Toxikk Review

The arena  first-person shooter. It’s been awhile since the subgenre has been anywhere near the public eye. Oh sure, some people will tell you that Overwatch, and Team Fortress 2 are arena first-person shooters. Mainly because they have some zippy movement, and outlandish characters. But they’re not arena first-person shooters in the classic sense. When many people wish for an arena shooter they mean the very late nineties, and early two thousands. Shooters like Quake 3 Arena, The Unreal Tournament series, and even a dab of Tribes.

PROS: UT2k4-esque movement. Great weapons. Great map design.  Wonderful tutorial.

CONS: Skill Class system could use minor tweaking. Needs a bit more identity.

FATALITY: This game takes a cue from UT99, and adds environmental fatalities.

For full disclosure, I bought the Early Access pass on Steam last year. I know it makes me a bit hypocritical as I never buy EA passes normally. There’s no guarantee a game will get finished, and so I generally wait. But in this case, I caught wind of it, remembered my days in the Maximum Carnage UT2k4 clan, and was wistful. I liked what I saw at the time, but never really talked about it much because there wasn’t much content. You can’t really review something that isn’t complete.

Now that the game is done, and I’ve thoroughly played the final release, I can. The final version, is really, really good. It does everything it advertises, bringing players a game that hearkens back to the old days. Which weren’t that old, as the last UT game came out in 2007. Still, nine years is a long time in video games. There were other attempts like Nexius, but they fell flat even if they weren’t bad for a variety of reasons. They didn’t have an interesting enough look, or they weren’t talked about enough to give them a look. Or they didn’t connect with the players for other reasons.

But with Toxikk, Reakktor, the game’s developer, seems to be trying to avoid some of those problems. For starters, there’s a demo. That gives you access to all of the game content. I’m serious. You can go download it, play to your heart’s content, and see if it’s something you’ll enjoy. But if you buy it outright you’ll get a lot of features you’re going to need if you plan on playing it with friends for a substantial amount of time.

But before I get into that, let me tell you what the game is all about. I’m sure there are some of you moaning “It’s an Arena FPS! We know!” But I’m sure there are also a number of people out there who have never played one of them. Toxikk is an arena first-person shooter. There is no single player here. The entire game is meant to be an arcade experience where you play against friends or strangers. The core game mode is a Death match mode. Basically it’s a free for all mode, where the person with the most kills wins when the time runs out, or whoever hits the score limit first.

But what makes the game a bit more challenging is that it uses a similar movement system to Unreal Tournament 2004’s. So instead of simply running around, and shooting people, you can make yourself harder to hit. You can double jumps. You can do massive long jumps. You can do short dodges. You can do cartwheels off of walls. This means enemies have to step up their aiming game. Likewise they can do the same thing. The maps are all designed with the movement system in mind. So you may need to use an elevator jump to get to a certain room. Or there may be a huge gap between rooftops you can’t simply jump over. But using the advanced tricks you do a dodge jump toward the left, then wall jump off of that surface to make the rest of the jump. This system makes travelling through the stages faster, and worth the time to master.

The movement system is paired with a pretty cool selection of weapons. You’ll start with a pistol, but you can run through the maps to find shotguns, sniper rifles, flame throwers, rocket launchers, plasma rifles, and even a nuclear rocket launcher. These weapons all have influences from Quake 3 Arena, and Unreal Tournament. The great thing is, they all have secondary fire modes. So you’ll have to master when to use a primary or a secondary mode. There are also health boxes, ammo boxes for each of the game’s weapons, along with armor pieces to pick up. You’ll also find some stages have a jetpack, health that takes your meter up to 200, and armor that does the same. In most cases you’ll need to know the movement system well enough to get to them though. They’re also in places where you’re a prime target. So there is a nice mix of risk, and reward. The key to victory in a Death match is to keep everyone else from getting the power ups, and good stuff. Even more than your goal of killing everyone. Because it makes them have to fight an uphill battle. All of these elements add layers of depth to what may seem simple on the surface.

But you aren’t only getting a Death match mode to play. There’s a Team Death match, called Squad Assault where one team goes after the other.  A point capture mode, where the game puts three points on the map for your team to hold. You walk over them, turn the spots into your side’s, and try to keep it. The challenge here is that if you have enough players for the map you’ll have three endless skirmishes. You’ll want to keep some team mates on each point to ensure the other side can’t simply walk up, and take it. Whichever side took points more times wins. So if you can hang onto them longer you’ll keep the odds leaning in your favor.

There is also a Capture the flag mode called Cell Capture. Basically one side tries to steal the other’s cell, then bring it back to their base. The other side is trying the same thing simultaneously. So across the different modes you have a variety of old-school game types. But it gets better for people who love the CTF, and Point Capture modes because some of the maps feature vehicles. Just as UT2k4, and UT3 had them, so does Toxikk. In this game you get a ship that operates a bit like a helicopter, a hover craft, a jeep, and a FREAKING GUNDAM. Each of them is a blast to use, and can add a lot of tension in the battles. The ships can shoot missiles from above, cut people down with a chain gun. The Gundam can step on people, take out several people at once. The hover craft can steam roll people. The jeep can have a rider take control of a giant gun on the back of it while they drive to get the cell.

