thelondonpaper in UT3 Xbox 360 gaff

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While Unreal Tournament 3 on PS3 has finally hit UK streets, the Xbox 360 version is still shrouded in mystery – or so we thought.

On our busy commute home this evening we spotted a review for the Xbox 360 version in thelondonpaper, the popular London-based free evening newspaper that those annoying men and women in purple jackets force on you as you barge your way through five billion other commuters on Oxford Street.

The review, found in the Londonnightin section, begins with the sentence: “Unreal Tournament 3 (Xbox 360) looks spectacular” and even uses the 360 version’s box art to illustrate it. It’s an obvious gaff by the newspaper, and one UT3 publisher Midway won’t be too pleased about either. Thelondonpaper is read by hundreds of thousands of Londoners every day, many of whom only pick it up for the daily Britney Spears is still nuts update on page three.

Well, we say the review is an obvious gaff. Either that or reviewer Andy Lowe has got his hands on a review copy of a game not many people in the world have even seen running yet. We thought there might have been a teeny, tiny chance that was true. So just to be doubly sure we checked specialist retailer GAME to see if we hadn’t gone mad and somehow missed the release of one of the premier first-person-shooters on Microsoft’s next-gen machine. Thankfully, our insanity concerns were unfounded. Where the release date should be screams a big fat “PREORDER”.

While we’re here, we’ll highlight some of Lowe’s most pertinent points from his review of UT3 on the Xbox 360. While he praises the game for its “beautifully balanced” gameplay and “fiendish and brutal” weapons, he criticises it for being “flat, samey and just a bit ‘so what?'”.

He’s even got some pointers for the next game – Epic take note: “Make it personal. Lose the sci-fi setting. We want to fight in multi-storey car-parks and shopping centres. Keep the weapons simple, hard to find, have them jam from time to time. Make the enemy smart but flawed. Every kill should hurt and some of the bad guys shouldn’t go down easily. Give the player a strong sense of moral propulsion. In short, more real, less Unreal”.

Hear that Epic? Put shopping centres in the next Unreal. It’ll be amazing.

So there you have it. The mainstream press messes up once again. Forget Fox News and nudity in Mass Effect – thelondonpaper has just stolen the blunder show.