Unreal Tournament 3

Brerlappins little hat wrote:So are more than 10 people in the entire world playing UT3 since this update? Or is it still dead? I havent actually played it since it updated

By now, you've put Akasha six feet under, mastered Warfare along with the other multiplayer modes and have pelvic thrusted your way across every map from Arsenal to Torlan. Aside from random mods that you track down off the web, you're probably looking for a challenge or some kind of additional play to make you pick up your impact hammer and flak cannon for a multi-kill or two. Fortunately, you're in luck. Epic Games and Midway Games recently released the Unreal Tournament III: Titan Pack, an expansion that provides more than a simple addition of maps or mutators. Instead, you're getting a large amount of content that will keep you gibbing your opponents for a while to come.

The first notable feature is the Titan mutator, which really puts a new spin on just about every single game type that it can be included in. When a player joins a match with the Titan mutator enabled, they'll see a small meter at the bottom right of the screen. Performing different tasks, such as eliminating vehicles, killing opponents, or returning flags, will fill your meter with varying score amounts. Once you've earned twenty points towards your titan meter, you can trigger your transformation into a titan, growing to fifteen feet, gaining 400 points of health and shielding and also snagging completely different weapons.

Titans are allowed to perform a large ground pound that tosses enemies off their feet and at times completely off ledges, which will instantly add to your kill count. They'll also receive homing rockets as well as shock rifle charges, which will slowly regenerate as they're fired. Players that are good at using the Titan and manage to refill their Titan meter once again can further transform into a Behemoth. While they keep the same weaponry, their ground pound radius is expanded, the character grows to thirty feet and they gain 800 points of shields and health. Needless to say, watching these gigantic figures come lumbering down at you can be a daunting prospect and if you take one down, they'll explode with a nuclear explosion (similar to that of a localized Redeemer strike), allowing them to take out enemies and friends alike in the blast radius.

While the inclusion of these beasts would seem to throw off the balance of the game significantly, Epic spent a long time making sure that there were some downsides to turning into these brutal tanks. First of all, your speed is significantly decreased, leaving you open to attack from all sides without quickly dodging or escaping incoming fire. Secondly, it's impossible for Titans or Behemoths to pick up power-ups or weapons, or drive vehicles. They also can't accomplish game mode objectives, so you won't be able to capture nodes in Warfare or pick up the flag during CTF matches. Furthermore, while Behemoths gain additional health and strength, their life span is limited to 30 seconds before they explode; Titans, by contrast, remain standing as long as they have health.

As a result, you'll find that turning into a Titan is much more of a support role or base defense position (in Warfare mode) than anything else and if you manage to get coordinated with your teammates, you can create a nearly unstoppable force for your team. In these situations, it's possible for an organized team or clan to dominate, skewing play as they support their Titans with Darkwalkers and other vehicles, but for the most part, the Titan adds a ton of strategy to gameplay as you figure out the best time to transform and then instantly try to hold down the fort as long as you can. As a minor aside, I do wish that there was a game mode that revolved around the Titan, because it's pretty obvious that a "King of the Hill" or "Last Titan Standing" element is tailor-made for these giants on the battlefield.

Apart from the Titan Mutator, players can partake in one of two new gameplay modes, each of which expands on the replayability of the title. The first one is Greed, which is very similar to CTF, with the exception that when a player dies, they drop a skull that's worth one point. Collect five skulls and you'll receive a gold skull, while collecting twenty skulls equals a red skull that also acts as a damage amplifier. Further collecting ten additional skulls boosts the time that the damage amplifier is in effect, which, of course, plays into the main purpose of the game: is it worth it to you to constantly attempt to blast your enemies, farming their skulls and potentially maintaining your damage boosts, or is it more intelligent to try to score with the collection you currently have?

By bringing their collected amount of skulls to a repository in the enemy base, a player is teleported back to their team's base and starts over again until the point threshold is met. Greed is an extremely fun gameplay mode to launch into, especially if the Titan mutator has been turned on, as using supporting giants to aid a faster soldier that collects skulls can lead to pitched battles around enemy bases that can be extremely tense for both sides. For example, during one fight, I witnessed a rival with more than one hundred skulls that he'd meticulously saved by scavenging the battlefield. However, every single time that he'd try to make it to our base, we'd shatter his defenses and collect the bounty on his head, only to have his teammates do the same to us. It was only with one or two of our side going Behemoth that we were able to score any points at all during that match.

The other mode is Betrayal, which is one of the most engaging gameplay modes I've checked out in a while, primarily because of how devious and cutthroat the game is. Players are provided with an instagib shock rifle, and are given free reign to blast opposing players for points. The better a player is doing within a match (such as killing other players without dying and gaining a lead over other players), the higher the point value over your head grows. Here's where things get interesting: every shot that you make adds to your points as well as a bank of points for your team. At any point, you have the option to betray your team by shooting them in the back, claiming the banked points and marking you as a rogue agent for thirty seconds. During this time, former teammates can blast you and earn retribution bonus points, but if you can avoid this fate, you can deny them points before being randomly assigned to another team and proceeding through the rest of a match. Only one person can win this mode, however, so you'll need to balance when you decide to stab your teammates in the back and when you go hunting for other players. It's fast paced, it relies on accurate shots to take out opponents and it's definitely a burst of adrenaline when you see a teammate turn on you.

