Before I go into divulging details about the UT3 Beta Demo, I just want to say that I used to play the original Unreal Tournament and UT2K4 religiously and would travel to different LAN parties just to play them competitively. Also, I played Quake 3 Team Arena and built a couple maps for Quake 3, so I am not just some guy that dabbles in First Person Shooter online play. I live and breathe this stuff. I have been looking forward to UT3 since the day I caught wind of the rumors that the new Unreal Engine 3.0 was being developed. Xbox 360 gamers got the highly regarded Gears of Wars (PC version coming soon!), but still no major FPS game for PC gamers. Waiting for UT3 to come out has basically helped out Valve, as I have purchased a dozen games via Steam to pass the time. No offense to Counter Strike: Source or Day of Defeat, but my roots lay in Sci-Fi FPS aggressive online play. So imagine the squeal of joy that I emitted when I found out that the UT3 Beta Demo was out a couple days ago. Now that I have clocked in about 7 hours playing through various gameplay modes, I am here to give you the scoop.

The demo download is surprisingly small at about 750MB. I am not sure what the difference is between a “beta demo” and a regular demo, since this seems pretty solid and only crashed on me once due to my graphics driver going haywire. My rig is currently a little underpowered with a 1.6GHz dual core Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo) with 2GB of Crucial DDR2, and a nVidia 6800GT. Luckily, I got things running smoothly at 1024×768 and all the bells and whistles turned down to their minimum settings. Admittedly, I was a little disappointed to see that the graphics options are very limited. In past versions of the UT franchise, you had extensive control over various graphical options, but UT3 just gives you a couple sliders to raise and lower the overall graphical appearance. Honestly though, even with everything turned down, this game looks great.

Since it has been a few months since I have played an Unreal Tournament 2004 game, I decided to give my best shot to the bots before jumping into online play. The controls are very responsive and no problem getting back into the groove of executing dodges, double jumps and wall jumps. All the best weapons from all versions of UT are present and look the best they ever have. Of course that doesn’t last long as I always play with the weapon hidden to see everything in front of me. The weapons sound incredible and make you feel like you are really using highly powerful weapons. This adds to the immersion factor, since many games’ guns sound weak and have almost zero recoil.

It was nice to see that they implemented the feign death option again, but as I promptly learned, bots don’t fall for that trick. The bots are smart even on the lower AI options and dodge appropriately. Even when you are racing at them full speed in the Scorpion (a.k.a buggy of death) they tend to stick to the walls and other obstacles to make it harder to run over them.

There are only a few vehicles in the demo, but the most fun has to be the hoverboard. Using the hoverboard, you can latch onto any vehicle to go a little faster. Unfortunately, to counter the extra speed, you cannot fire any weapons from the board and if you are shot even once you tumble awkwardly off onto the ground. It will take you a second or two to gather yourself, so you are at a serious disadvantage if you are shot off of your board in the middle of the battlefield. Other vehicles in the demo include the Manta, Scorpion, Goliath, and the Darkwalker. There might have been one other vehicle, but I was too busy fragging to remember.

Overall, the UT3 Beta Demo delivered everything I expected and more. Hopefully I can get a new video card soon to be able to play with higher details. Also, I think I will spend the extra $10 and purchase the Collectors Edition with over 10 hours of tutorials for the unreal editor. I would like to get back into map making as that is what keeps many popular games feeling fresh years after the original release date. A strong, intelligent modding community is a great thing to have, and I want to be part of that again. Also, hopefully they will release a nice UE3 runtime demo for my demonstrations of DoomzPunk in the coming couple of months.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Games, Modding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.