Evolutionary, not revolutionary

Sorry UT3 - Team Fortress 2 wins this round.

Unreal Tournament 3 is a fine game. It plays well, looks okay and doesn't ask anything unreasonable in the hardware side of things. Yet it tastes a bit... stale. You can't avoid the fact that this is just another evolutionary step for the Unreal Tournament series. If you didn't like UT before, UT3 doesn't include anything so radially different that it would change this view. There is also a distinct lack of final polish; I think Epic simply ran out of time with Christmas rapidly approaching. The fact that the Xbox 360 version was unceremoniously pushed to 2008 and the PS3 version will apparently just barely make it to the stores before the holidays tends to support this assumption.

While most of the major flaws are already fixed with the first (beta) patch, and the preliminary list of fixes for the second patch seems to tackle most of the remaining ugly bits, you can't avoid the feeling that overall the game doesn't feel as polished-until-it-shines as Valve's Team Fortress 2 (included in The Orange Box), and the lack of that final touch has to show in the scoring.

The lack of Assault - my favourite UT mode of play - is also bit of a downer. Not that Warfare isn't great (it improves greatly on the Onslaught mode of UT2004), but it just isn't the same thing. In any case, overall Unreal Tournament 3 is a good game, but it just misses the bar hanging between "good" and "excellent". Still, it improves the 2004 edition both visually and in gameplay terms, and is definitely worth checking out, especially if you are an old-school UT veteran.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

Component	Publisher's Minimum	Publisher's Recommended
Processor	2.0+ GHz Single Core Processor	2.4+ Ghz Dual Core Processor
Memory	512 MB	1024MB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon 9600+ or NVIDIA GeForce 6200+	NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX+ or ATI Radeon X1300+ Video Card
Graphics Card Example	Not specified	Not specified
Free Disk Space	8 GB	8 GB
Net Link	not specified	not specified

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

Component	YouGamers Minimum	YouGamers Recommended
Processor	AMD Athlon XP 2200+ / Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz	AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ / Intel Core 2 Duo E4400
Memory	1024 MB	2048 MB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB / NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128MB	ATI Radeon HD2600 XT 256MB / NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT 256MB
Free Disk Space	8 GB	8 GB
Net Link	Broadband for multiplayer	Broadband for multiplayer

Scores

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

Gameplay	85	It's Unreal Tournament, refined, tweaked and shuffled around - some old features return, some are cut out and some new ones make an appearance. Unreal Tournament is the baseline benchmark for twitch-based online shooters, and with UT3 the series is still going strong. Just don't expect anything from the single player mode.
Graphics	88	Good and consistent visuals, but lacking a bit in the originality department - similarity to Gears of War is noticeable. Whether this is good or bad is an open issue; I didn't mind the change in style, but some UT fans might disagree.
Audio	82	Competent audio and voiceovers - does the job well enough, but fails to stand out and impress. Some problems with volume levels of music, effects and voices, but nothing you can't tweak manually.
Technology	90	Stable, runs well across a wide range of hardware and proves that the latest Unreal Engine can support SM2.0 cards just fine - assuming the developers can be bothered to include simplified shaders.

OVERALL

Worthy addition to the Unreal Tournament lineage. Doesn't impress with anything truly remarkable, but I guess most of the work has gone towards the Unreal Engine itself. A fine shooter with multitude of game modes and maps, just not quite as polished as Team Fortress 2.

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