Inside every gamer lurks a primitive voice that cuts through all the talk of ‘emergent gameplay’, meaningful narrative and originality, and incessantly reminds us of our base videogame urges. “Killz!” it barks, “speed!” it yelps, “guns!” it shrieks. This ‘inner- gamer’ grows more demanding with each passing year, and insists on bigger explosions, quicker speeds, and more bombastic methods to make things die. It usually gets what it wants as well, and staggers away from most experiences with its primal appetite well and truly sated. But every now and then a game arrives that not only satisfies our inner-gamer, but spanks it so violently it goes scampering off to our inner-child in tears. Such games usually bear the name “Unreal”.

Yes, Unreal Tournament III is finally here, and has managed to take its predecessors’ trademark blend of twitch gameplay, outlandish gunfights and unmitigated destruction into new and insane levels. However, before we tease you with vivid descriptions of ‘Heat Rays’, Dark Walkers and hoverboards, let’s get all the bad stuff out of the way with first, shall we?

Most critics consider the Unreal Tournament franchise as a series of focused, online, multiplayer experiences, and have always disregarded its rather ‘tacked-on’ single-player modes. However, developer Epic Games recently revealed that half of those who bought the last UT (UT 2004) never took it online. This probably explains why Unreal Tournament III’s single-player campaign – unlike any of its predecessors’ – has been generously fleshed out with cinematic cut-scenes, scripted characters and numerous missions. So it’s only right that we give it some special attention, and here’s where that ‘bad stuff’ gets in the way.

Firstly, you’ve got some hackneyed story concerning a generic steroid-bag protagonist, who joins a crack unit of troops in order to avenge the destruction of his city. What makes this story more banal than the sum of its parts is that the action transpires exactly like it does in multiplayer. Yep, we’re supposed to believe we’re fighting a war by playing ‘Capture The Flag’. But it’s okay, because you’re not actually stealing capturing a flag, oh no, you’re capturing a Field Lattice Generator (which looks exactly like a flag). Deathmatches are no longer about killing your enemies more times than they kill you, they’re about “destroying your enemy’s respawner”... by killing your enemies more times than they kill you.

Yes, we know it’s just sci-fihokum, but what happens in the cut-scenes and the mission briefings, seems so at odds with UTIII’s actual gameplay that it’s impossible to care about the story. Epic might as well have interspersed scenes from Neighbours and told us we’re capturing flags because Harold and Madge want an ad-hoc blanket to screw under.

What makes this even more irritating is that the team at Epic had a perfectly good single- player concept staring them in the face. Maybe we’re being naive, but if a game has a two-word title and one of those words is “tournament”, then perhaps it’s a good idea for its story to be about a tournament. This is the crazy approach UT 2004 took with its single-player mode, which required players to progress through the ranks of a bloodthirsty competition set on a deep space mining colony. It was a threadbare narrative, but at least it didn’t have to explain why you can’t put a flag inside a car and drive back to your base. If pilfering flags is such a vital part of intergalactic warfare, why haven’t they figured out how to fit one inside a tank?

But UTIII’s single-player campaign harbours irritations beyond its contrived story. Epic usually does a stellar job with its AI controlled bots, and we’re happy to say UTIII continues this fine tradition, but with one exception – Warfare mode. Warfare is basically a tweaked version of UT 2004’s Onslaught mode, which pitted two teams against each other on a map dotted with ‘nodes‘ that must be sequentially captured. When all the nodes are captured the opposing team’s ‘core’ is vulnerable to attack – destroy the core and you win the match.

Warfare mode adheres to this format, but introduces ‘The Orb’ – a glowing ball that instantaneously captures a node on contact. It’s a brilliant feature in multiplayer, infusing battles with an unstable ‘capture the flag’ dynamic. However, while the orb is genius in multiplayer, it becomes a hernia-inducing bauble of irritation during single-player, as computer-controlled team-mates who pick it up rapidly turn into the deathmatch equivalent of a Chuckle brother and go gallivanting off to a completely irrelevant node. What makes it even worse is that your team-mates always pick up the orb before you do, which means single-player Warfare missions can last for an eternity. So thanks Epic, for trying to give UT a proper single-player campaign, but frankly, we’d rather French-kiss a badger’s arse than play through it.