But if all of the vehicles sound like they add insurmountable odds, they surprisingly don’t. For one, vehicles all have fairly low health. Even the Gundam. If you’re good enough at maneuvering with dodges, jumps, and the other movement tricks, you can avoid a lot of the firepower. Most of the vehicles will go down from a handful of missiles. If you’re inside a vehicle when it blows up, the other team is also getting a frag. In Cell Capture, you also can’t drive or pilot a vehicle if you’ve picked up the enemy cell. You have to make it back either on foot, or on your hover bike. And if you choose to use the hover bike, you can’t shoot any of your weapons. So you’re pretty crippled, and really have to hope your team can cover you when you’re bringing back a cell.

If the movement system sounds rather daunting to you, Toxikk does have a pretty well thought out tutorial. The very first lesson is just the movement system, and basic weapon handling. From there each lesson gives you a handle on, more, and more. I would recommend every player to at least try the tutorial before going online. Because it can at the very least give you  a handle on the basics. It will also force you to acknowledge when someone is honestly that good. Seeing someone clear a rooftop jump, while shooting down three enemies, and landing unscathed can feel intimidating.

But that intimidation is why Toxikk has a Skill Class system. As you play the game it measures what you’re doing, and will give you a rating between 1, and 12. This is always in flux. So you can have a ranking of 8, play ten really bad rounds, and find yourself a 7. Likewise, when you improve you’ll go up. This was put in place because the developers realize a lot of people won’t have fun if they’re constantly getting crushed by 12’s with no hope of learning everything. When you go on the server browser in the full game (more on that later) you’ll see servers allow some ranks, but not others. One server may be ranked 1-4, another may be 8-12, with others in between. You have to be within those ranks to join them.

That said, there are servers that don’t utilize the system. So if you would rather learn by playing against the heavyweights than training against  a cruiserweight division, you do have that as an option. Unranked servers are also great for groups of friends because you don’t have to shut out that friend who is too green, or that other friend who is a seasoned veteran.

Separate from the Skill Class, is point system is an MXP experience point system, and this isn’t really all too important. But if you enjoy the game, and play fairly enough, over time you can increase this number for some cosmetic armor options for your character. There’s an assortment of different heads, torso options, and camouflage options you can use to customize your look. Everyone can change the color of their combatant. But people who like the game can add a few more tweaks over time. The coolest being a fearsome skull mask. This is one of the few grievances I have though because nothing about the core game requires any grinding. Perhaps it was put in for fans of that sort of thing, without effecting the game play. But it just seems odd. Since everything is open anyway, why make costume pieces on a ladder?

It doesn’t matter too much though because everything gives you boatloads of MXP. Fragging someone. Completing a tutorial. Utilizing trick jumps in a match. Piloting a vehicle. Virtually everything aside from dying gives you some points. You even get MXP in team modes for assists. Hell, if you’re bad at the game, but just really want a cosmetic item bad enough you can play against bots on the lowest possible difficulty.

Now people who just want to play the core game can use the free demo. It isn’t timed. You aren’t blocked from any of the levels or weapons or movement. It’s all there. But if you enjoy it, or have friends you want to play it with, it’s well worth picking up the e-tail version. Buying the game means you’ll get a server browser. So you can actually find a server you, and your friends can all join without having to worry about an outlier not being able to get in because it was a certain rank limit. Paying customers also get the ability to host their own server, be it dedicated or by playing peer-to-peer through a router. You can set up private games over the internet too.  There are other perks for buying the full game too. You get to use the character customization I talked about, as well as the game’s SDK.

What does that mean? Well you can make your own content. New stages, modes, characters, whatever you want. If you’re proficient enough in using Unreal Engine 3, the sky is the limit. Because of this, even if you don’t plan on designing mods, or stages you benefit. Buying the game means that you can also download, and install mods other players make through the Steam workshop. So there is a wealth of potential stuff you have access to if you buy the game outright.

Unreal Tournament games were played for years after release due to the prevalence of new maps, modes, skins, characters, weapons, and other content made by fans. The same could be said for the Doom, and Quake games. So hopefully, Reakktor Studios’ insistence on taking the path set by Epic, and id many years ago will have a similar payoff.

It all hinges on a player base sticking around. At launch some of those fears were quelled as a lot of people seem to have discovered the demo, and seem to be liking it. Toxikk is a fun game I think everyone should at least try. It’s a beautiful game too. Reakktor has pushed this iteration of UE3 about as far as it can probably go. There are a lot of cool visual tricks, and filters they’ve utilized to make it keep pace with even some of the newer games on bigger budget engines coming out. The environments are gorgeous. Great textures, wonderful designs, the entire world looks like it takes place in the same universe. Even the homage levels Dekk, and Cube feel like they belong here even though their layouts are taken straight from Unreal Tournament (Deck was in all of the games), and Doom 2 (Dead Simple).

