Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Worth playing"

While many of the pillars of PC gaming have been adapted to consoles, it seems intuitive that there are certain games that simply couldn't work on them... or are there? As someone who used to float around on the GameSpot forums evangelizing the virtues of PC gaming, I never really though I would be comfortable playing Unreal Tournament on a console, but that so happens to be UT3's greatest triumph: comfort.

My addiction to this game is something I percieve as the final step of my acclimation into console gaming. I've grown up since my days of PC gaming, and I have other, more pertinent things to spend my money on than a new graphics card, or a complete PC overhaul every couple years. One by one, I've switched to playing my most coveted PC games on my Xbox 360: Half-Life 2, Call of Duty, Team Fortress, etc. The final nail in the coffin is Unreal Tournament 3, the latest entry in a franchise I imagined simply couldn't work on consoles, but work it does, and even as a former PC gamer, it feels the same as Unreal Tournament did 11 years ago.

I love my Xbox 360 and playing games on my TV. I never play PC games anymore, and I have loads of fun playing my old favorites on my 360. However, I still wouldn't argue that playing with a controller doesn't change things. Half-Life 2 becomes a lot more complicated with a gamepad; the intricate grav-gun maneuvers that are carried out with pin-point precision using a mouse become a tedious chore. There is a serious learning curve and it didn't help that I was almost completely new to console shooters, but I feel even now that I've mastered it, the game plays and feels differently than it did through all those hours of zombie-fragging on my PC.

Unreal Tournament 3 is more than enough proof that this doesn't have to be the case, and even the fastest, most frenetic shooter of all time can be translated to the much simpler vocabulary of a gamepad. It doesn't just work, it also feels familiar. This is the same Unreal Tournament I've been playing for over a decade, and that is UT3's greatest accomplishment.

Of course the quality and content of UT is still there, with UT2004's excellent Onslaught mode (now called Warfare) upgraded and revamped, as well as the classics like Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and so on. Overall UT3 is a smaller game than its predecessor, but the graphics are upgraded and the gameplay has been tweaked in many interesting ways.

Vehicular game modes (Warfare, Vehicular CTF) now equip the player with a personal hoverboard that can be whipped out at any time by tapping the "x" button. This is a huge improvement over Unreal Tournament 2004, where the action would often take place far away from where you spawn, and if you couldn't get your hands on a vehicle you were hiking across the map on foot, and many of them were quite large (especially Onslaught maps). It was a huge speed-bump in the usually frantic UT pacing but the hoverboard largely rectifies that issue. However, it seems to be a little too-fragile at times, since taking any damage whatsoever knocks you off the board for a few seconds, leaving you completely vulnerable while your character gets up. If this happens with multiple enemies around it is a death sentence.

With UT3, Epic really tried to bring out the single player campaign a little more. Unfortunately, the more they do, the more painfully obvious it becomes how contrived and uninteresting it is. The game actually has a story, not surprisingly about a war, and lots of similarly contrived explanations for why capturing a flag three times might result in a victory on the battlefield. Or also how you spawn infinitely. Or also why the entire thing seems to revolve around blowing up power cores. In any case, the simple gladiator tournament style campaign mode of previous Unreal Tournament/Championship games didn't try to hide the fact that it was a competitive multiplayer game. Trying to put the whole thing in the context of a war, starring some really uninteresting characters fighting against a really uninteresting opponent, honestly just makes the single player campaign seem more lackluster than it already was.

Overall the gameplay hasn't changed too much. This is definitely an improved Unreal Tournament game, and the core gameplay has been improved in almost every way from its predecessor. But the real draw is that at it's core, even on the Xbox 360, this is the same Unreal Tournament game that has been the darling of PC gamers for over a decade, and proof that strategy and skill involve more than an itchy trigger finger and dexterity with a mouse: this is still Unreal Tournament, and it shows.