Before getting my hands on Unreal Tournament 3, I really had no clue what I was in for. What was the deal with this one again? They're calling it the third, but it's really the fourth? And something about mods on the PlayStation? I knew that was somehow important. Navigating through Epic's labyrinthine office for the second time in two weeks, deja vu assaulting me at every turn, I was placed before a big box of a Dell, and tasked with playing the next in Epic's flagship series--all while keeping my pride intact in the process.

Direct Expectations
Unreal Tournament 3 continues in the footsteps of its forebears, offering fast-paced online FPS gameplay across several modes and dozens of maps. To that effect, the game will ship with around 40 battlefields in all. While Epic is taking the opposite approach of recent multiplayer games like Team Fortress 2 and Shadowrun, which attempt to provide a handful of focused maps, this still counts as a reduction in real estate from previous titles in the series. Of the few maps I played, and the list I skimmed, each seemed suitably varied in their environments. I saw Endor-like forests, cold rocky moons, sweeping plains, and, of course, space stations with ominously large planetary backdrops.

I'm not going to elaborate at length on Deathmatch or Capture The Flag. Mutators are back, as are several fan-favorite maps. Outside of a few minor tweaks, these modes are about what you would expect, in that they feel very much as they did in earlier entries--but with vastly improved graphics. Unreal Tournament 3 takes its numeric title from the engine that powers it, which is appropriate: the game looks fantastic. Epic is banking on this extra glitz to attract new fans to its base, and they look to be well on their way in that respect.

On the PC there will be limited differences between DirectX 10 and 9 display, and game servers will not discern between the two clients. As far as required system specs, it's safe to say that anything under a dual-core processor and an nVidia 7800 GPU will have a hard time running the game with the flashiest effects enabled. However, like Gears of War PC, UT3 will benefit from year-long scalability improvements made to the Unreal Engine 3, so your dusty single-core CPU will have a shot at minimum performance. A 2.0 GHz single-core processor, 512 MB of system RAM, and an NVIDIA 6200 is the current bottom-line spec. While 512 MB of RAM may sound low, the game was designed for consoles with just that much RAM, so it's not out of the question--unless, of course, you are running the memory-consuming Windows Vista.

After a few quick rounds of DM-ShangriLa--a lovely little stomping ground with a great sniper's roost--we jumped into another map you'll see in the upcoming demo, VCTF-Suspense. Vehicle Capture The Flag is just as it sounds--capture the flag, with tanks and fighters and artillery abound. This particular map is oriented so that each base is on one end of two perpendicular bridges. Both teams have a bridge to snipe at vehicles from with the Anti Vehicle Rocket Launchers, making it difficult to dominate on either end. In order to run the flag, it became necessary to make use of the new transportation method--the hoverboard.

88 Miles Per Hour
Think "Back to the Future," with a spring-loaded board for jumps. Activated by hitting "Q" at any time, the hoverboard will greatly increase your speed, at the cost of being unable to shoot. While on the board, you can also attach yourself to a friendly vehicle with an energy beam, catching a much faster ride to the front lines. The whole concept is akin to Tribes' jet-pack gliding, albeit slower, and more along the lines of surfing rather than skiing. Zipping around on these things was a lot of fun, and a great way to speed up the dead-space of getting to the fight. It's not as fun when you get shot, as you instantly tumble from the board, and are unable to return fire until the character recovers from the fall.

Another new addition to the series is the arrow-based guide system. Not sure which path to take toward the enemy flag? Transparent markers will form a long chain along the floor, pointing you all the way out of your base and toward your opponents'. These arrows can be turned on and off with the press of a button, letting novices get the help they need and freeing veteran tournament entrants from the annoyance of unnecessary help.

After a long CTF stalemate was broken, I was ready to mix things up. Capture the flag is nice and all, but where UT3 really comes alive gameplay-wise is in the new Warfare mode. Fans will recognize the general idea of Warfare immediately, as it borrows from the now-defunct Onslaught mode found in Unreal Tournament 2004. You'll be capturing a series of connected "nodes," which must be destroyed, controlled, and then recharged with the beam of the Link Gun. When either team's base-bound Power Core becomes unlinked from a node, it is rendered vulnerable to attack, and can be subsequently destroyed, ending the round with a win for the attackers.

Warfare differs from Onslaught in one significant way--the addition of orbs. Each team has an orb-spawning point in their base, which produces a single glowing football that anybody can grab and run down the field. The orb is then used as a sort of detonator, which instantly wipes out an opposing team's control of a node, speeding up the process of node control enormously. Only one of these orbs spawns at a time, and if dropped--either by death, or by being knocked off of your hoverboard--a timer slowly ticks down until the orb's self-destruction. In the event that an enemy orb is dropped near your base, you can choose to sacrifice yourself to immediately destroy the orb, ensuring that a random player won't come along and scoop it up for an easy score. This self-sacrifice actually earns you a point, encouraging players to help out their team in this way.

It sounds complicated, and on some maps, it sort of is. One small map had me disabling a node, which then lowered a bridge, allowing me to drive a tank onto a platform near the enemy's base and fire down into their Power Core. Having to stay alive while doing all of this was a real task, but to the game's credit, the process was always challenging rather than frustrating. The levels are often wide open, and getting sidetracked with self-contained battles and random encounters while boarding from objective to objective is part of the fun. In that way, Warfare really is CTF, DM, and Onslaught, all rolled into a complete package.

Continue reading for more on bots, vehicles, War of the Worlds, and Warfare on the PlayStation 3.