The Open Source Journal

I was eagerly awaiting the newest in the series of Unreal Tournament games. I’ve followed them since the beginning, and it seems we have come nearly full-circle again with the newest incarnation, Unreal Tournament 3. The demo contains 4 game modes: deathmatch, team deathmatch, vehicle CTF and duel. While I dabbled in team deathmatch and duel, most of my time was spent on regular deathmatch and CTF.

The first thing that I noticed was the much darker atmosphere, unlike the previous games which had always used vibrant and bright colors. Now I understand that nearly every game nowadays wants to be gritty and evil and dark and eat babies for breakfast, but I always considered the other UT’s to have a special charm exactly because it didn’t conform to that typical formula.

But enough on the dark visuals, UT has always been known for frantic action and balanced game play. It seems that they’ve increased the former and decreased the latter, turning it more into something akin to Quake. I’ve always loathed Quake, and having to make such a comparison chills me to the bones. But what really solidifies that comparison is their removal of double-dodging! How could they possibly remove one of the most useful additions to the UT game play? It is one of the many reasons I refuse to play most other death match/ FPS games; without double-dodging it feels like my character is moving like a snail on ice after smoking a bag of reefer. It simply won’t do.

And at the tip of this Titanic iceberg of doom is the destruction of their balanced weapons system. The shock combo and the flak grenade have been severely weakened, while nearly everything else has been upped, in effect making every weapon a good match against every other weapon. I like to believe that in UT, and in UT2004 especially, the weapons would counter-balance each other quite well (physical projectile-based weapons versus plasma-based weapons). That element of the game has been trimmed down a lot and the game is more akin to a frag-fest than a well-thought out death match FPS. Sure there are some positive new gimmicks, such as the map changing during the game, but if I want something based on gimmicks then I’ll just turn on a Wii. I turn to Unreal Tournament for a solid, well-balanced and frantic death match/ FPS experience.

In general, the game strikes me to be less of an Unreal Tournament game, and more of a Gears of War meshed with Quake elements. I supposed that’s good since both of those have had tremendous success over the years, but as a long-time UT fan I feel betrayed. They removed the Unreal Tournament ambience and replaced it with that of another title that made them millions. Guess they figured it worked once, might as well try again.