So I got to check out the latest incarnation of Unreal Tournament while at GDC this past week. I promised Cliffy I'd put together a little compilation of impressions of what I saw. Keep in mind that I havent played Unreal Tournament in a real long time so I cant really use that as a base for comparison. Ok well, here you go:

Cool Stuff:
- Physics is better than anything out there. watch guys tumble down stairs, knock things over and watch them interact with the environment. Neeto.
- Player models are great. Seems like it's always the same standard space marine mecho-suit style for these games lately, but they had good ones!
- World geometry actually more than 10 polys. UT kind of annoyed me in how low the poly counts appeared in the levels, looks good now.
- Terrain was great stuff. About the same quality as Team Arena but with improved texturing.
Not Cool Stuff:
- I would whine about the weapons here I'm sure, but honestly that's something that takes hours to properly understand and judge. Dunno.
- CliffyB's outfit was rather conservative and boring
- Levels from what I saw seemed to focus a bit more on aim than positioning or strategy
- Not enough visual feedback when I'm firing weapons or when I'm hitting enemies. Some had it great (Flack gun) but others... nothing I could see
- I Didnt get to play the advanced bots, but the medium bots were morons
Stuff I saw:
- Cliffy wuss out of a Soul Calibur match with Robin Walker.
What I thought:
- Felt like a very solid follow-up to UT with an exceptional step forward in technology. For people who play games because they like to see purty stuff, this will be for you. For stuff like this I'm thinking wait for the demo to judge for yourself on if you actually like it. I can confirm that it looks great, and first impressions say it feels great.. which is more than can be said for a lot of games.

For those of you who missed it, Epic has renamed their product line a bit which appears to point to plans of releasing annual versions.  Check out stories here and here.