There are a wealth of menu options too. You can tweak all kinds of graphics settings, turning off some of the visual fidelity, lighting effects, bloom, and motion blur if you’re on fairly modest hardware. You can even turn off the frame rate limiter which starts on 60. But for a game of this nature you should really push it as high as it will go. It’s a much more responsive experience, and worth dealing with some tearing if you have a standard 60hz monitor.

You can also customize your entire HUD. The colors of the weapons on your selection bar. The crosshairs on your weapons, you can  even turn off your HUD entirely if you want. The hit markers when shooting someone, the size of them, the sound it makes. All of it. That’s besides the fact you can set whatever key binds you wish, weapon priority order, and a whole lot more. Toxikk is not giving you a shortage of performance or personal style options here.

The audio is one of the weaker points in Toxikk. The sound effects are actually really good. But the soundtrack  could stand to be markedly better. The game tries to accent everything with a score of thumping techno, and electronica. But nothing really stands out. There aren’t any catchy loops, or hooks the way its inspiration possessed. UT, and its sequels had great songs like Go Down that would be stuck in your head even months after playing. Even people who aren’t fans of electronica can enjoy the UT OST. Toxikk’s soundtrack isn’t bad. But it feels too generic at times. It fits the atmosphere of the game, but doesn’t do much beyond that.

The only other issue I have with Toxikk  is that while the character designs are really cool, they aren’t anything you haven’t seen in other games. They could use a little bit more personality, and perhaps some fleshed out back story. The most you hear about is that there are two factions; the Drayos, and the Exocom. There isn’t much told about either group, or the world. While I do think it is imperative any multiplayer game, focus on the actual game being fun (which this absolutely does.) it could have given players a little bit more detail on its universe. It may have gotten some players a little bit more invested, by having them care about the world. The UT games did this well with much of the story being put into the world, and in bios for the characters. There was also an intro in them to explain the setting. All without having to make people play through a campaign.

That said, I still highly recommend Toxikk. If you miss playing old school arena FPS games I think you’re going to like it immensely. If you’ve never played Q3A, or a UT game but love playing competitive shooters in other subgenres you may like it. In the short time it’s been out there are already plenty of new players learning, and adapting. That’s in addition to veterans of the old games who have discovered it. If you’ve wondered where this style of game has been, or you’re someone tiring of modern progression systems Toxikk is definitely worth looking into. If after my long-winded review, you’re still on the fence check out the demo. You have nothing to lose by doing so.

Final Score: 8 out 10

DOOM (2016) Review

Alas, I am late once again. But perhaps I can still bring something new to the table. A lot of people jumped into the new game almost instantaneously. Many claiming it was a full on return to form. Open, vast stages. Swarms of bad guys. All of the stuff Doom 3 was missing. Others claimed it did none of those things. That it was blasé. After spending some time playing through it, I don’t think either camp is entirely accurate.

PROS: Fun, arcade gameplay. Atmosphere. A wealth of performance options.

CONS: Still not quite the DOOM you remember. Creator tools lacking.

ROTT: They took a page from Interceptor’s Rise Of The Triad reboot, adding to the fun.

This version of DOOM went through a very long development hell period. It started. Then restarted. Then id software was bought out by Zenimax. Then John Carmack left the studio to go do Oculus Rift. The game restarted again, then focus veering more old-school. It came out a few months ago, and here we are.

DOOM gives us the two modes we’ve come to expect. A one player campaign, and a multiplayer game. It also has some tools for players to make their own stages. As well, as a host of performance options for those playing on a computer. Though, it goes further than most games in this regard on game systems as well. For those of you who do pick this up for your computer, you’ll find a wealth of settings to play with. The one I saw the biggest difference with, was the rendering selection. You can use the long running OpenGL renderer, or you can use the newer Vulkan renderer.

From what I understand the Vulkan renderer uses far fewer resources than OpenGL does. It shows. Just to see how hard the game could push my middle-aged GTX 760 I tried the game on maxed settings using both renderers. On the tried, and true OpenGL it was an absolute slide show. Single digits the entire time, and going to a huge battle was too much for the card to handle. Trying that out on the Vulkan renderer got me into the high teens in fire fights, and the low twenties when I didn’t have much of anything going on.

Mind you, I still couldn’t play through the entire game maxed. But it goes to show what an improvement this was on my configuration. So if you do buy this for a computer with an older CPU, and GPU You can probably run with higher settings on the Vulkan, and have it look closer to what consoles see, rather than running with everything set minimally on OpenGL trying to break the 30 fps or 60 fps standards.

With the firefights as frantic as they are in this game, you’re really going to want to get the frame rate as high as possible. You can see, and feel a difference as things are not only smoother looking, but more responsive feeling too. Some other settings you can take a hard look at are the lighting effects, and the resolution scale. DOOM seems to be a big fan of video card memory. So if you have an older card like mine with less than 4GB VRAM on it, you’ll have to turn some of these off or down a bit.

Fortunately, at everything aside from the absolute rock bottom settings, DOOM looks spectacular. At medium details it looks about on par with what you might see on the consoles, at high, slightly better. nearly night, and day, maxed out. You don’t have to have the latest, and greatest to run it on Ultra. But you also can’t do it effectively on a card that was midrange 5 years ago. Again, if you have a really old card, you’ll probably want to eschew the nice visuals in favor of a higher frame rate. The shootouts in this game really do benefit greatly from performance. If that means some jaggy lines, or blurry textures it’s worth the hit in visuals.

