Augury

If there’s any criticism to be made of this weapon, it’s that it’s simply too damn good. I was never a huge fan of the original Rocket Launcher, although the power of loading up to 6 rockets and letting them fly was undeniable. I also thought that UT2004’s Rocket Launcher never lived up to its potential. With UT3 they have finally gotten everything right. The thing has a feature that’s good in almost any scenario, making it a great all-around weapon.

Primary fire shoots out single rockets. The sound and visuals of the rockets are great, and the explosions are satisfying, particularly when there’s someone on the other end being ground into chunks. Each rocket does 100 damage, so that’s easy enough. Splash damage with rockets, as with most weapons, has been reduced a bit, but it’s still good enough to kill with frequently. I’m not certain about it, but the rockets’ speed feels somewhere above the speed of rockets in UT, but below their speed in UT2004. The refire rate is also fairly quick for this sort of weapon.

Secondary fire loads up to three rockets that can be fired simultaneously. There is about a quarter of a second delay when tapping secondary fire, as the Rocket Launcher enters a loading animation, so don’t expect to tap secondary fire and immediately fire off a rocket. The secondary fire is where the real versatility of the weapon comes into play, as it can fire rockets in either a straight, horizontal line, or in a tight spiral configuration, or shoot them out as grenades with timed detonation fuses. Switching between these three “modes” is accomplished by holding down the secondary fire button and tapping the primary fire. One tap will take you to spiral mode, while a second tap will take you to grenade mode. A third tap returns you to the default line fire mode. Release the secondary trigger to unleash the rockets when you’ve selected the firing configuration you want.

The line is best for carpet-bombing an area, while the spiral configuration is best if you know you’ll hit your opponent and are more concerned about dealing lots of damage in one go. Players are highly agile, so against them it is most likely you’ll use the line firing configuration. Even if none of the three rockets scores a direct hit, the splash damage from the nearby rockets is often enough to kill an unarmored opponent. If you are fighting against a big vehicle like the Goliath or a stationary target like a node, spiral configuration will give you a good solid punch with 3 rockets hitting simultaneously, rather than risking that the two side rockets will deviate away from the intended target.

There’s also the return of an old favorite, the grenade mode which launches a live rocket with a timed detonation rather than a warhead. Up to three grenades can be launched, but they’re wildly unpredictable. Their trajectory is quite similar to the Flak Cannon’s secondary fire arc, so it is a bit high, although nowhere near as far. Your best bet when using this fire mode is to use them when an enemy has ducked into a confined space or when you are trying to cut off strategic exits or entrances. For example, the small Bio Rifle room near the Helmet pickup in Heat Ray is great for tossing grenades into, if you happen to have the Rocket Launcher. The large doors on Shangri-La that separate the UDamage plaza from the Stinger also make a great choke point that can be used to funnel unwary opponents into a face ful of grenades.

As if the Rocket Launcher wasn’t good enough, it’s also got a homing feature. It’s had the feature in past Unreal Tournament games, but in Unreal Tournament 3 it’s better than ever. That is to say, it’s actually useful. In past UT games, as soon as you began to load up rockets, you commited yourself to not locking on to an opponent. This means, for example, if you had an enemy tank in your sights and wanted to load up three rockets and fire them at him, the rockets would not home in on the tank. In UT3, though, you can gain a lock while loading rockets. This makes a big difference in vehicular gametypes, because you’ll frequently see a vehicle barreling at you from a distance away, but a single rocket usually won’t connect with a moving vehicle, or if it does, won’t phase it much. This change allows you to load up to three rockets AND lock on to an enemy while doing it. It’s a great trick to use on Scorpions, Hellbenders, and Goliaths. It’s even effective against the Raptor if the pilot is hovering low and remains relatively still for a few seconds. Just beware and realize that vehicles have heavy armor that grants some amount of damage reduction to them, so a salvo of three rockets won’t instantly take out a Scorpion with 300 Health, but they will do severe damage.

