Unreal Tournament III (PC)
Third Tournament's the charm?
1/30/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2
What's Hot: On powerful hardware the game looks great; Hoverboards are a cool addition to a genre arguably running low on ideas.
What's Not: Feels a little half-baked; Doesn't scale well to older hardware; The single-player campaign is a melodramatic and not very funny joke.
This is the first Unreal Tournament game to offer a single-player campaign, and really, Epic shouldn't have. Imagine a string of missions only connected by histrionic and melodramatic cut scenes where everything is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT but you never care to find out why. "Macho pissing contests" is how my wife characterized most of your allies' conversations.
The game features big blocky character models, and generic futuristic military motifs, which are reminiscent of the Unreal-powered
Gears of War, recently ported to the PC. Unreal Tournament is a PC franchise, or was one, but like
Gears of War, it has a console port interface. It's clumsy and inconvenient, and you need to be connected to the Internet to play the single-player game.
The bottom line is that
Unreal Tournament III hits stores in an unfinished -- or at least "not ideal" -- condition. For now, it's middling online entertainment, but if the Unreal community embraces it, expect most of these flaws to be addressed in patches from the developer and mods from the fans. The game ships with a powerful toolset, and the PC is still the best home for player-made mods and other new content.
This review was based on a retail copy of the game purchased by the writer.
