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Preview

Unreal Tournament III

Format PC

Developer Epic Games

Publisher Midway

Genre First Person Shooter

28-Mar-2007 Will Porter visits the home of Unreal and generally makes a nuisance of himself

6 Comments

Somewhat belying the fact that I'm an evil badass from space intent on puncturing a planet with giant alien vertebrae and dripping blackened tentacles, I'm currently more occupied with giggling like a schoolgirl.

Skimming over charred hill and craggy dale in my personal Viper hover-bike with a joy previously reserved for nuns singing atop the Alps, I tumble over the crest of a hill beneath the sunny skies of the IzanagiCorporation's base of operations.

I see a tank in front of me, and instinctively raise the Viper's suicide hackles - slowing down and bringing up its sides so that my craft looks like a mixture of Batman in flight, a Cobra about to strike and an angry short man leaning back and arching his shoulders so that he can spit into the face of a provincial bouncer. I release the payload and the body of my craft jets into the innocent wall next to the tank while I'm flung backwards and neatly scythed in half by the blades of a passing Scorpion buggy. The tank, it seems, was empty.

As I suppress manic laughter at my ineptitude, a door behind me inches open and the beaming face of Epic boss Mark Rein pokes through and stage-whispers to his cohorts: "You're not showing them that crappy game are you?" I nod almost unconsciously, my grin extending further upwards; I've just seen a vacant Necris Darkwalker and am about to piss molten laser-fire into the faces off all those who oppose me. Today is a good day.

MULTI-KILL
"One thing we've always found is that science-fiction kicks ass," claims UT's characteristically exuberant producer Jeff Morris later on. "It's so liberating
to be able to go in and say stuff like, 'wouldn't it be cool if the giant robot fought the giant lizard thing?' We don't have to worry that the thing never actually existed - we're not trying to do the Wehrmacht in 1944."

No, they're most certainly not. Despite the occasional nod to reality, the vibrant, fast-paced world of UT has always had both feet in the somewhat surreal, with more of a focus on fun, instant gratification than its more po-faced rivals.

IN YOUR FACE
"UT is a very 'short time to spectacle' game," agrees Morris. "When you spawn there should be a cartwheeling, exploding vehicle and two guys dogfighting in front of you. Forget walking anywhere!"

The thing is, less than half the people who bought the previous outing, UT2004, simply did not connect their musclebound deathmatch to the Internet, so by way of response Epic are upping their single-player adventures considerably. We're talking proper characters, dialogue, branching storylines, twists, turns and general narrative trickery - something you might think difficult given the game's inherent frag-fest setup, but not so. Once again, the kickass nature of science-fiction saves the day...

"The key piece of military technology in this time is the 'respawner', which allows military forces to come back to life over and over," explains lead designer Steve Polge, a perceptible twinkle in his eye showing just how much he loves that his job allows him to impart such brilliant nonsense.

"What that's done is changed military combat from being between large armies to being between small units of highly trained soldiers, who know that they have infinite lives and know that they can throw themselves at something." Life, then, is dispensable - yet not always infinite since maps might see the destruction of the enemy's respawner. Or the respawners may only be capable of giving life to combatants a certain number of times before they hit their limit. Their 'frag limit'. Do you see? Do you SEE?

POLITICAL FLAK
The planet of Taryd is not a happy one. The government of Earth is distant,
and the planet's precious resources are controlled by three giant, evil corporations in a constant war of attrition. You've got the Axon (rugged, traditional sci-fi stalwarts), the Liandri (cyberpunky creators of the 'Unreal Tournament' competition itself) and
the Izanagi (oriental, pagoda-loving artistes). It's for the latter that your muscle has been hired.

Rather than the simple tournament structure of yore, the single-player missions, whether they boil down to deathmatches or Warfare matches (see 'How The Warfare Was Won', opposite), now link together to form a branching narrative. The plot will see you doing stuff like stealing technology from another corporation, laying claim to an area important for the refining of Tarydium or simply pushing forward with a military campaign.

What missions you embark on and whether or not you defect to a rival corporation will remain up to you - Epic are designing the game so you'll be able to see the ramifications of your decisions in the world at large. This whole shebang is controlled from what's currently a global view - a beautiful Earth-like planet with clusters of white spots marking specific map/mission areas. It's from here, or a screen very like it (Epic are still fine-tuning) that most of your decisions will be made as you play through the game. The 35-40 dots spiral up and over the globe alongside the story arc, eventually leaving terra firma for a few orbital frag-fests, then to another planet entirely for the final set of face-offs.

The Necris faction, you see, with their devastating Darkwalker tripods and flying Furies aren't just sitting around the multiplayer maps looking menacing. Partway through the single-player campaign they invade the planet of the bickering corporations and start transforming it to their own needs, hungry for Tarydium.

BLACK DEATH
For a while you'll be able to ignore it, carrying on with the petty squabbles and demands of your faction, but it's not something you can ignore forever. To begin with, the Necris send in the Krall - horned reptilian chaps who thrive on outnumbering UT squads - and then the Necris and the big guns of their terrifying armoury start to hit the ground.

After the invasion, you return to familiar maps that have become infected with the goopy nanoblack that not only runs in the Necris' veins, but also is pumped through their lands. Dark clouds hang over Necris bases, black bony tentacles punch through walls and viscous black liquid oozes where clear water once ran. In short, in single-player and multiplayer alike, it's pretty bloody obvious at which end of the map the goodies and baddies live.

In the single-player campaign you won't be alone in your fight either, since Epic don't want you to feel like you're relentlessly fighting alongside barking AI bots. There'll be four main characters in your team, with plenty of verbal sparring, neat dialogue and personal tics crammed in. The aim is to make them feel and fight like real humans, though if you want to test the comparison there will also be a four-player co-op option with all the usual drop-in/drop-out functionality.

