UT3's campaign will likely steer you away, but the action packed multiplayer will keep you invested for weeks.
(-) shaky, uneven campaign / no story to speak of here / repetitive, grating voice acting
Don't be so quick to dismiss Unreal Tournament III as just another shooter. It outreaches on a couple spots, but when it works at its strengths, it delivers fast paced action and enough thrills to set it apart from the rest of the pack. It's probably the closest to Halo you're going to experience on the PS3, for those out there concerned about that, but you really don't need to compare it to other games to see how well it shines. Take an over the top, sometimes even goofy arsenal of weapons, and plentiful of both online and offline multiplayer action, and Unreal Tournament III has everything you would want in a modern shooter.
Most shooting games nowadays offer a single player experience that's often bypassed by people who dive straight to the multiplayer, and the developers may have realized that if the bare-bones offering here is any indication. First of all, there's really no plot to speak of. You're just thrown into a few real time video sequences with other characters who are supposedly waging war with sci-fi gadgetry across the world, but you're not going to care about any of it. In fact, there really isn't much of a campaign either. You're essentially going through a predetermined list of game modes like death match and capture the flag variants, which'll probably keep you going for a while but eventually you'll realize it's just a way for the game to act as a tutorial for the bigger, better things, namely the multiplayer. This is a multiplayer focused game, and with the linearity and sometimes even monotonous campaign mode, that shows in full effect.
To make up for an offset of that magnitude. the multiplayer would have to be pretty damn good. Luckily, it is. First of all, UTIII offers an online component where you can rank up and unlock different accessories and cosmetic features for your avatar, and blow the brains out of strangers worldwide. That's really no surprise, as nearly every shooting game released at this point is expected to have that feature, and it would be unforgivable if it didn't. But what makes this game so special is it maintains the online mode and keeps alongside it, splitscreen with AI bots. This means if you lack an internet connection for whatever reason, you can still be perfectly happy with this game. It also means you can enjoy the multiplayer better because you can adjust the map, number of bots, and their difficulty to your liking, meaning you don't have to get constantly creamed by other human participants. You can adjust the amount of kills needed to win, time limit, and even different gimmicks like increasing the speed or lowering gravity. It's an excellent feature, and we need more shooters that do this.
In both offline and online multiplayer, you have the usual standby list of features like free for all, team deathmatch, and objective based modes. One of which is capture the flag, and if want a break from the mindless action and want a little more tactical thought to it all, the warfare mode. In this mode, you play on wide, expansive maps, a team based game to claim domination on a line of nodes in specific order to act as a current. When you have them all claimed, you head toward your opponents core node and wreck it while it's vulnerable, while being defensive and avoiding the same fate yourself. There's always a rush of soldiers on both teams going for the same spot, so the action can get deep and chaotic in a hurry, it's best to not approach the mode until you've honed up on experience. There are plenty of modes to enjoy here, and given all the extensive options, anyone can enjoy them.
There's lots of different maps to play on, though some of them tend to play better than others. It's fun picking small maps and bumping the AI bot count to maximum that way to ensure there's always chaotic action. The selection of maps depends on what mode you're playing. The regular death match maps tend to be smaller, more compact, while other maps for tactical play are more spread out.
The game has a very old school feel. You're fighting in a threshold of modern environments and other more surreal settings, and while the gun variety is modest, what's there is interesting and fun to use. For example, there's an electric gun that can shoot either thunder balls or a quick jolt of lightning, a more organic and borderline-alive gun that shoots green goo that stains the playing field, as well as more traditional warfare. A weird choice however is the melee attack for fighters is also a gun, which conceptually doesn't make any sense because really your character should just punch or something. Each gun also has a secondary fire. You can have as many guns as you can carry, but you're expected to find them on the map, as well as health pickups because there's no health restoration. Aiming around is also simplified, there's no aim assist system or anything like that, but the learning curve is fair enough. You can also use vehicles, air craft, turrets, and other useful machinery to assist you depending on the map. There's no killstreak rewards or anything for racking up kills, but it's not sorely missed here.
Graphically, Unreal Tournament III isn't a beautiful game, but there's some great looking particle effects and some pretty sci fi orientated environments to keep your eyes happy. The game also never suffers from slowdown, despite the amount of chaos going on in the world around you. The sound isn't quite met with the audio though. The music and sound effects both serve their purpose, but while the voice clips from the other characters are amusing at first, they repeat themselves over and over again and grow tiresome quickly. The game also needed more voice actors. There's about twenty something different fighters to play as, but there's only four recognizably different voices you'll hear throughout the game. You'll get tired of hearing "headed toward enemy prime node" over and over again before too long. You can turn the voices off of course, but you might miss out on important information in some of the objective game modes. They also seem to be mixed randomly, with little coherence. Sometimes a team soldier will well, "In need of assistance" while getting shot at, but achieve a combo and yell with glee "I'm unstoppable" Well, if he's really unstoppable, then he really doesn't need any help. Am I right?
Don't go coming with high hopes that you'll get a lucrative single player experience with memorable characters and an intriguing plot to unfold, but if you just want some quick, mindless action, than you've come to the right place. Unreal Tournament III's strengths lay behind the multiplayer, and in that regard, it's a success. It's a game with lots of flexibility, for both online and offline multiplayer, and it's a game you're bound to get a whole lot out of.