Unreal Tournament Has Changed, but is it for the Better?

For frantic twitch based First Person Shooters few names stand out like Unreal Tournament, and the newest game in the franchise was recently for the PC. The main question is, if you are a fan of the series should you get the rig and pony up the cash for the game or just stick with the older games in the series?

Epic Games is one of the premier middleware developers in the world, their Unreal Engine has been the backbone of many of the best looking gamers of the past decade, and the current iteration, Unreal Engine 3, has been licensed by numerous developers for use in games on the PS2, 360, and PC. This is the engine Unreal Tournament 3 is based on, and it a very graphics heavy game. To get the optimal performance out of the game you will need a very beefy and expensive rig for the most part. It is you choice whether you are going to get a rig to max out the games visuals, but the recommended specs are out of reach for some people:

Recommended System Requirements
* Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista
* 2.4+ GHZ Single Core Processor
* 1 Gbytes of System RAM
* NVIDIA 7800GTX+ or ATI x1300+ Video Card
* 8 GB of Free Hard Drive Space

Unless you are a hardcore gamer there is a chance you do not have a rig capable of these requirements and will either have to play on low settings, deal with a choppy frame rate, or perhaps both in some cases.

"But what about the gameplay" I can hear you asking. Gameplay in UT3 has some great additions but also some glaring omissions. If you are a fan of Deathmatch or Capture the Flag you are completely set as UT3 has both of these modes in spade, including team modes and vehicle modes. If you are a fan of Onslaught you are pretty much set as Warfare is a 99.5% identical game mode. However, if you like Assault you are out of luck... there is no Assault mode in the game at all. I suppose they opted for a storyline in the single player mode but single player doesn't make up for the lack of a classic game mode. Also missing is Bombing Run and Domination, two modes that I enjoyed quite a bit when they first showed up in Unreal Tournament 2003.

Unreal Tournament is an oddity in the gaming world. The game is heavily marketed as a online FPS with a huge following when almost 60% of gamers who own the game never take it online, instead they opt for LAN games or bots. This might even be more true with UT3 as the online mode is very limited. Sadly this seems to be in line with the rest of the game on the PC. Many people have speculated that the PC was not the lead platform for development of the game and the PS3. This would explain why the game has a very console like menu system and why it does not allow for very in-depth tweaking of the graphics and game settings like previous games did.

The last refuge for many people once they have played through the game's built in maps is user created content, and the user community for the Unreal games is huge. It used to be that a talented user could make a fairly decent map in a few days time, perhaps just over a week, and this included unique terrain or textures. Tens of maps would flood the community a few short days later and really excellent maps might show up a month or so later. Sadly this does not seem to be the case with UT3. In a list of "essential maps" on PlanetUnreal.com a total of 4 maps are posted, and all of them are Death Match maps. Even amongst those 4 two look similar in style in screens and style despite being made by different people. Some will argue that many games utilizing the Unreal Engine 3 technology have all become looking the same, and this may also be coming out in the user content for games utilizing the engine.

The game itself is also riddled with bugs and issues. Many people are having problems with the online portion of the game. Since I don't play online as much as most I didn't have to deal with those issues, however I still had problems with the game. It took me going into a config file in a text editor and changing lines to get the game to stop freezing at random because of a certain effect on screen, despite my computer being above the recommended specs for the game. While I had no problem doing this an average computer user will have issues and could just see the game as being broken. This is also a problem with pushing the bleeding edge of technology on a platform where there are millions of different hardware configurations. This might also explain why the PS3 was the lead platform, but in the end that is not an excuse for the issues people are having on the PC, especially for a series that has it's main following on PC.

In the end however, the game is not so much an innovation of even a true evolution of the series. Instead it feels half baked and rushed, but shows potential for being a great addition to the series. It is fun, and I find myself playing Warfare for hours on end and loving it. However when my friends come over for LAN gaming we tend to play Unreal Tournament 2004, a game has fewer bugs, has much more user content available, doesn't require such hefty PC specs to run at a playable clip, and still manages to look good to people who aren't spoiled on graphics. I can only hope that Epic releases patches quickly for many of the hardware issues people are having and patches their user interface for more customizability.

Graphics and Audio - 24
The game looks amazing, there's no denying that. If you have a system that can handle the maximum setting the game is absolutely gorgeous and the environments are stunning to look at. If you can't handle the recommended specs you might be better playing Unreal Tournament 2004.

Gameplay - 19
The addition of a story driven single player mode sounds great, despite it just being cutscenes between matches in arenas with bots. You can get that from playing offline anyway against bots. The old standby modes of Deathmatch and Capture the Flag are fun, and Warfare is a fun slight evolution of Onslaught. The absence of Bombing Run, Assault, and Domination can be annoying and I hope the user community comes through with mods to rectify this. Other than the modes the game is just like it's predecessors in most ways, and even new things like the new vehicles do not add much to the gameplay.

Creativity - 17
With nothing really new in terms of game modes, and a single player mode that hasn't changed from it's predecessors aside from the addition of storyline cutscenes, the game it pretty much a half sequel. However, the maps designs, the characters, and the work put into the vehicles (even if they really don't offer anything) is amazing and the attention to detail is great as well.

Fun - 21
Despite it's short comings and technical problems and heavy requirements, the game is still very fun and worth a look if you can support it. If you can't meet the system specs yet I'd look into Unreal Tournament 2004 for your twitch FPS until you upgrade your PC.