Just before I started this post, I noticed Shamus’s new webcomic at the escapist.

Which is a nice coincidence since I am going to write about UT3 now. Well, here goes the article.

For some reason, the last installment of the Unreal series is not getting any good response. I am actually surprised with this, especially since I tried it. And I think it is fun.

Yes, Shamus made good points with his UT3-hate-post here. But none of the problems he mentioned happened to me. Okay, I see some of them, but not enough to make me dislike the game.

Now, he also complained about the story in his Shamus’s webcomic. Yes, I think the story sucks, myself. But then again, in my opinion, this game is a multiplayer-focused first person shooter. the campaign that included with it is merely a training ground for newbies, so that when they play online with the Gurus of UT3, at least they don’t do anything stupid and shame themselves.

Well, truthfully, I never played the original quake, quake II, quake the third, or even any of the previous unreal series. Nope, I never touched any of them. I had my time with OpenArena, though. And I might also pick up Quake 4 to fill the vacuum until later this year. The first multiplayer first person shooter that I played is Counter Strike, a half-life mod (I started playing Open Arena only about a year ago). I continued playing it for years, and the moment I finally got sick hearing ‘Go, Go, GO!’, which is about a month ago, I braced myself and grab a copy of UT3.

My first impression? Well, the whole create-your-online-profile is new to me (I play neither Airborne nor COD4 online), so I courageously create a new one, and go online… to find that the servers available are either full or empty. So I tried Instant action, which is playing with bots.

There are quite a few game modes available. The first is deathmatch, which is the standard shoot-anything-you-see-moving type. And then there’s team deathmatch, where the players are divided into two teams, and each team must try to kill the members of the other team. CTF, the standard capture the flag match and its variant, VCTF, which is pretty much the same plus vehicles. And the most irritating of them all (maybe I’m just sucks), warfare. The last one is a node-to-node controlling. Don’t make me explain it.

The bots in this game varies from ridiculously stupid to Jonathan Wendel, with a hugeload of vacuum in between. I am exaggerating, of course. But still, the difficulty should be more polished, giving learning curve to beginners, challenge for more experienced players, and hell for n00bs who started the game at hardest difficulty. But this game’s difficulty chart looks like andes.

The graphics, on the other hand, well… Let me say this. Medal of Honor:Airborne uses Unreal 3 engine, The graphics looks great. Gears of War uses Unreal Engine 3, the graphics looks even greater. Bioshock uses Unreal Engine 3, The graphics looks, pardon my intentional grammar mistake, greaterer. This game, though, is just stunning. It has all the goods of the other games combined. Large environment of Airborne, texturing and character design from Gears of Wars, and water effects in Bioshock.

I might get sued for saying this, but I’ll say it anyway: I like this game’s graphics more than Crysis, especially the fact that my PC can run it at maximum settings smoothly. What’s the point of a game having great graphics if you need to tone it down a lot for it to be playable? Those graphics options in Crysis are itching to be set to ‘high’, which will entertainingly render the game unplayable. I played through Crysis with medium graphics setting, always wondering what ‘high’ would look like the entire time.

A lot of people saying that the previous Unreal series are better than this one, especially the ‘99 one. But hell, I’m not buying any 1999 game in 2008 just to play with the game’s old timers. Besides, I’ve already like UT3 so much that I don’t have enough sleep this few days.

So, well, I like this game, but I’m not sure if I can recommend it to anyone, especially that this game is multiplayer-oriented. So, If you enjoy multiplayer first person shooters, try this one, you might like it.

And, by the way, try to find me online, my profile’s name is sdxaw. I live at GMT+7 timezone, though, so, unless you’re on holiday, it might be a problem.