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For the Minigun, this time around, Epic has gone back to its Unreal 1 roots and combined the Stinger weapon with the Minigun, adding a lot of flavor to what’s normally a pretty boring weapon. The new weapon design is spectacular, reminiscent of Unreal 1’s minigun design, but in no way looking dated. This thing has a barrel with three spinning barrels, each comprised of three spinning barrels. How cool is that?

Primary fire is what you expect from the Minigun. Rapid-fire, hitscan bullets with a built-in spread. This time around, each bullet does 14 damage, which is near double the damage the standard minigun bullets did in UT2004. I’ve no idea how many bullets it sprays out per second, but I figure it’s somewhere between 7.5 and 15. The bullet spread has also been tightened up a bit. In short, this weapon will tear things up. It’ll take down a freshly spawned player in under a second, and even heavily armored opponents will die quickly under sustained fire. A lot of people consider the Stinger to be the ultimate weapon now, although I’d argue it doesn’t stack up quite that well at close range. It is very effective at medium to long ranges, maybe a bit too effective at long range. Just be sure to start firing slightly before you think you’ll need it, as it does take half a second or a second for the barrels to spin up to full speed.

In the demo, at least, the Stinger is the only weapon given in the weapon lockers of vCTF-Suspense that gives footsoldiers a fighting chance against Mantas or Raptors. Neither the Shock Rifle nor the Sniper Rifle are given in the lockers, so acquiring one requires a bit of effort. Further, neither of these weapons have near the raw damage-per-second output of the Stinger. The Stinger does over 100 damage per second, where the Shock or Sniper Rifle do about 50 damage per second. Holding down the fire button is guaranteed to do at least some damage, and used in conjunction with other teammates it’s quite effective at taking out these threats.

Secondary fire with the Stinger fires out a single, 38 damage tarydium shard. This firing mode is pretty much a direct homage to the original Stinger from Unreal. Unfortunately, the Stinger in Unreal was pretty much only useful as the weapon you used when you didn’t want to waste ammunition for better weapons. The secondary fire is almost identical to the plasma bolts that the Link Gun shoots out via its primary fire, except the tarydium shards only fire about half as fast, but do half again as much damage when they connect.

I’ve only found two situations where I find the secondary firemode consistently useful. The first is in delivering a knockout blow to people who I knock off of their hoverboards with the primary fire. Once someone is on the ground, they’re sitting ducks against the high-powered but relatively slow shards. The second is in spamming tarydium shards at vehicles coming across the bridge in vCTF-Suspense. With the latter, it’s not so much about getting kills as suppressing vehicles that might be on the far side of the map, and a couple of quick hits of 48 damage each will dissuade most people from sticking their head out.

Many people have been complaining that the Stinger is “too powerful,” and while it’s true the Stinger is extremely effective, in a regular DeathMatch game, walking around with a weapon that’ll take 6 or 7 shots to kill a person just seems suicidal with so many one-hit wonders stalking about. Perhaps others might find it more effective, but I typically only tend to pick up stray kills with it. It is an overwhelmingly good choice to have drawn if you’re in large open spaces, whether in DeathMatch or in vehicular gametypes.

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Lethal, elegant, requiring years of training to truly master, the Shock Rifle is the katana of First Person Shooter weapons. If the Katana is the soul of the Samurai, then the Shock Rifle is the soul of an Unreal Tournament player. It’s always been a dominant weapon in Unreal Tournament, but a lot of factors made it the single weapon you needed to have in Unreal Tournament 2004. From the looks of things in UT3, it isn’t necessary in DeathMatch, though it’s still one of my favorite weapons there. In vehicular gametypes I expect it to be a necessity simply because it’s so versatile.

Primary fire is a hitscan beam that does 45 damage. The only significant difference to its functionality in UT2004 is that it takes maybe one or two tenths of a second longer to refire. However, major changes to maps and player movement have made the primary fire far less dominant. By reducing the exaggerated movement options, map scale was brought much more into line with player scale, meaning that DeathMatch encounters now are more likely to take place in a medium range where all weapons are effective, rather than at long range where only hitscan can be reliably used.