Whatever settings you ultimately go with, One of the things this game does well is the atmosphere. The stages all look creepy, whether you’re on a base on Mars, or in a chasm in Hell. The texture work is phenomenal. The character models are terrifyingly beautiful. All of the bad guys from the old games have been translated very well. Better than you could imagine. As great as these characters looked in DOOM, and DOOM II, they were still a little bit cartoonish. Here, most of them retain their designs while somehow coming off as a lot more fearsome. Some of the DOOM 3 style even makes its way in, particularly with the Hell Knights.

While I think the claustrophobic nature of DOOM 3 leads it to being the creepier game, this one still has plenty of moments where you may find yourself uncomfortable or disturbed. Again, doing this almost entirely using its environments. It also has a pretty great ambient industrial metal soundtrack that fits the action fairly well. It will intensify as battles become more difficult, and then subside when things calm down a bit.

This version of DOOM tells its story pretty much the way DOOM 3 did. You’ll get cut scenes involving the main three characters. Samuel Hayden, one of the heads of the UAC, Olivia Pierce its top researcher, and the flagship DOOM GUY, you play as. If you only follow these cut scenes you’ll find a similar retelling of the story told in DOOM 1, and then again in DOOM 3. Once again, an experiment on Mars has created a portal to Hell allowing monsters to kill everyone. This time though, the UAC is shown as complicit in knowing about it, and justifying it by pointing to the technology they’ve created because of it. But when they realize they can’t control the situation, you get to show up.

Of course you’re having none of it, and you run off to stop a mad scientist blood cult leader through a 13 stage campaign. Like DOOM 3, along the way you can find logs that fill in back story, and if you find enough of them, you’ll discover that this game tries to tie all of the DOOM games together. Beyond that, there are a lot of Easter eggs to be found, giving nods to the old games. The most impressive of them are hidden retro stages. Just like Interceptor did with their Rise Of The Triad reboot, and Flying Wild Hog did with Shadow Warrior’s. You can enter these old levels from 1993 if you find a hidden lever in every stage. Each stage has a corresponding retro level hidden within.

But there are other eggs. Like DOOM 3’s Soul cube, DOOM 2’s Icon of sin, and even a DOOM 1 themed clone of Bejeweled. This game has a lot of love for fans of the original games on display. But they rarely get in the way of the current story on display. The game also is the first in the series to really give your character personality. The most you saw in previous games was an end game screen, or a cutaway. Here, you punch things. You kick things. In doing so, you point out the wrongs of the UAC without saying a single word. It’s pretty effective in spite of the silence.

Speaking of breaking things, the combat, and mechanics really shine here. They’re a lot of fun, and this game is all the better for having them. Every weapon in the game has weight to it, and destroys enemies in the most visceral ways. Your hand gun is the pea shooter you had in the original, except now it has unlimited bullets, and a charge shot. All of the other guns from DOOM 2 come back, including the Super shotgun. They all dole out a similar level of damage, and the zippy movement makes the battles feel very much closer to the old games than other action games have.

DOOM also expands things a bit with its Glory kill system. Once you deal enough damage to a monster, it will flash. Press the melee button within a specific window of time, and you’ll get a gristly canned animation. During these, you kill monsters with your bare hands in savage ways to get health replenishments. You can turn them off, but honestly they don’t break up the flow of combat at all. On paper it sounds like something that would. But in practice it really doesn’t. Plus the game brings back the power ups from the old games. So you can walk in sludge, max health, and kill monsters in one punch.

The new movement system almost feels like Metroid Prime at times. You can jump up, climb onto ledges, and eventually double jump. Unfortunately, there are a couple of minor problems I had with the campaign. First of all, as wonderful as the environments are, they still aren’t as open as the original games’ were. True, this game is still a far cry from the hallway, cut scene, shoot out, hallway, cut scene routine many games have. But it isn’t as open. In the old games you could spend three hours on a single stage exploring it. While it’s also true that the key card system added some linearity to them in the sense you needed to go in a door order, it’s less here. There may be a side path you discover, only to find it leads to the same place the main path does. There are still colored doors that require a key, but things just don’t feel nearly as labyrinthine. It’s pretty obvious where you need to go. You won’t need to find the auto map, or a specific path because everything is laid out. I will give a couple of the levels a lot of credit though for their excellent verticality. These stages involve a lot of climbing, and require players to really pay attention. They also feature that excellent platforming I mentioned above.

The other issue I had with the campaign is that things can feel a bit formulaic a couple of stages in. Throughout the game there are these monster teleporters called Gore nests. You have to destroy them, then fight a bunch of monsters in a quasi-horde mode. The thing is they place these several times over in a few of them. So you’ll pretty much figure out that you’ll go to a key area, maybe find a weapon. Then go to a room with a Gore nest, break it, and fight a horde. Then two rooms later, find another Gore nest, break it, and fight a horde.