Right, thankfully that’s all the bad stuff out of the way. But we’ve now forced ourselves into a negative little corner and our only way out is to abruptly change tone like some creepy alcoholic. But bear with us, we promise there’s a sober reason for our two-facedness. You see, once you break free of UTIII’s single- player-shackles and venture all squinty-eyed into the bright lights of the internet, the game becomes a completely different beast. In fact, it becomes utterly sublime.

How many videogames let you jump into a tentacled aircraft (straight out of an H R Giger wet dream) and rocket into enemy territory, strafing neon green globules of explosive goo, before disembarking and stealing the enemy’s flag? How many videogames then let you hoverboard back to your own base under the cover of a raging sandstorm, while colossal enemy tripods thump across the battlefield, blasting out deadly Heat Rays in a frantic attempt to bring you down? Genius nearly always flirts with insanity and UTIII illustrates this point with lurid intensity. It’s utterly bonkers and throws so many vehicles, weapons and dynamicity at the player that it’s a miracle its battles remain so balanced, and it’s a miracle we’re able to play it without slowly curling up into a foetal position every five minutes.

You’re given a total of six modes to mess about with, including the aforementioned Warfare mode, as well as Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture The Flag, Vehicle Capture The Flag (VCTF) and Duel, which we hope are all fairly self-explanatory. Suffice to say, there’s plenty to get stuck into. The vehicles are so wonderfully implemented in Warfare and VCTF (see ‘Revving Up The Frags’ boxout) that these two modes are strong enough to jettison away from UTIII and form their own fully fledged game. But that doesn’t mean you’ll have less fun sans-wheels. In fact, we found ourselves habitually drawn to the claustrophobic and ruthless confines of UTIII’s classic deathmatches, during which we could rigorously test the most important part of any UT game: the weapons.

While veterans will still find themselves making a beeline for the rocket launcher’s spawn point, there have been some important changes to UT’s weapon cachet that are bound to affect your tactics. The most contentious being the reduced-strength Flak Cannon. Calm down, calm down, it can still gib a n00b in one hit, but you’ll have to get close enough to breathe on them. The Enforcer is back as a default weapon (which sucks) and so is the Impact Hammer (which is awesome). The Minigun has been replaced by the Stinger, which is able to pin your victim’s corpse to the scenery, and the Lightning Gun has completely vanished (and we don’t particularly miss it). Old favourites such as the Shock Rifle, Biorifle and Redeemer make a return virtually unchanged, and newcomers such as the time- slowing Stasis Field and the face-eating Spider Mine, ramp up the eccentricity levels to Colonel Gaddafiproportions.

Gameplay tweaks have also been made to suit the limitations of the PS3’s controller. This has been largely accomplished via a slightly slower movement speed and the introduction of a small recovery period after landing a jump. Constantly jumping while aiming and shooting is, of course, a massive part of playing UT, but incredibly hard to pull off with a control pad’s finicky analogue sticks. It therefore makes sense for Epic to reduce the player’s reliance on such a tactic, as many Sixaxis users will find themselves up against mouse and keyboarders, whose left thumbs are able to perennially hover over their Space button. The positive effect of these changes is that UTIII is an absolute peach to control with the Sixaxis. The downside is that UT veterans may find the slight dip in game speed adversely affects the accuracy of mouse scrolling, and the less jump-happy gameplay takes some getting used to.

So, there you have it. When it’s online, UTIII is brilliant and without doubt the best multiplayer experience on the PS3. It’s a blissful marriage of tense and brutal deathmatches, desperate and dramatic Capture The Flag runs and multi- layered vehicle warfare. The ability to install user-generated mods onto the PS3 – from fancy new skins for character models, to brand new levels and new game modes – breaks new ground for console games (though unfortunately the feature wasn’t ready in time for our review). The only thing preventing Unreal Tournament III from scoring any higher is its miserable single-player campaign, but if you have an internet connection that shouldn’t even be an issue.

Christopher Reynolds