The other game mode available in this demo is Vehicle Capture the Flag. While ‘introduced’ in Unreal Tournament 2004, this is the first time it will be a fully supported game mode. In all honesty I expected this game mode to be an utter and complete failure. I’ve never been much of a fan of vehicles in online shooters and this looked to be no different. Strangely, the beta demo changed my mind…

How? Why? Read on to find out!

Vehicle CTF in the UT3 beta demo takes place on vCTF-Suspense; a beautiful wide-open map with flag bases on opposite ends of a massive suspension bridge. Only the usual Axon vehicles are available here: the Scorpion buggy, Hellbender ‘truck’, Manta ‘hovercraft’, Goliath tank and Raptor aircraft –

Interestingly the vehicles handle better than their UT2004 counterparts and feel more grounded, just like players do. The vehicles are also a lot weaker, putting more of an emphasis back on players themselves. Also aiding in the renewed emphasis on ‘infantry’ are the hoverboards, which replace the translocator in vehicle game modes. These boards allow you to race across maps, perform stunts and follow other vehicles into combat, but aren’t be-all end-all capmachines, because a single hit from any weapon will have you lying flat on the ground for a while.

Crush the Flagcarrier!

CTF purists will be happy to know that vehicles can mostly be taken out of the equation. I spent an afternoon playing vCTF with a friend over TeamSpeak and hardly ever touched any vehicles… we won pretty much every game and I was on top of the scoreboards all the time. Vehicles are very easy to take down and most of the combat seems to occur on foot, inbetween nice fast-paced hoverboard hops.

These hoverboards really help you to stay in the action at all times and are incredibly fun to play with. Most enjoyable about these hoverboards was to use them while capping flags with a mate in the Raptor. I’d grab a flag and meet him behind the enemy base, and he’d airlift me towards our base, at times engaging in exciting dogfights while I dangled below on my hoverboard. The only problem with that was that he needed to be very careful when maneuvering, because I got slammed into walls, bridges and steel cables a few times too many. And to top it all off, on the occasion we did make it all the way to the base without me slamming into a wall, he frequently landed… on top of me… ouch.

The new shiny toys

A nice new touch to Vehicle Capture the Flag were the various HUD improvements. Whenever a flag is taken you see the icon on top change to that of someone carrying a flag, making it much more easily noticeable when a flag is at home or away. Also useful are the lights directing you to the enemy base, which appear the moment you spawn. These adjust themselves to your movement pace, so you can always keep up with them, and could be a great help to the less spatially gifted (although maps don’t really get more basic than this).

The reintroduced jumpboots transform the battlefield into a much more 3D arena of death, and are a great help for attackers. Meanwhile the Redeemer has undergone a great restyling, becoming essentially a mobile platform of nuclear death. The missile itself even has a blast radius which blows people off of their feet now.

The reintroduced Stinger minigun and the restyled sniper rifle are now the anti-vehicle weapons of choice, blasting through vehicles nearly as effective as the awesomely deadly AVRiL missile launcher. Meanwhile vehicles have gotten some touchups as well, with the manta requiring a little more work to kill people, the scorpion now capable of a special racing self-destruct attack and the raptor being an optional airlift device for players on hoverboard.

All in all I can think of Vehicle Capture the Flag, and the Unreal Tournament 3 beta demo, as nothing but a success. The vehicles are implemented flawlessly, making it fun even for hardcore CTF/DM purists, such as myself. The map is enjoyable, although not particularly outstanding/unique in terms of design. I’ve seen hardly any negative comments towards this game mode thus far and the truth is that it’s so fun that even non-UT players find themselves unable to stop playing the demo.

A friend of mine used to dislike UT – and most shooters for that matter. He decided to try out vCTF in the UT3 beta demo with me. A few hours later he could hardly stop playing and had his own, popular, DM and vCTF servers running. In similar vein some of my friends who had always preferred Quake over UT now can’t be dragged away from UT3 DeathMatch. It really seems like this demo is a massive hit on all fronts.

Rating: Must Have

Game Drone Seal of Approval

(yes, that’s the first!)

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