Unreal Tournament 3 Beta Impressions

My other ride is a Goliath…

Of course, the hoverboard isn’t the only vehicle in the game and there’s plenty of other ways to get around the impressively sized maps.

My personal favourite method of transport is the Scorpion, a nippy little buggy with two methods of attack. The first is a cannon mounted on the back which launches a pulse attack, the second is the scorpion-like claws from which the vehicle derives its name. The claws are razor sharp blades which open from the side of the vehicle and decapitate anyone in your path.

Just as with the vehicles previous incarnation in the last game though, you have to be careful with these blades – it’s all too easy to catch them on a wall, ripping them off and damaging your crippled pet.

The vehicles in the game are all stunning to look at though, with fantastically detailed textures and even better looking weapons.

Each of the vehicles is well balanced too, with a range of advantages and disadvantages to every single one. Practically all of the vehicles have returned from the previous games and the pros and cons are all pretty predictable, so there are no real surprises to be had, but they all handle great and look even better.


They all handle well too and most can be taken over by one or more players, with the second player usually either unlocking a secondary attack or taking control of the primary.

Tanks like the Goliath are slow, as you’d expect, but are great at destroying other vehicles. They lack power against fast-moving players, especially if they’re on a hoverboard. However, if a second player jumps in then they can take control of a secondary attack, a mounted machine gun which is handy for laying down covering fire and stopping lone-players bringing you down with a well placed AVRIL missile.

Airborne vehicles handle in the exact opposite way. They’re very fast, but not well armoured and can be quickly bought down by a missile or two. Players are told when a missile locks on to them, but the air vehicles tend to be very difficult to control in our experience and it’s often hard to lose altitude and get behind cover when you need to.

Then again, I can’t even drive a car, so why you’d trust my opinion when it comes to flying a super-futuristic jet-plane is as beyond me in the same way that the aforementioned task is. Still, at least I got smart enough to use a word like aforementioned correctly, so it’s not all bad.

There are also a host of new vehicles though for the Necris team in the game, though we were only able to use a single one of them. The Necris, which in the UT storyline are a race of mutants, have a range of vehicles which don’t exactly mirror the human range but are designed to supposedly give a decent balance.



Of the nine new Necris vehicles, the only one we got a change to go hands on with was the Darkwalker – a strider-alike with tremendously powerful attacks. The first is a kind of sonic attack which knocks players over and stuns them as if they had fallen off the hoverboard. The second attack is a powerful laser which can kill most players in a matter of seconds.

The Darkwalker is a decent vehicle and in a large game involving all types of vehicles then it would probably be OK, but in our experience the Darkwalker was incredibly hard to defeat and the gameplay was almost broken by its overwhelming attacks.

It seems a little unfair too that the Necris are getting all the new vehicles and we would have much preferred to see a handful of new human vehicles for levels which pit the two races against each other. The human garage hasn’t been expanded or altered all that much from the previous games and is starting to feel a little repetitive now despite the facelift and tweaking.