Unreal Tournament 3 Beta Impressions

It looks un…canny

In spite of how good or bad the gameplay is one of the most important things for most of you will still be the graphics. To me it’s a sad state of affairs that the graphics of a game are considered so important and that, in the eyes of many gamers, good graphics can compensate for poor gameplay.

To me an innovative game is much more important than a good looker.

But, on the other hand, Unreal Tournament 3 is incredibly pretty to look at even in the beta stages and, unlike other betas we’ve looked at, it pulls all this together with flawless performance.

Now, I’m only going to say this once – though I’ll probably be forced to repeat it endlessly in the ensuing discussion – so listen closely: this is a beta.

Got that? Beta. Not final code. Unfinished. This means that the game is out of the basic design stage and is nearing the point where it will finally ‘go gold’ and enter production.


Because of that we can’t really comment on the technical sides of the graphics and the state of the code. We could show you what all the different graphics settings look like, but the information would be largely useless since the code is undoubtedly going to be shifted about and retweaked based on the player feedback.

What we can say though is that Unreal Tournament 3 does look utterly awesome. The textures are incredibly detailed and the levels show that the same attention to detail has gone into designing each and every model as has gone into designing the fantastically balanced levels.

The best thing about the game’s graphics is the special effects thrown about by some of the more powerful and impressive weapons. The shock rifle has always been my favourite gun in the Unreal Tournament arsenal, which remains mostly unchanged except for the lesser weapons.

The Shock Rifle, as series fans will already know, is a weapon with two main modes of fire. The first is an accurate pulse round which can only be fired once every few seconds, the alternate fire is a slow-moving energy ball which rarely-if-ever hits anything in my experience.


What makes the shock rifle so good however is that these attacks can be combined and that, when the energy ball is shot with the pulse attack, the result is an incredibly powerful implosion that tends to gib anyone standing close enough to it. It’s a difficult but rewarding weapon to use. It gets even more so in UT3 because the effect is gorgeous to behold even on default settings and the shockwave looks authentically electrical and suitably devastating.

It’s a common theme in the graphics for UT3 and it’s clear that Epic has done its best to try and make a game which looks both realistic and futuristic at the same time. As a result the game looks very detailed, almost clustered with fine details and the game is just astoundingly jaw dropping – especially for a multiplayer game, which is graphically the complete anti-thesis to this year's other multiplayer hit.