Fantastic Fragfest

Unreal Tournament 3 is a super slick, ultra fast, first-person multiplayer fragfest. Run, Jump, Twitch, Shoot. No surprises there.

And to fans of the UT series, besides some spectacular new vehicles and a third-person hoverboard, the only real surprise is that it’s on a console, yet unlike most PC-console FPS ports, it actually works very well. If you can get past one or two hurdles that is.

From the point of view of casual gamers (which a PC-console conversion should consider very strongly as its primary raison d'être), there is one very intimidating feature; the majority of the game (Campaign and Multiplayer) is online.

Campaign mode has a story told through a handful of overblown, detached, cheesy cut-scenes, some mission briefs, and a little in-game banter, but its main purpose is to gently introduce the player to the various maps, modes and machinery before they plunge into the dog-eat-dog world of multiplayer.

While in itself Campaign mode serves that purpose perfectly, hosting a tutorial online seems like a bad idea, especially considering that UT3’s online stability has been an issue of concern.

Despite the fact that Sony’s recent 2.17 firmware update has allowed me to remain online indefinitely (even with a wireless connection), before the update I was lucky to go 2 matches without disconnecting, and it’s hard to understand why hosting Campaign mode exclusively online was absolutely necessary.

Perhaps it was to encourage people to play together, as a key feature is that human teammates can drop in and out at any given moment. In a truly mission-based single player game, that would be a hugely appealing prospect, but in UT3 it feels a little redundant, as the Campaign mode is essentially what you’ll be doing in multiplayer (the heart and soul of the game) anyway.

Initiating Co-op play is also quite easy to miss as you have to press the square button when commencing a Campaign, which brings me to another issue – the interface.