Fortunately, everything about the combat is very fun, and the campaign doesn’t over stay its welcome either. So you likely won’t mind. At least not enough where you won’t finish it. Plus with all of the secrets hidden in the game, you may even replay it several times over to find everything. These two issues don’t ruin the experience by any means. But if you come into this game expecting THE ULTIMATE DOOM with prettier graphics, you aren’t quite going to get that.

Still, it’s also much better than some people give it credit for. Even with its levelling system, it still delivers a challenging action game. Yes, this iteration of DOOM has a levelling system. You get two types of points. Points for your Samus Aran-esque  suit, and points for killing bad guys. Praetor suit points are usually found on fallen guards throughout the game. You take flash drives off of their bodies, and plug them into yourself. There are also energy balls you can find in giant tanks. between them you can beef yourself up over time, either by expanding health, armor, or ammo bars.

The other points you earn while playing can be used to put upgrades onto your different weapons. You can add rockets to your assault rifle, or a lock on to your rocket launcher, and so on, and so forth. You don’t have to use any of this stuff if you want to get closer to the old days, but there is a lot of challenge even if you do choose to use them. One other thing this game does well, is making health, and ammo scarce to pick up. Using your chainsaw (which only has so much gasoline) on monsters can often get you more ammo but you must have a certain amount of gas for each enemy type. There’s also a robot merchant hidden about in stages where you can buy secondary fire modes for you arsenal by spending your weapon points.

You can also find hidden runes in stages that send you to these challenge rooms. Completing these will unlock other tasks you can perform during your play through. Completing those can get you achievements, and other bonus perks. On the lower difficulty settings you probably don’t need to find all of these things. But on the harder ones you’ll probably need to. Because the difficulty ramps up pretty quickly.

All of this, again makes the combat a nice balance of risk, and reward. DOOM is a very fun campaign to play through.

After you play through the campaign, you’ll probably want to check out the multiplayer. What you’re given here is also pretty good. Mostly. On the plus side, the modes all take full advantage of the mechanics. You can climb, double jump, and move the way you do in single-player. You can customize your player model the way you can in some other games, putting preset textures on your model, changing colors, choosing armor parts.  It plays with the pace, and frantic nature an arena shooter should.

What is going to turn many people off though, is that it uses a lot of modern-day features. There is a ranking system, and so weapons, and other items are locked off until you can grind away long enough to use them. You have a class system, with three classes. Beyond that you can choose a load out like in many modern games.These kinds of design decisions take away from the arena shooter vibe many people wanted.

The original game’s multiplayer threw you into a Death match, or Team Death match. Everyone had to scurry to find whatever weapon they could, and there were no restrictions. Once they had a weapon it was about map control. Finding a path that took them to each of the power ups, and keeping opponents from ever getting them. That was part of the strategy. If an opponent got wise, they changed their strategy, to find their own path, and that’s where the skirmishes would happen. Everyone had access to everything in the map, the challenge was keeping everyone else from having things. It’s what arena shooters, as a genre were built on. Games like Quake 3 Arena, and Unreal Tournament took that ball from the original DOOM, and ran with it.

So for those looking to relive the feel of the old DOOM Death match in an updated setting, this is going to be disappointing. It isn’t terrible. It uses the assets well, it runs fairly briskly. But the modern conventions do hinder more than help. Why? Because it doesn’t do much to differentiate itself from other modern games. There’s a cool rune you can pick up to turn into a demon, getting you some easy frags. But beyond that it doesn’t do anything all that different from other games. Going back to the original’s simple, but effective multiplayer oddly enough, would have made it stand out a bit more.

Still, if you want to check it out, there are a fair number of people still playing it, and you can get some new content for it if you don’t mind buying some DLC. Again, it isn’t a bad mode by any means. But it likely won’t be the go to multiplayer shooter for most people with so many better options out there.

One area DOOM does try to stand out a bit is with its Snap map feature. Here, you get a utility that will let you take a number of pre-made rooms, and put them in whatever order you wish. It reminds me a lot of the level editor in Timesplitters 2. You can quickly make a map, and you can even sector tag sections of it. So you can plot how enemies behave or  tweak the store mechanics for the aforementioned point systems within your map. You can also choose to make a map a single player map, or a map for multiplayer.

But, like the multiplayer mode, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Especially since DOOM games all had countless mods, and maps made for them in the past. There are still custom maps, and other content being done for the original game. All with their own textures, sound effects,  music, and even features. Creative types, especially on PC are so used to doing full-blown mods that Snap map is going to be a huge step backwards. On consoles, it may fare a little bit better where it was probably focusing on to begin with. Again, it isn’t a bad feature. But it could have been much more attractive had it been a more fully realized set of mod tools.

Overall, I still recommend DOOM to any fan of the series. It does a lot to tie the games together. It gives you a fun, and challenging campaign with a lot of fan service. There’s a fair amount of replay value for those who want to find every last secret or get every last achievement. The other attractions are fun, but for most, they’re not going to hold one’s attention for very long. But for anybody who loves DOOM, or action games in general, check it out.

Final Score: 7 out of 10

 

Unreal Tournament Retrospective Part 4

Unreal Tournament III was, and is the game that tried to be all things to the entire fandom. Sadly, the fandom didn’t ever see it.

