It's clear Epic had two objectives with Unreal Tournament III on 360. Firstly, they wanted to make more cash than a mint does in a month, and secondly, they were out to streamline the UT formula into the premiere online twitch shooter for both seasoned vets and punters alike. In particular, the words "online" and "twitch" deserve special emphasis. "Online" because if you're not online with a full-blown gold account, you'd be better off spending your pre-tax earnings on vintage Saudi porn or cartons of last week's milk than on this. "Twitch", because this plays absolutely nothing like the horde of other online shooters that encourages you to think and strategize, and instead is all about how many bodies you can puncture, slice, melt and explode in the briefest time possible. This isn't war. It's a snuff massacre with alien hardware. Make sure you're down with that.
Before we blow bellows of smoke up this release's muffler, we should address Unreal Tournament III's "campaign" mode. Chucked into this release with the delicacy of a chainsaw cutting a wedding cake, it's nothing more than a pre-determined set of melees against bots, book-ended with some piss-poor narrative sequences. It's certainly not a fleshed out single-player adventure. While we applaud the leading-edge bot support and the ability to play the mode with a friend online, calling it a "campaign" mode in light of recent releases, like Battlefield: Bad Company, makes UTIII seem a tad cheeky.
But we can't stay mad at something this gorgeous for long. In fact, when you first lay eyes on this beast it's hard to take it all in. Moving at the fastest speed a FPS can run at before players collapse into a frothing epileptic statistic, it juggles stunning texture work, masterful models, and eclectic art direction. This isn't bog standard sci-fi postcard material. Stepping into some of the game's many maps is like a frenzied crawl through an alien's Dali-esque fantasy. One of our favourite maps, Portal, is actually three completely distinct areas joined together by warp portals. The first area is a lush green basin, the second, a dead snow base, the third some kind of intergalactic floating space platform surrounded by speckled galaxies. We've seen scores of developers use the Unreal Engine before, but as witnessed with Gears of War, Epic know how to bring their bouncing golden child home the hardest – and all in 1080p without a frame rate hitch in sight.
That's all good and well, but the fancy pictures would've counted for naught had Epic botched shrinking the game's controls onto the 360 pad. They haven't of course, with the game controlling as smoothly as expected. That said, playing a game like Unreal Tournament with anything but a mouse and keyboard is always going to require a few sacrifices. It is a PC title from birth after all. The prime example is the shock rifle's special attack that requires you to fire off a sphere of blue gobby energy then shoot it – mid-air – with the gun's alternate fire. On PC it's possible to pull this trick off with reckless abandon, but unless you've got the skills of a German Kung Fu Surgeon you'll be struggling to reach the same pinnacles of accuracy with a control pad. Not a huge issue, but something to be mindful of.
Something that requires no further defence are the superb loading screens, which are as all loading screens should be: brief.
So far, so good, but it all boils down to content. UTIII pimps six game modes in its gory buffet for players to hop into and start butchering each other. There's Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Vehicle Capture the Flag (VCTF), Duel and Warfare modes. Fans of the series will notice this is four modes fewer than in UT 2004, with less popular modes like Double Domination and Bombing Run given the arse. That's actually a good thing, because all those useless modes did was make it a damn sight harder to find a server hosting one of the decent game styles. In fact, while modes like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Duel, and normal Capture the Flag are all good and well, their inclusion feels a bit token. After all, we've been trudging our way through these modes for how many years now? For us, the game's other two modes are really where it's at – VCTF and Warfare.
VCTF is fairly self explanatory. Unlike the standard CTF maps, these arenas are a lot larger and feature a full garage of body mincing machines to drive. Warfare, on the other hand, sees two teams square off in a bid to capture and hold a set of nodes positioned around the map. It's sort of like a mobile game of King of the Hill, and we're tipping it to be the most popular kid on UT's block.
Having said that, our experiences hacking through numerous Warfare battles varied greatly. Often it provided a top bit of fun as we went about splitting our time between defending vulnerable modes and attacking the next node on the map, but other times it felt like a right war of attrition – a real slog.
The thing about Unreal Tournament is that the weaponry is so insanely powerful, that often you'll find yourself arriving at a choke point and being instantly obliterated by some unknown WMD that. Cue respawning at some backward base and having to charge back to the combat zone, again and again. There's no settling down into a decent ambush position, and there's no real cover. Combine that with being part of a paltry team that doesn't know whether to scratch its arse or wind its balls, and you've got a painfully slow death on your hands. Potentially, anyway.
Alleviating these problems somewhat is UTIII's range of swank new features and vehicles. Notably the new orb system goes some distance to reduce the pain of playing on a team that licks bag. Spawning at one of your capture nodes, the orb can be picked up by a player and taken straight to the next vulnerable node for a gamebreaking instant capture. They don't upset the balance of the game at all because, as with flags, you can't just grab the orb, hop into a high-speed vehicle and roar into a base. Nope, orb carriers are banned from all vehicle use and their position is marked on the map for all to see. Suffice to say, it's all balanced and peaches and cream.
And then we come to the vehicles. Ferrari can go choke on a Big Mac; these babies are our preferred method of transport/murder. The Axon, or human, wheels consist of jeeps equipped with suicidal charges, nimble hovercrafts, bolshie tanks, mobile artillery, and our favourite, the Leviathan – the most powerful vehicle in the game. Not only can this war whore carry a slew of your team mates into battle, it can also deploy into a beastly orbital-grade ion canon capable of pulverizing all with the subtlety of a nuclear blast.
Think that's cool? Double your definition of coolness and you'll end up with the new Necris vehicles. If H.R. Giger were a military vehicle designer, this is the sort of hardware he'd be pumping out. Towering tripods called Darkwalkers melt anything in sight, tentacle flying machines obliterate from the air, crazy Scavenger vehicles roll into balls and over enemies for an instant kill, and more. Additionally in every game mode that supports vehicles players can also access hoverboards to speed around the map and get to the action faster. While you can't fire your weapons while zooming about, you can tow behind other faster vehicles to ensure you arrive at a hot zone at the same time as your comrades. Controlling the hoverboards with the control pad works a damn sight better than using a keyboard and mouse, and is the fastest way to move flags and orbs around the map.
There are also some new features exclusive to the 360 release. There are a two new player models to choose from (whoopee), 5 new maps, and – the big one – split-screen play for up to two players. A couple of the new maps are notably exceptional. Rails is a VCTF map that gives both teams access to a turret that can traverse the length of the battlefield right up to the enemies base, and Coldharbor is a Warfare map that plays a little differently to the rest of its ilk. Instead of trying to occupy connecting nodes, it sees each team trying to occupy the map's main node which in turn starts a countdown to a nuclear strike on the enemy's base.
It's a nice twist on the standard Warfare mode and here's hoping it inspires future maps to fondle the rules a bit more.
But the deal sealer for many multi-platform owners will be the exclusive split-screen mode which you can take online. In fact, with the exception of Ranked Matches, you can use the split-screen option for any of the game's modes or games, online or off. Like in Halo 3, the person playing alongside you will be signed into the server as your guest and the killing can go on unabated. From what we played there was no noticeable drop in frame-rate or quality with two people dancing around an online arena throwing their weight about. It's without a doubt the best new feature on the 360 version.
However, we do miss the complete lack of support for user-created mods that exists on the PS3. So far on Sony's box we've seen some savvy designers inject Master Chief models into the Unreal world, mutators that allow you to play the game from third-person – and there'll be more to come. 360 owners will get none of this. While Unreal Tournament III is a sterling game in its own right, if history is anything to go by, its potential was even better as a platform for up and coming game designers to show the world what they've got. We guess you can't win them all.