Despite intense journalistic pressure, Jeff Morris refuses to spill exactly which characters will be in your squad, what former UT teams are kicking around (although the Iron Guard certainly seem to be) or what role UT icon Malcolm will play. However, he does admit that you can see some of your pals in the surrounding screenshots, including, "the chick with the reverse bandit mask and the guy with the corn-rows and the tattoos".

When quizzed further, Morris also mentions that a fair number of key UT characters, such as Necris villain Loque, will be making a return to keep the fans happy. No more details escape the man's lips, however, as he uses the brilliant diversionary tactic of dropping a delightful nugget of game trivia into the conversation: Gears Of War's lead character is voiced by the same guy who plays Bender in Futurama. Did you know that? I didn't know that...

WARM AND FUZZY
Unreal Tournament III may have been built from the ground up with an entirely new engine, but the old 'comfy slippers' adage still holds with the gameplay. That familiar, nay iconic, roster of weaponry remains intact - the Bio-Rifle, the glorious Redeemer, the Shock Rifle with its ingenious ploy of being able to shoot the alt-fire plasma emission with the primary fire zapgun for added death-bringing hilarity. But look closer and you become aware of one or two gaps having been plugged - gaps that you probably weren't aware of in the first place.

At the shallower end of the pool, for example, the Stinger (UT-speak for mini-gun) always had a slightly crap alt-fire option. Now, however, it's been gifted with the ability to fire bursts that can pin an enemy to a wall by his head. In a similar fashion, the rocket launcher can now chuck grenades as well as its familiar racked-up missile salvos, while the Unreal Engine physics can now provide stuff like real physical attributes for every individual pellet of a Flak Cannon round.

Gobsmackingly, Epic also claim that the insane graphical complexity of each weapon means that each holds more polygons than an entire map in UT2004. Honestly, that's the sort of factoid that would make the Germans declare a national holiday.

JUMP START
Epic have also noticed that when people are speeding around their imaginary lands in vehicles, two of the most common action keys are rendered redundant, namely duck and jump. So it is that, in a tradition kickstarted by UT2004's Manta, many of the vehicles now have different modes of manoeuvre, to thunderously brilliant effect.

Take the Necris Nemesis for example. As lead designer Steve Polge eloquently puts it: "Real tanks can't crouch" - but this one can. Or at least, it can switch between a ground-hugging sleek-mobile whose turret is firmly fixed forward and a standard drive-and-aim mode, before slipping into a far more interesting gear: having you move along at an absolute crawl but granting you a higher viewpoint, a tremendous amount of firepower and (I admit, grudgingly) a lot more rockets fired in your direction.

If you think that's quite cool though, just wait until you see the Leviathan. Jesus 'Capital H' Christ! A tank of the corporations rather than the Necris, the Leviathan is a five-man beast and is - as you might have guessed - bloody big. The driver has control of the accelerator pedal and a smaller gun, while each of his companions blasts happily away with different varieties of heavy weaponry from the tank's roof and sides - each with their own cheery purple energy shield to boot.

When you first see the tank deploy itself into 'crouch' mode, however, your eyes will widen and you'll temporarily forget to breathe. Unfolding itself like the best Transformer base you've seen, with its four guns raising on fire engine-style hinged platforms, the thing becomes a veritable machine o' death: double the gun barrels circling one �ber-gun with infinite range and almighty explosive capabilities.

THE POWER OF THE DARK SIDE
The Leviathan still doesn't quite match the Necris Darkwalker though. I know you've seen a ton of material on these wavy-legged monstrosities - but I promise you that until you fight against them yourself, there's no way you'll realise quite how intimidating they are.

In my playtest, I was happily nipping around atop my Marty McFly patent-pending hoverboard on the crest of a craggy outcrop, when a previously crouched Darkwalker raised itself to its full height so it popped into view directly in front of me.

At the risk of using two Back To The Future references in close proximity, it was almost exactly like the bit in Back To The Future II where Biff stands on the top of his hotel and is thunderstruck by the sight of the De Lorean appearing over the lip of the building. Only this time the encounter ended with a burning death-ray and a beautifully rendered fried skeleton. Oh, and burning trees. The trees got set on fire too...

BUT WHEN?
To wrap things up, the Epic lads show me a final scene of Whisperish - an outcrop of rock hundreds of feet above water on the Necris home world. For some reason, the broken buildings (minus the black tentacles) remind me of some unholy mixture of Alcatraz and the Vatican.

As a tower of smoke billows up in the centre of the map and pillars flare up with flame in the near-distance to indicate the presence of the Redeemer in their midst, I get to wondering - are we actually going to get to play the finished product this year? As ever, Epic respond to that question with a shrug - it'll be released when they're happy with it.

There's still a lot they refuse to spill on as well. The introduction of deployables for example (something beyond the spider mines of UT2004, although categorically not including auto-turrets, which Epic see as distinctly 'not fun') - not to mention a number of still undisclosed vehicles.

I loved UT2004 because it seemed to do everything - whatever mood I was in, I could find a map or a mode that slotted into the pleasure-hunting parts of my brain like a missing jigsaw piece. UT3 is pulling the same trick - but has found a remarkable number of areas to drizzle tasty gameplay juices into an already successful recipe.

I don't know whether it's the hoverboards, the eye-candy or simply the way it delivers instant exhilaration when others specialise in frustration, but it's suddenly leapt above Quake Wars in my estimation. I like having fun, and Unreal Tournament III really likes being fun. Blood, pain and death aside, it's a match made in heaven.

Will Porter