Pros: Wondrous UE3 visuals, Homogenized movement, Worthy gameplay additions.

Cons: Botched launch. Steep (at the time ) requirements. Gamespy.

What The Poop? It’s rated M so why the watered down announcements, and taunts?

It’s no secret that Unreal Tournament, and Unreal Tournament 2004 were both major successes for Epic Games. Both games won all kinds of awards from publications, and websites like PC Gamer, Computer Gaming World, and Gamespot. Both games were featured in high-profile tournaments for huge prizes. Both games gave other FPS makers like id Software some really stiff competition.

But what the casual observer may not have noticed, was that Unreal Tournament’s player base was fragmented between the two games. Many gamers felt that UT2k4’s adrenaline pills, and required mastery of trick jumping may have been a little too unreal. They preferred to be grounded, and able to dodge firepower. But without looking like Keanu Reeves bouncing around in another Matrix movie.

Meanwhile, others had felt that the new additions 2k4 brought to the table increased the skill level for those who wanted to play seriously. They enjoyed the new Onslaught mode. They relished in the movement system, staying just out of firing range before returning fire, and scoring high frag counts. Going back to standard UT felt backwards.

Still, there were plenty who enjoyed both games enough to go back, and forth.

With UT3 Epic was whetting their appetite for console development. Sure, in the past UT had been ported to the PS2, and Dreamcast. UT2k3 had also been on the Xbox as Unreal Championship, and they had done an exclusive Xbox Unreal Championship 2 which was met with mixed reaction. But those weren’t done entirely in-house, and UE3 was poised to power many console games. So with UT3 Epic had to not only please fans, but also try to make a game they felt console players would give a chance to.

Upon looking at the fragmented fan base, Epic decided to make a bridge game. An Unreal Tournament that would please the diehards who never left the original game, as well as the 2k4 purists. But they also wanted to make something Playstation 3, and Xbox 360 only types would be able to play without giving up in frustration.

UT3 features some stunning visuals. There are some really beautiful environments, and some of the classic UT maps from previous games like the iconic Deck make a triumphant return. Even seven years after it’s release the textures, lighting effects, sounds, and animation will impress. The uninitiated may pick this up, install it on their PC or console, and wonder why this game didn’t take off.

To answer their question the game really did do what was advertised, but not entirely.

UT3’s movement system is indeed a hybrid of UT, and UT2k4. Like UT the gravity is more grounded. Gone are the superhuman double jumps, replaced with a double jump that feels like a jump, and a half. One of the most vocal oppositions was the removal of the dodge jump. In 2k4 a player could tap any direction to dodge. Pressing jump immediately afterwards would allow them to jump very far. In some maps this may have cleared a room. To be fair, UT3’s maps are designed around this new system, but it somehow turned off both the UT, and 2k4 fan bases despite how well it really does homogenize the two systems. For instance, even though dodge jump is gone, wall jumping is still here. It’s still possible to cart-wheel over rockets, goo, and flak balls. Just don’t expect to be halfway down the hall afterwards.

UT3’s weapons also changed to accommodate the rest of the game. In previous games the Bio Rifle would also spray on the floor, or you could fire a single full charged shot for what was often times an instant kill. In UT3 A fully charged shot instead sticks to opponents, and drains their health. Sometimes still leading to an instant kill. The Rocket launcher reverted back to its original UT firing modes, while the Flak Cannon’s arc was changed. The Shock Rifle’s combo attack was also tweaked to slightly reduce the blast radius. Unreal Tournament III also brings back the command to feign your own death. This is really only effective on new players however, as series’ veterans will shoot corpses.

One of the more unpopular changes however was the character designs. Presumably to appeal to the Xbox crowd (Which ironically got the game last), UT3 almost seems to take place in the Gears Of War universe. Gone are the over the top races of 2k4, and standard science fiction designs of the original UT’s races. Instead characters have big bulky Space Marine designs eerily similar to those of GoW. If you are coming into this game late, don’t expect to see the UT1 styled Necris designs, or UT2k4’s Mr.Crow, Egyptian costumes, or other designs. Longtime fans turned up their noses at this. To be fair, the Robots are back (albeit in a new look), and the new Krall models are playable. You can also do some light costume edits on your models, choosing boots, belts, shoulder pads, and visors. But it is a far cry from the variety of earlier games.

Unreal Tournament III brings over the standard Death match, Team Death match, and Capture The Flag. There is also a Vehicular Capture The Flag that introduces vehicles to the mode. One of the most popular modes in UT2k4 was Onslaught which was updated, and called Warfare. In Warfare nodes are still captured, but now there are orbs added into the mix. Orbs can be carried to the nodes to more quickly set them up or buff their defense shields.

Doing so is important because it makes things that much more difficult for the enemy team to take the nodes down. Every node becomes a frantic battle for control. By capturing enough of these areas, your team will lower the force fields around the opposing team’s reactor core. Once the defenses are down you can attack the reactor core until it is destroyed.  Hover boards have also been added to every character in the mode allowing players to get around faster than walking if they can’t get into a vehicle.

