vehicle with a skymine cannon for the driver. All these little changes result in a far superior vehicular experience.

While the Axon vehicle set consists of the fairly standard jeeps, tanks and fliers that you’d expect to find in a shooter, the Necris vehicles are something else. Sure, there’s a tank and a hovercraft and a flier just like Axon has, but all the Necris vehicles move and fight in very different ways.

The Necris Darkwalker, a giant tripod with two devastating beams is a powerful super-vehicle without being overpowered. Like the Axon Leviathan, you can outmanoeuvre it easily enough in faster vehicles, but get in the way of the main beams and you’re toast. The Darkwalker also comes equipped with a “scream” attack to knock down anyone at close range, as what I’ve dubbed the “crotch cannon”, a smaller, less powerful turret that’s faster to turn than the main one.

By far the craziest vehicle in the game is the Scavenger. This is effectively a giant Necris hamster ball which can be walked around on its spidery legs or launched into ball mode for extra speed at the cost of manoeuvrability. For taking out larger, slower targets you can use the Scavenger’s attached laser pointer to guide a deadly energy pulse towards your target.

Even with such a variety of vehicles UT3 never feels unbalanced. There’s always something you can do to counter a vehicular attack. Manta in your base? Hop in the Scorpion and let rip. Darkwalker cramping your style? Find a faster vehicle like the Fury, Viper or Manta and run rings around it. It’s this kind of variety coupled with balance that sets UT above most other team shooters. One of my biggest complaints about Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for example was that in certain maps the odds are stacked in favour of either the human or alien team. This is never the case in UT3.

An interesting, if somewhat overlooked feature of UT3 is its selection of deployable equipment. The Nightshade – the Necris stealth vehicle – can deploy a number of traps and shields across the battlefield to help your team out. The most fun deployable by far is the slow field generator. This spawns a giant green cube inside which time moves really slowly – affecting players, vehicles and even weapons fire. Plant one by a chokepoint for hilarious results.

Some deployables are also available as pickups in other gametypes like Capture the Flag. One neat trick is to steal the enemy’s flag and replace it with a slow volume, trapping any defenders who might try to follow you.

Smoke and Mirrors

Historically Epic has always done graphics really well, and UT3 is no exception. All the game’s maps are either set on Taryd – a human colony world – or Omicron Six – the Necris homeworld. This allows each of them to stand out in their own right while at the same time being part of either a human or Necris environment. As with Gears of War, Epic has succeeded in creating a coherent overall visual style while giving each level its own unique touch. This is something which many felt was missing from UT2004, with its bright colours and wildly different visual themes. While that game was visually impressive for its time, it lacked a binding overall style. It’s hard to put your finger on, but maps in UT3 just “fit”. Whether you’re battling it out in the Taryd Market District or Orb-running underground on the Necris homeworld, you know you’re in the Unreal universe.

If you’ve checked out our visual tour article then you’ve already seen UT3 at its best. The game looks very pretty, there’s no doubt about that. Every one of the Necris-themed levels is stunning – the alien/gothic look has been pulled off really well. There’s plenty of variety among the more earthly levels, with a mixture of high-tech, industrial and Asian architecture in places.

Maps like “Sanctuary” (based around a Necris church) will impress you with their scale and polish, while the smaller industrial arenas like “Arsenal” and “Defiance” still boast an impressive level of detail. “Deimos” (the spiritual successor to UT’s Hyperblast) deserves a mention too, simply because it looks so good and contains such a wealth of crazy gravity-based mechanics. VCTF map “Necropolis” also provides a great showcase for Necris architecture, while on the Warfare side of things “Avalanche” and “Onyx Coast” prove that icy levels don’t have to be a boring visual washout.

I could go on. Although UT3 has fewer maps than UT2004, each one of them is of extremely high quality.

With all its eye candy, surely UT3 needs a pretty beefy machine to run? Well, yes and no. If you want to run at highest details and 1920x1200 resolution then you’ll want a dual core CPU and an NVIDIA 8800 of some description. Previous-generation tech like the 7800 GTX also copes well with medium detail at a decent resolution. If you feel like splashing out on a quad core CPU then UT3 will make full use of that too, using the extra power to accelerate things like physics processing.

