EPIC FAIL'd!

User Rating: 6 | Unreal Tournament III PC
With this one, Epic most certainly did fail us.

Really, the only thing they can claim to have improved is the graphics.

The Gameplay still retains some of the fun from it's predecessors, and this is really the only reason I don't give it a 1.0. It's still a fast paced, action packed experience, and you still just run around killing everyone, with the exception of a returning gametype from UT'04 (albeit modified for the worse).

Core gameplay aside, it seems Epic has sold out. Every game since UC2 would suggest that they are no longer interested in the quality of a game, but rather the revenue they might acquire. EVERY time they just make a crowd pleaser with no real substance, most successful of which would be Gears of War.
While on it's own Gears is a decent game, taking what made it successful (super grim, extreme, brutal, makes children feel like cool grownups), and applying it to the unreal series is the biggest mistake they could ever have made (short of a criminal act).

The Tournament series is now a joke. It used to be about nothing but a bloodsport that you participate in, that was it, and it worked wonderfully.
Now however, there is a story involved. A story about tournament players... NOT PARTICIPATING IN A TOURNAMENT. It's simply about some guy with an uncanny resemblance to GoW's "Marcus Fenix", who's trying to exact revenge on some new species that seems like a Gow-ish, more "XTREME" version of the Skaarj from the previous games. These creatures apparently are a warrior race used by a corporation the wipe out entire planets. Now why would a corporation want a bunch of animals to eat a planet's populace? To pave the way for absurd, super-evil zombies (the new, more extreme necris) to make tentacle filled, black goo covered landscapes where people once lived, the purpose for which has thus far eluded me.

The singleplayer has you "fighting a war" against the necris. And by fighting a war, I mean playing vehicle CTF and Warzone with them (while riding a hoverboard nonetheless). It would seem that respawn technology has reached the battlefield now. And instead of just fighting in the tournament, you fight a squad of 3 people to "wear out their respawner", so that you can just kill them, oh but for some reason you're still using impractical tournament weapons (unlike real battle weapons, like in Unreal 2: the awakening).

To make things stranger, they think up reasons for you to play things like CTF and warzone with your enemy. According to them, in CTF, you attempt to take their "field lattice generators" or FLaGs, which will leave their respawner unpowered, allowing them to die. And in warzone, you just destroy the damn thing. BUT you have to link a bunch of nodes to power down their shielding. Nevermind the likely absent reasoning as to why both your respawners are fatally linked...

Then theres multiplayer. This part is definitely the highlight of the game; at least you don't have Cole.. uh, I mean Othello (former classic character) shouting "WOO!" at you the whole time.
Fortunately, Epic barely managed to keep the gameplay fast and fun, so MP isn't a complete letdown (unlike the game as a whole).
Even then, There is a slim pick for maps, none of which are actually any good, even the remake of Deck16 is terrible. And MOST of the characters are now either gone, or changed for the worse. Take Malcolm for example, he was a genetically engineered super soldier that was put into THE TOURNAMENT. But now he's some highly unlikable wartime commander that won't stop spouting crap that just perpetuates racial stereotypes.

So overall, to me, the Unreal franchise is dead. Don't waste your time with this, especially if you're a UT veteran, just stick with '99 or '04.