One of the best competitive shooting series returns for another installment in Unreal Tournament III. Like games past, the latest Unreal features spectacular graphics, highly sophisticated artificial intelligence and extremely fast paced gameplay. Of course, all these fantastic features have somewhat unreal system requirements, but that's to be expected from high-end shooters. Using a wide variety of weapons, players can battle it out against each other or very competitive bots in speedy gunfights.

Unreal Tournament III's environments look as spectacular. Levels often have hidden complexities like small crawl spaces to sneak through, along with hidden weapon caches. Our only complaint is that some of the hallways are very nondescript, and players can easily end up running in circles. Arrows point players in the right direction, but they don't consider potential hazards, and will often lead them to their sudden deaths. Still, once players get the feel for a map, navigating through them becomes less of a hassle.

The latest Unreal Tournament focuses on a handful of game types, and features fewer modes than its predecessors. Game modes include traditional features like deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag. There's also a Duel mode featuring small maps for players to duke it out one-on-one. To spice things up, there's an all-new vehicle based capture the flag mode, where players can't drive while carrying a flag, but can whip out hoverboards and grapple onto friendly vehicles to drive them back to the home base. This form of transportation doesn't come without risk, because players can't shoot while on hoverboards, and the slightest damage will cause them to fall off and drop the flag. However, one can't overlook the guilty pleasure that comes from decapitating enemies with the grapple line.

Many of the vehicles from the previous game make a return, although some handle a little differently with the new graphics and physics technology. Vehicle CTF has the additional benefit of having a minimap showing locations of flags while on the move.

Onslaught, the extremely popular vehicle-based combat mode from Unreal Tournament 2004, goes by the name of Warfare. Players must capture a string of connected power nodes leading up to the enemy's base, enabling them to destroy the enemy's power source. Except this time, there are a few outlying nodes that activate special weaponry, turrets being one example. Controlling multiple outliers grant extra bonuses, like raising the power orb to the surface so players can blast it. To up the stakes even higher, players can carry special objects called orbs (only one per team) that instantly captures an enemy's power node or renders nearby captured ones invincible. Orbs increase the already fast pace of Warfare, and creates a constant tug-of-war. Gamers take big risks running with the orb, since they show up on enemy radar, effectively painting giant targets onto their backs.

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