Along with the mutator and game modes, you'll find sixteen new maps scattered across Deathmatch, CTF, Vehicle Capture the Flag and Warfare modes. Some locations feel like natural extensions of prior stages of Unreal Tournament III, such as Eden Inc, which combines the city feel of Defiance with the lush greenery of a stage like Gateway. Others, such as Koos Barge or Ocean Relic, stand out as separate battle arenas for players to test their skills in.

Scattered through some of the maps are two of the new fixed weapons that players can leap in and use to quickly destroy their enemies. The first is a Stinger Turret, which fires shots at an extremely fast rate and lets you knock down your opponents for a quick kill. The other is the Eradicator Turret, which allows you to shell enemies from just about anywhere on the map. Conceptually, while I like the idea of deploying a camera angle to be able to hone my shots, the Eradicator felt as though it was just a bit too haphazard, because while getting shelled from the skies was surprising, it didn't feel nearly as effective as some of the other turrets, weapons or vehicles around.

Speaking of vehicles, the Titan mode includes the Stealthbender, a modified hellbender with cloaking that can be used to run over opponents stealthily. It packs spider mines and EMP fields while having the ability to use the two new deployable elements from the Titan Pack in a warzone. The first is the Link Station, which can be used to slowly repair any damaged vehicles for your team. This is especially useful if you're trying to establish a chokepoint with Scavengers or Mantas and you're finding that your equipment is getting dinged up with each battle you manage to survive.

The other one, which is more a cool visual effect than a truly useful item, is the X-Ray Field, which reveals any skeletons of soldiers that run through it while increasing the damage they take. It's a good idea, but not particularly useful when you realize that a well placed rocket, shock rifle blast or flak shell can take your enemies out without any amplification needed. Outside of the Stealthbender and its use of these deployables, you'll discover that a version of the old Slow Field deployable has now been turned into a power-up.

If I had to state a particular issue with the maps and vehicle, it's that the Stealthbender seems to be as invisible as its name implies. I know that I played around twenty to twenty-five separate matches before I ran into my first one, and when I did, I didn't notice other users taking advantage of the deployables. Even worse is the fact that tracking one down seems to be harder because there aren't that many maps where they're included. If you search the Unreal boards, there even seems to be disagreement on which maps these machines are included on, so your mileage may vary when it comes to driving one of these.

The last included item for the Titan Pack comes in the form of Nova and Kana, Liandri and Ronin based characters that can be added to your team as bots or used as the basis for customized characters. This doesn't particularly add anything to the game apart from extra fodder to shoot at, which, in some ways, leads me to another sticking point. While the Titan Pack and the requisite 2.0 was supposed to improve the AI, especially within Vehicle CTF, there are still plenty of moments where the AI stands still or doesn't fire at you for a number of seconds, even with bot skills cranked up. That doesn't feel like a vast leap over the previous version. What is visually improved, however, is the darker menu scheme, which isn't nearly as glaring as the white and red background which could be jarring to the eyes.

The 2.0 patch and Titan Pack also add a lot of networking performance elements and stabilization for games, as well as stronger server browsing and mod support. For PS3 owners, this also means the inclusion of Trophies, while for PC users, you gain Steam Achievements. While you won't necessarily go back and charge through the campaign or go for all of the achievements, the inclusion is a nice thought and is great for newcomers to the game.

However, there is a certain issue that does stand out for PS3 owners which will probably decrease the enjoyment of the Titan Pack: no one seems to be playing this game online. I counted the numbers over a few days and there were about 100 users total in matches across the PSN. Even worse, there was only one server each for the Greed and Betrayal modes and those weren't consistently up and running all the time. That sucks, because apart from playing bots on your system and even playing split-screen locally, you won't be able to fully enjoy everything this pack has to offer, which is solid multiplayer. Even hosting a game, I didn't find any takers, which is just sad. The PC community is much larger, so you'll find a lot more servers dedicated to Greed. Not nearly as many for Betrayal, but I noticed at least three or four running at one time with a large number of people playing, which is a vast improvement over Sony's anemic numbers.

Closing Comments

Take one awesome mutator, two new game modes and a ton of maps and you've got an excellent expansion for Unreal Tournament III. The Titan Pack expands the replayability of the game and breathes fresh life into a shooter that you might not have played for about a year or so. While the added vehicle seems to be rarely included in the pack and some of the secondary elements, like the Eradicator turret, don't seem too useful, the main focus of the pack -- Greed, Betrayal and the Titan mutator -- are more than enough to make this an awesome title.

Plus, it's free! Go and grab this pack now and if you're a PS3 owner, start playing these two modes and expand on the number of servers available. It's your Unreal civic duty.

8.5/10