 

Also while not an official mode, Death match now had stock maps with vehicles for Vehicular Death match. While some scoffed, and still scoff at this idea, it is actually one that works. Furthermore, it keeps people who simply like to goof around, and wreak havoc with vehicles out of the Warfare mode. This can relieve some of the more team oriented player base. Also other games such as Battlefield Bad Company 2 seem to have taken a cue from UT3, putting vehicles in their DM variants for likely similar reasoning.

Unreal Tournament III also has a campaign, that tells the story of series’ newcomer Reaper. In it the Necris return to destroy an outpost colony by releasing an army of Krall. Reaper’s group; The Ronin, are slain. After being rescued, He trains with Malcolm to get revenge.

 

The campaign isn’t a traditional one either. Instead of an 8 hour single player game you will play through a tournament ladder. This is to get you accustomed to how each of the multiplayer modes work. Some of the ladder stages may throw in an objective to advance the story. But it mainly serves as a tutorial. Along the way, you can complete side challenges to obtain cards. The cards can be cast to make other missions easier. It is possible to play the campaign in Co-op, but most players will likely stick to the other multiplayer modes.

Love or hate these changes UT3 is still a very fun, and very good game. Console players who are intrigued will find something completely different from the umpteenth Call of Duty clone, and open-minded fans of the previous games will still find a lot to like. The console versions of Unreal Tournament III are much better than the ports of UT, and UT2k3 on previous consoles. The Playstation 3 version has all of the content from the initial launch of the PC version. It can also run mods or content PC players make with the editor. It can’t run the editor itself, and the mods have to be specifically made for the PS3 in mind. Still, for fans with both versions, or PS3 owners who have friends who mod on the PC it is a nice feature. The PS3 also received some the updates, and patches over time. The Xbox 360 version came late, and with some exclusive content. However due to Microsoft’s Xbox Live restrictions at the time didn’t get as many updates. It also cannot run mods made by the community on the PC version.

Unfortunately the biggest problem for even the most devoted fan at release was a buggy launch. UT3 had a demo come out shortly before release. Despite feedback from a vocal community, UT3 launched in a state not too different from the demo. There were crashes, instabilities, and performance issues for the first couple of months. Also while it was heavily promoted that the PC version editor would be able to make levels PS3 version buyers could use, there were also complications with this feature. It also used Gamespy for matchmaking which reduced a lot of the ease of server browsing with its account system. Strangely, the salty yet funny award announcements had been changed to substandard PG rated names. Despite the fact the game had about as much gore as ever.

Finally, the system requirements were criticized for being steep at the time of release. Crytek’s Crysis came out around the same time, and was berated for the same reason. This, coupled with a glitchy launch hampered early sales of the game. Also homogenized gameplay seemed to fracture the fan base further rather than bring it together.

Months later Epic was able to get out a comprehensive fix for the PC version with a lot of free bonus content added. Called the Titan Pack, it fixed many of the glitches the original release had. It also cleaned up performance issues, and on top of that added new maps, and weapon balances to the game. Titan pack also added Titan mode. In this fun mode players could turn into a giant if they met certain conditions during a game. It really is a lot of fun, and is definitely worth checking out. The Titan Pack also brought a new UI that PC gamers should have had during launch. Now they could change all of the various visual settings the original release locked them out of.

Unreal Tournament III is a great game that didn’t really get the attention it deserved. Playing it today certainly gives that impression. It runs fast, it has the wild weapons the series is known for. The modes are highly enjoyable, and the PC version still includes the Unreal Editor for free. This a great deal for anybody even remotely interested in-game design as you get to play with the very same utility many games are still being made on. While not as plentiful as previous games, one can still download all kinds of community driven content for PC, and PS3.

If you’re a PC gamer who missed or skipped UT3 when it originally came out in 2007 you may find yourself pleasantly surprised if you play it today. With its beautiful graphics, fast paced gameplay, and hundreds of hours of free content one can’t help but wonder what could have been had there not been so many missteps during its original publishing.

For Xbox 360, and Playstation 3 owners in their teens, and early twenties who have only experienced Epic’s later franchises, UT3 is a great way to see what shooters were like in the days of hyper competitive old, fast paced, difficult, yet fair.

PC gamers can get this underrated entry on Steam, While Console users may be able to find it in bargain bins for a comparable price. Epic is also transitioning away from the Gamespy service so UT3 players can still find games when Gamespy shuts down.

Final Score: 8/10

 

Unreal Tournament Retrospective Part 1

Unreal became a household name back in 1998 when it challenged Quake II, Half-Life, and SiN for the First Person Shooter crown. It had a solid storyline for a blockbuster game. It had a cool universe of its own, with numerous races, and factions. But most importantly, it had one of the better multiplayer death match modes anyone had seen.

Unreal, and Quake II’s multiplayer modes became so popular in fact, they exceeded the popularity of the campaigns. So iD would follow-up Quake II with Quake III Arena. Q3A was an entirely multiplayer affair. It was fast. It was frantic. It became an instant hit with competitive gamers everywhere.

While this was going on, Epic realized while creating Unreal’s multiplayer focused expansion pack that it was now advanced enough it could be its own game.

