The Unreal franchise has long been king of the hill when it comes to online PC shooters. If you hop into Unreal Tournament 2004 (T2K4) right now -- a full three years after its release -- you'll find droves of players still fragging each other into oblivion. After some delays and a name change (from Unreal Tournament 2007 to Unreal Tournament 3 to symbolize the "next generation" of the franchise) the long awaited sequel is about to drop onto the masses. Gamers got a taste of what to expect with a recently released demo... and oh what a taste it's been. The staffers here at GameDaily apparently aren't the only ones lusting for some more unreal combat, because the servers are always full.

Between the Unreal franchise and its console hit Gears of War (which until Halo 3 dropped was the highest selling 360 game in history), Epic Games is the current reigning champ of shooters. But Epic isn't just master shooter makers. All of these high profile games have something in common: BioShock, Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway, Frontline: Fuels of War, Gears of War, Mass Effect, Medal of Honor: Airborne, Stranglehold and Unreal Tournament 3. They're some of the most gorgeous games ever made. Why is that? Because they all use Epic's Unreal Engine 3 -- the industry's current "go to" graphics engine.

The UT3 demo includes three maps and four different game modes; deathmatch, team deathmatch, vehicle capture-the-flag and duel. Warfare is the new mode, which takes the place of the now legendary Onslaught, but isn't available in the demo because there isn't one particular map that best exemplifies its variety. Both Deathmatch modes and Duel allow players to scamper around a map called Heat Ray -- an urban battleground lit by neon lights, that resembles an environment from the film Blade Runner. Shangri La (the other Deathmatch/Duel map) is a smallish Asian-themed courtyard set majestically atop a serene, snow capped mountain. Serene, that is, until the match starts and blood washes over the cobblestones, turning the white snow bright red. The vehicle CTF mode takes place around a towering suspension bridge ironically called Suspense. While seeming narrow, the vertical altitude of the map is so dizzying that it may give those with acrophobia (fear of heights) serious pause.

Based on just these three maps, the one thing we can say unanimously across the board is that UT3 will sear your eyeballs out of their sockets, and it might just be the "killer app" that legitimizes Ageia's PhysX card. We gave it a run on a high-end rig outfitted with the card, and on a low-end rig without. Aside from the additional eye candy, the PhysX card adds to the game experience by enhancing environmental destructibility and drastically changes how vehicles handle. Epic kept the system specs down and it shows because the game ran ultra smooth on both set ups. Granted, we had to turn down the resolution and other advanced settings on the low-end rig, but it ran without a hitch.

Continue...