Fortunately UT3 also scales really well to mid-range and low-end hardware. The official minimum system requirements talk about an Athlon XP with 512MB of RAM and a Radeon 9600. Make no mistake, this is the absolute minimum needed to even get the game to start. If you have this sort of system, don’t expect to play the game on anything other than low details at 640x480 with 50% scaling.

Nevertheless I was impressed with the way UT3 scaled to some more realistic low-end specs. I put together a test rig with an old Athlon XP 2600+, 1GB of RAM and a Radeon 9800 graphics card and the game ran at a pretty playable 30 frames per second at 800x600 with a bit of scaling. In this case the CPU was the bottleneck, so adding more bots and vehicles quickly sent the framerate into the 20s.

I also gave UT3 a go on my laptop, a Sony Vaio FE41M. With an GeForce Go 7400 graphics chip it’s not a gaming notebook by any stretch, but it does sport a dual-core processor (Intel T5500) and 2GB of RAM. With performance limited by the slower graphics card I set the resolution to 1024x640 and turned scaling down to 50%. At these settings DM and CTF both run at playable 30-40fps, with Warfare sometimes dropping down to 25 in big battles. It’s not pretty, but the resolution is high enough so that you can see what’s going on, and the framerate is playable.

It’s impressive to see UT3 running on systems like this at all, especially when the likes of BioShock would just laugh at them. PC gaming has been losing out to consoles lately, paradoxically at a time when PC ownership is higher than ever. The answer to this is for PC gaming to be more accessible to PC owners and that means being more tolerant of low end tech. Developers should take note of what Epic has achieved with UT3 and provide good scaling for low-end machines so that games are at least playable, if not pretty on less powerful hardware.

Rockets Go Boom

Sound is an area where the style of the Unreal Tournament series shines through. The booming UT announcer voice returns emphatically, backing up the action with “multi-kill!”, “Rampage!” and all the others we’ve come to know and love. There are also some new rewards like “BULLSEYE!” when you take out an enemy vehicle with the Scorpion or Viper in kamikaze mode.

One nice addition to UT3 is the way announcements buffer and then play back. If you get a bunch of announcements in one go, they’ll play one at a time rather than interrupting each other. If you’ve just scored a MONSTER-KILL and then someone steals your flag, the game will play the monster kill announcement and then tell you that your flag’s been taken. This sounds like a minor change, but it was always annoying in UT2004 to not hear the announcement for some cool thing you’d just done because someone somewhere just destroyed a power node. Announcement queuing really helps in Warfare mode where there are constant status announcements to reflect the rapidly-changing state of the battle.

The game’s weapons sound beefy and powerful, which helps to back up the idea of brutal, battle-worm devices that’s conveyed so well by their visuals and animation. The same can be said about vehicles – absolutely nothing to complain about here, each one of them has decent sounds which add to the overall atmosphere of the game.

Each map has dynamic music which changes throughout match depending on what’s going on. If you’re walking around your base collecting pickups then the tempo’s going to be a lot more relaxed than if you’re fending off a Darkwalker attack. This change links music more intimately to the action, and enhances the atmosphere of the game much more than the looping tracks of old. Each level also has a unique audio cue which plays when you kill someone, which is pretty neat.

Finally, it wouldn’t be UT without the customary selection of cheesy taunts for each race. Taunts are back with a vengeance in UT3. Some will make you laugh. Some will make you cringe (Bishop’s “And he taketh away!” for instance). They do get a bit repetitive after a while – I would suggest to Akasha that if she loves her Nanoblack so much then she might want to go and marry it. And I still think that the Iron Guard male voice sounds entirely too much like Duffman from The Simpsons. But cheesy as they are these taunts make up the background chatter of UT, augment the game’s style and are probably a positive addition.

Next Page: Single player campaign, AI, UI and conclusion!

Posted by AuTo@PLaY at 2011-05-13 07:53:46

DOESN'T ANYONE REPORT POSTING ABUSE OF STUPID SHOPPING AD POSTS TO ADMINS AROUND HERE! i SEE THEM ALL OVER THE FORUMS! AND THEY ARE NOTHING BUT GARBAGE ANYWAY! FOR PRODUCTS THAT DON'T SELL!