Unreal Tournament

The first in a line of one of gaming’s most popular arena shooters. This is where it all began.

PROS: Customization. Variety. Mod tools. Everything.

CONS: Graphics haven’t aged well.

HOLY WMD BATMAN: The Redeemer.

Unreal Tournament takes place in the same universe as Unreal. In it, the New Earth Government, partners with Liandri corporation to devise a bloody gladiator sport with characters representing each of the races in the Unreal mythos. As such you get to choose from a bunch of races, and characters to use.

Unreal Tournament is a vintage game that holds up very well for both original fans, as well as newcomers who missed it. UT was, and is novel because instead of simply copying Quake III’s “Faster! Faster! Faster!” philosophy it instead blazes its own trail. How does it differentiate itself from the competition?

The first observation a new player would note is the weapons. Instead of a standard hand gun, shotgun, machine gun, rail gun, and rocket launcher along with laser or plasma guns UT mixes things up.

Unreal Tournament does have some stock weapons in it, but even those are set apart by their alternate firing modes. Pistols can be fired gangsta style. The minigun can have faster spins with less accuracy but more power, or standard spins with less power but more accuracy. Rockets can lock on to targets.

UT does feature a sniper rifle too. But don’t go into it thinking it is going to be an easy job getting headshots from afar. Because of the frantic nature of the game staying in one spot camping away is usually a bad strategy. It’s only a matter of time before you’re spotted, and taken down.

Science fiction themed weapons get outright bizarre. The shock rifle can shoot slow-moving orbs with its secondary function, that can then be shot with its primary function causing it to explode taking out enemies in its wake.

The flak  cannon can fire shrapnel or grenades. The biorifle can either pepper an area with green sludge or slowly charge a single shot that will kill many combatants in one hit. This also fires on a slow arc, so it takes time to master.

The ripper is easily the most sadistic gun in the game. Firing giant buzz saws, players unfortunate enough to be hit in the neck will be decapitated. Moreover, the blades ricochet off of walls. So really skilled players can use that knowledge to rack up frag counts. The secondary fire won’t decapitate. But it does have farther knock back.

The redeemer is the showcase weapon. Firing the primary shot launches a nuclear missile. Firing the secondary shot lets players remotely control that missile, driving it into a crowd of potential victims.

If you do run out of ammo UT has you covered with the impact hammer. It’s essentially a jack hammer you can use to explode enemies, or boost jump at the cost of some damage.

But weapons are only a small part of the equation. The biggest contribution Unreal Tournament makes is the ability to dodge. Unreal Tournament allows you to double tap any direction to do a sidestep or a roll. This becomes key when playing because in a full game, there will be projectiles flying around everywhere.

Dodges can also get you moving down hallways faster than running in some cases. Making movement a really big reason why many still play UT to this day.

Unreal Tournament has a few modes that are staples today. There are of course the typical Death match, and Team Death match modes. These work the way they do in every other shooter, players or teams trying to get in more kills than the opponent until either the kill limit is reached or the time runs out. Last Man Standing also appears with every player fighting until only one remains.

Assault is one of Unreal Tournament’s modes that set it apart upon release. This mode has an attacking, and defending team with the attackers setting up targets to be destroyed. This has been adapted, and retooled in a number of other games. But it was here it really came into its own.

Domination is another mode that has been retooled by other games. In it teams try to hold control points on the map for as long as possible. The more points held, the higher the score becomes. This leads to skirmishes around the points as teams rally to increase their scores before the time expires.

Capture The Flag is also here, and while UT didn’t invent the mode, it is one of the most popular series to play that mode in. This is because of some spectacular map design.

In fact map design is so memorable that many of them reappear in sequels as well as many fan made mods for other games.  Maps like Deck 16, Fractal, and Face are prime examples of the games’ glory.

The music is also very memorable. Tracks like Go Down will never be forgotten by the fans of this series for a reason. The soundtrack is full of electronica crafted for the environments throughout the maps. It matches the tone of Unreal nicely.

While the blocky visuals, and lower quality textures won’t wow you the way they wowed audiences in 1998 the customization options just might. Over the years a lot of PC games have really watered down the options. These days you can turn on or off certain visual effects, set detail levels, set your resolution, and whether or not you want to have v-sync enabled.

UT takes it further. You can change every one of those options as well as fine tune your HUD, crosshairs (You can give each weapon its own) as well as a bunch of other under the hood options. You can also punch in engine commands by pulling down the console. It’s sad to see in retrospect how much tinkerers no longer have the ability to tweak without going into a buried .ini file somewhere in a directory.

Unreal Tournament (and its successors) also gives you the tools you need to make your own stages, mods, and other user content. That’s on top of the 16 years of community mods you can still find today.

Going back to Unreal Tournament now will give you mixed emotions. On the one hand the old visuals aren’t going to wow you at all. On the other hand the tight gameplay, advanced movement, and reflex requirement will make you wonder why such a fun, and rewarding style had to fade out.

Still, even 16 years after its release, Unreal Tournament has a small but devoted group of people still firing it up. Do check it out if you have even the slightest interest in video game history.

Final Score: 8 out of 10