Developer: Epic Games
Publisher: Midway
Genre: First Person Shooter
Rating: M (Mature)
Number of Players: 1 (16 online)
Platforms: Playstation 3, PC, Xbox 360
Unreal Tournament 3 Gallery
Unreal Tournament 3 Official Website

If you’ve considered yourself a PC gamer at any point in your life, then surely the Unreal Tournament name should sound familiar. However, for us Sony fanboys in the crowd the UT name doesn’t ring quite as strong. Unreal Tournament was released for PS2 back in 2000, but it failed at delivering the blood-rushing intensity that made the game so great on the PC. This time around, Epic Games brought everything from the PC version over to the PS3, and the end result is a multiplayer frag fest that “M-M-Multi Kills” the competition.

The Story

In contrast with previous installments, UT3 offers a single player campaign with a storyline. While you can certainly make your way through the campaign without understanding who you’re fighting, this bittersweet tale of revenge is interesting enough to follow. Once upon a time, your hometown was invaded and massacred by the evil Necris faction; Reaper (who bears a striking resemblance to Marcus Fenix) vows to take out the Necris leader Akasha. The story can get a tad cliché at times and the scenes about the politics of the war are mediocre, but occasionally you’ll come across a few bloody, action-packed scenes that make it worth your time. The writers did an especially creative job at incorporating features of the game into military terms. For example, it was funny to hear how we needed to capture our enemy’s flag in order to cut off their power in a certain region of the world.

As far as the actual campaign goes, all of your missions are presented via an interactive globe. For the most part you only have one or two missions to select from at any given time, so the globe is really only there for you to keep track of how much area you’ve conquered. By completing the secondary missions you can gain bonuses, such as unlocking enemy vehicles or earning special power-up cards, but there’s nothing wrong with wanting to drill right through to the final battle.