Alas! The long awaited Xbox 360 port of Unreal Tournament 3 has finally arrived. Yes it is long overdue but one may ask. "Is it worth my hard-earned 60$??" In this review I will try to answer those questions and more to the best of my ability. Unreal Tournament 3 is just the latest in the Unreal series games developed by the guys over at Epic Studios. You of course know them as the guys who brought us Gears of War and soon to be Gears of War 2. Unreal Tournament 3 is a first-person, fast action paced game set sometime in the not-so-distant future.
You play as Reaper, one of the soul survivors of an attack on his hometown (I don't remember the name) led by Akasha, leader of The Black Legion. And you have to hunt her down and kill her. Oddly enough, Reaper looks quite similar to Dom from Gears of War; scratch that, he looks exactly like Dom from Gears of War. Anyway the campaign is similar to the other ones. You play a series of matches facing a number of AI controlled enemies. You can play a variety of different game types. You have deathmatch (every man for him or herself), team deathmatch (work together to kill the other team), Duel (1 versus 1), Capture the Flag, Vehicle Capture the flag, and the worst one of all in my opinion, Warfare (capture a series of nodes to reach the enemy base and destroy it).
You have an amazing amount of unique and unusual weapons in your arsenal. Anything from the flak cannon to the translocator. The maps are nothing short of beautiful. They all look remarkable. The only downer is that maps are game-type specific. So you cant just play any game-type on any map - which sucks because most of the warfare maps are great but warfare isn't. But anyway it's pretty simple, you win the match, advance to another one and they get progressively harder. As far as the story goes, well, its pretty lame and totally clichéd.
I'll do my best to try not to give the whole thing away but if you've seen any action movie/game you can probably guess it. Reaper is trying to seek revenge on Akasha for slaughtering his village and a number of obvious plot twists occur. So the story is really bad and only really worth playing for the achievements. Now the multiplayer...
Its basically the campaign but with real people. BUT. If you don't have Xbox Live, you can just play normal games with bots. That's pretty cool eh? Well, to an extent. The bots on the first three difficulties are extremely easy and really no fun to play against after a while. Anything beyond that...well lets just say you better bring a spare change of underwear because the bots will destroy you so quick you will piss yourself. The bots are extremely over powered and are always 4 steps ahead of you and will dominate you every time. I mean obviously if you're good enough you can win eventually but the difference between the difficulties is so vast you cant really ever have a challenge without it murdering you're hopes and dreams, leaving you shaking violently on the ground waiting to be committed.
Besides all that the game is really fun. Its fast like an FPS should be and its always satisfying hearing the announcer yell "HEADSHOT" or seeing a giant blast from a redeemer inevitably wipe the battlefield clean of all enemies and then some. I'd say its worthy of a rental or a borrow. Test before buying. Cant stress that enough. I shall give it a 7 out of 10.
Published by: Midway
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