Is off -

the chariot gives you unicorn ramming power.

The fool returns you to the start room.

Not getting hit by a boss doesn't open the door to the devil's room - not sure what is the mechanic there. 

I played the original 1999 Unreal Tournament plenty, although only ever against bots, and enjoyed it a lot. The weapons were all very fun, levels looked great. However lacking a proper single player mode I skipped it's sequels UT2003 and UT2004, before returning to UT3 released in 2007.

UT3 was advertised as having a proper single player mode, much more than it's predecessors. Unfortunately the single player mode is really just a series of bot matches; covering typical deathmatch, Capture The Flag and Warfare gameplay modes.

I played on the lower difficulty levels to avoid much replay. This made the deathmatches laughably easy - even the 1 on 1 final battle I won 20-4 on my first play through. But it's the deathmatches I enjoy most, and often it's team-based 4 on 4, for instance. However I was playing on lower difficulties, so they should have been fairly easy.

The Capture The Flag levels were quite often easy, but there were a few where vehicles are involved that were a bit of a challenge, and then one huge levels in particular (Sandstorm) that was extremely difficult. But overall the CTF levels aren't very exciting. I find myself just running like hell in most of them, trying to avoid detection. Only twice in the entire game did a team-mate manage to capture a flag. They're completely useless. In most cases I was better off continuing to the enemies' zone and just stand around waiting for my team-mate to inevitably drop the flag so I could take over the run.

But it's the Warfare levels that throw the game completely out of balance. In these levels you have stations that you take control of in order, until you get to the enemies main station and destroy it. The opposing side is trying to do the same to you. Some of these levels were very easy, completing them in just a couple of minutes. But then there were others that were really, really difficult. It seemed to depend too much on whether or not your team-mates were being imbeciles. The Torlan Warfare level, which was number 15 out of 41, for me, was by far the hardest level in the entire game. My team-mates just seemed to dick around and do nothing. Even when taking over all stations, I couldn't even GET to the final station to even attempt to destroy it, while my team-mates were plonking around at the start still. A bonus card (which do a few things like reducing the opponents enemy count) was a necessity on this one. Then on the other hand you get to the penultimate level, Warfare again, and it's done in under five minutes.

So what I'm getting at is that the levels are wildly out of balance, with some that are too easy and the odd one that's too hard for where it's placed in the list. And that's all this game really is - a list of levels one after another, some of which are poorly repeated. There's a story going on about some war and the character you're playing wants revenge on the cliche hot chick who nearly killed him. But the story is a boring and didn't enhance the experience much at all.

The weapons are all the standard Unreal ones; all very fun to use.

UT3 uses, obviously, Unreal Engine 3. It looks great as expected with some awesome looking backgrounds and setpieces. There's a tonne of variety in the different settings including temples, space stations, market gardens and many outdoors levels. I guess it's hard base a proper single player game around so many different settings, but I really wish more developers would put this much variety and fantastic looking environments into their games. Either that or perhaps Epic should make a proper, non-console biased, single player game like the original Unreal.

That being said, the looks are fairly identical to Gears Of War. The character models might as well have been pulled directly from GOW, while the textures and environments all have that similar muddy colour palette and blurry post processing effects. If you didn't really like the looks of GOW, you better skip UT3.

The final hurdle in UT3 to mention, from a single player perspective, is that the game isn't very long. Assuming almost every level you complete successfully on your first try, you'll be through it in five hours.

I'm going to judge this as a single player experience, as I don't play online, and as such because it's all bot play it does probably warrant replays so you can get a better look at some of the levels. However, it is JUST bot play, which gets repetitive fast. On top of that some of the levels (CTF and Warfare) I didn't enjoy that much. In fact I cringed every time a Warfare level came up. UT3 might look fantastic, but it's not a proper single player experience, so not really recommended. 

Do you guys know of any good single player mods out there? There's a fkn shitload of mods, so I guess i'll go through them to figure out what is fun for single player, even if it's against bots. 

the best reviews these days? 

To replace my crappy list of Binding items and their effects:

http://ninjanerdstech.com/2011/09/the-binding-of-isaac-items-list/ 

I've just noclipped/flown through all the non-campaign levels and Titan Pack levels, and realised just how good UT3 looks. In fact, I'll go so far as to say it's the best looking game ever made up until November 2007 (excusing Bioshock and COD4 as I'm yet to play them).

It's quite disappointing that a game that looks this good was wasted on multiplayer only with no proper single player. 

imo UT3 uses too much post processing to add colour leading to everything looking washed out. You turn the PP down and it looks very gray.

Skies are jaw drawing though. :E 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQxI2mRIooY&feature=youtu.be 

looks cool 

so what do you think about 'amnesia - the dark descent' i started to play it in may and still couldn't finish 

So scary one is reluctant to even start it up. 

Loved Amnesia, one of the few horror games that felt tense, especially when being chased. Very atmospheric too. Had a good experience with it. 

So scary one is reluctant to even start it up.

yeah, i was actually talked out of playing because of that. :S 

There are some hilarious youtube videos of people freaking the fuck out over that game, it really does seem to get under your skin! 

yeah, i've seen some. the youtube videos of the game even managed to put me on edge.

seriously, you have to really enjoy being flat out terrified to play a game like that. o.o 

fuck yeah that sounds awesome. i love a really scary horror that makes me have trouble sleeping cos i'm scared still lol. hopefully amnesia has that effect. on the other hand, I thought the 1st episode of penumbra was a bit average and not scary at all. 

Dino Run SE is free right now. Dumb but fun.
http://www.pixeljam.com/dinorunse/ 

Although the vfx were a bit rough.

The DLC is also good, and disturbing in a slightly different way. 

Get some eye, ear, brain and taste bleach ready before viewing this footage of Cave Story 3D: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRrTEeA_hko

It is higher resolution and 3D thus better. 

Just finished it

Visuals : A+, the game looks fantastic, loved the use of different primary colours in environments. Lighting in particular is extremely high quality, using very high resolution lightmaps and radiosity, it really makes the levels come alive. It's what kept me playing really, to see the next environment!

Gameplay : The running and jumping stuff is excellent, reminded me of Brink's parkour system but it feels better here, some areas were a little frustrating to figure out how to get through them but the game never relies on precision jumping and movement too heavily which is a good thing from my perspective. There were a couple of areas where it was tough to get the character to do the correct jump however and failing this usually led to my death by falling. Lucky the checkpoints are fairly well placed.

The combat is where it gets quite frustrating however, there are lots of melee moves you can do to take out enemies, or disarm them and use their weapons. But it never gets above mediocre. The guns feel pretty bad overall and these combat areas are the worst parts of the game, luckily they are not the main focus.

Really enjoyed it overall, would recommend it if you haven't tried it out yet.

Screenshots - http://steamcommunity.com/id/darrenweekes/screenshots?tab=public&showdate=1&filter=shortcut_179 

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/13/see-syndicate-move-first-ever-footage/#more-77815 

agreed on Cave Story... they really did themselves no favours by showing the comparison shots - the 2d art was so much clearer and the environments were much more understandable.

I guess they've done the market research, but I would have thought that the Cave Story license would have been best served by keeping things as they were - the only people that know it are people that sought out pseudo-8bit indie platformers in the internet.