Little Black Tears

By Paul Munn | March 3, 2008

I recently finished blazing through the campaign mode of Unreal Tournament 3 on the PS3 with and without the help of one or two people from my friends list and came to a few conclusions about the game. First up it’s gorgeous and plays really smoothly with a controller. I’d initially feared that allowing keyboard and mouse support would result in a game that relied on it, but I really don’t have any desire to use those — when the bots get too tough it’s not because I can’t shoot it’s because the bots are just too good at shooting. Once I hit the Necris phase of the game while playing through on Hard difficulty I found myself getting shut down repeatedly via anti-vehicle weapons and crack shots with almost any weapon from medium to long range. I dialed it back to Normal to make my way to the end.

The taunts from the Necris enemies were particularly entertaining, especially following the mechanically austere and humbling robotic voices of the Liandri drones that inhabited most of the previous section of the game. The invading Necris are given over-the-top evil voices and menacing lines you’d expect from bad guys in an action film. Their terraforming technology consists of inky “nanoblack” that looks pretty poisonous and ugly and the moment they invade they start using it everywhere. One of my favorite taunts that still makes me chuckle when I hear it happens when a Necris kills you and sarcastically says “I cry little black tears for you”.

Also high on the list of fun things to do is piloting a darkwalker. They feel strong enough to give me a real sense of power as I tromp slowly towards oncoming enemy emplacements. They do attract weapons fire from just about everyone, however. The AI has been taught that unhindered darkwalkers are bad news.

That part is all good. The AI on your teammates? Not so good.

It really needs to get the AI enhancements from the 1.1 and later patches from the PC patched into the PS3 version. Letting a bot on your team get the orb in warfare mode is always a crapshoot and you’re just as likely to find them standing next to an enemy node doing absolutely nothing with the orb as to see them run in and slam dunk it into the node to capture it. This was especially infuriating when the enemy AI players seemed all too adept at taking all the nodes leading up to my base, exposing the core. I’d be bounding down the hill shooting at my AI teammate while shouting at the screen “Take the [BLEEP]ing node! Take it!” My wife found my swearing at the TV moderately entertaining.