Although vCTF-Suspense has some long-range vistas, particularly across the bridge or from the lower level to the top of the tower, these are usually fairly contained. I consider it a necessity to pick up the Shock Rifle on this map, as it’s still a footsoldier’s only effective long-range option against Mantas and Raptors. Others contend that the Stinger alone is enough to deal with these threats. Personally, I feel like delivering a fair amount of damage with precision is more important than firing the Stinger and hoping that it sprays enough bullets in the general direction of the target to destroy it. In medium to close ranges against these vehicles, though, the Stinger is definitely superior, so your strategy should be dictated by whether your opponent is directly attacking you and coming closer or whether they’re otherwise occupied or at such a distance that they can’t close it quickly.

The secondary fire is the trusty shock core projectile, but these have been changed slightly to make them a more effective option in their own right. The refire rate on the secondary fire seems to have been upped a tad, and the damage for a direct hit with a shock core has been increased to 55 per hit, so a secondary fire core followed up by a primary fire beam will kill a freshly spawned player. The speed of the projectile core has also been increased, which is, again, an improvement in this firing mode’s basic functionality.

While the Shock Rifle’s beam excels at long range, the cores are an average weapon in middle and close ranges. Although the core itself is not very menacing at mid range, it’s not something you can ignore either, and not simply because each core is a bomb waiting to go off. Cores move at a speed comparable to rockets and have a similar blast radius, so even though they don’t deal quite the damage a rocket does, they will take an opponent down if given the chance. Further, the cores have one unique feature that can make them situationally quite good: Shock cores will detonate other flying projectiles that come in contact with them. So firing a shock core at an opponent may detonate the rocket he just fired with your name on it. At close range utilizing the splash damage is a lot easier. It’s not the best DeathMatch weapon at those ranges, but it suffices in a pinch.

Oddly enough, the secondary fire of the weapon is a big part of why I consider the Shock Rifle a must-have in vehicular gametypes. With the current state of the beta demo (and, as far as I know, the first box version of the game), the Manta is such a dominant vehicle in skilled players’ hands that you need all the options you can get against it. In my Impact Hammer rundown I detailed how that weapon’s secondary fire can be useful against Mantas, but a skilled driver can easily defeat that strategy. The Shock Rifle secondary will knock back oncoming Mantas significantly, though, so if a Manta driver attempts to run you over, head-on or not, firing a core at him will beat him back. If he keeps coming you can keep firing as fast as he comes, and it’ll only take four or five before he’s toast. If he backs off or runs away, you’ve got the primary beam to use on him.

Then there is the combo. The combo is the main draw of the UT3 Shock Rifle, as it was in the original game. The combo is quick, big, and deadly. I have no idea about the size or damage in comparison to other games, and this is tricky to figure out without access to the script. As a point of reference, the combo in the original UT did 250 damage (maximum) and in UT2004 it did 200 damage (maximum), so I expect it to do a maximum of between 200-250 in UT3, leaning towards 250. It feels like the combo has a highly damaging core area, where most of the damage takes place, and a steep damage fall off outside that area. What this means is that it’s probably going to kill an opponent if it hits, and outside of that they won’t be damaged much. Overall the combo is very satisfying, and in DeathMatch I might even say it seems even a little too dominant, as if the other features of the gun are only there to supplement the combo.

The combo is what really fills in the weapon and makes it so versatile, but the combo is best used at medium ranges. At the long ranges seen in vehicular maps it loses some of its lustre. In UT2004 the combo was best used to destroy oncoming Mantas or to kill the drivers of oncoming Scorpions. Although the combo still seems like it will be an attractive option for destroying Mantas, since the Scorpion is now a closed-top vehicle you can no longer kill the driver with a strategically placed combo above the vehicle. I would like to say that a combo at the front of the vehicle could deflect its trajectory away from you, but with the Scorpion being a nearly immovable object by any form of force, I am skeptical if that would work reliably. However, a combo is a significant amount of damage, and given enough distance, a combo attack on an oncoming Scorpion followed up by Shock cores could dispatch the vehicle.

Overall I feel like the weapon is a good mix of the original Shock Rifle and UT2004’s, and might actually be the best one yet.

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