Unreal Tournament III

In the fast-paced, war-ravaged future of Unreal Tournament III, nobody dies. They just respawn in first-person Deathmatch, CTF, and objective-based Warfare battles until one army or the other hits a predetermined number, then everybody goes home for dinner. Weird.

To help you reach those objectives, UT III supplies computer-controlled teammates — bots — that will kill, protect, and wreak havoc autonomously through the story-based campaign. Keep the bot intelligence on Average (the second of eight skill levels), and you don’t have to be great to feel great: they won’t react to situations with human speed at that default setting. And while they’re smart enough to commandeer the games’ 15 vehicles, they can’t necessarily steer them. But bump the skill skyward — into the realm of Adept and the top setting, Godlike — and you…well, you get your ass handed to you by robotic death machines. Even on the smarter settings, though, you can’t easily tell the bots to do one specific thing while you do another the way you would organize human teammates — you get general commands like “attack,” “defend,” and “cover me,” which are a little clunky to execute with the D-pad.

All the more reason to play with other humans. Bots won’t care about the huge variety of maps or the Mutators that let you remix gameplay elements to taste, but you and a friend will love the option to play through the entire five-act campaign cooperatively, either online or via split-screen (a 360-exclusive perk). Together, you can change strategies on the fly, work as driver and gunner in the larger vehicles, or just wander around and stare slack-jawed at the scenery as one. With obscenely meticulous environments and a framerate that never quits, UT III makes Gears of War look homely: the level of detail is almost as breathtaking as the vicious deaths. Weapons range from rocket launchers and twin pistols to globs of exploding slime and ricocheting shrapnel cannons; there are many satisfying ways to kill and be killed. Non-lethal gadgets like handheld teleporters, hoverboards, and electric grappling hooks keep the gameplay fresh and, in a series hallmark, fast. Very fast. For the first several gameplay sessions, our eyes stung, and then we realized why: we weren’t blinking. Who would dare?

Xbox 360 owners have had to wait a little longer than they hoped for Unreal Tournament III, but the reward for that patience is the inclusion of five exclusive maps, two new characters, and a nifty Gears of War 2 preview.

It sometimes feels overwhelming to navigate labyrinthine passageways while directing a team and trying to not get flanked by a flak cannon, but that’s exactly the kind of chaotic depth that helps replay value. The phrase “bigger, better, faster, more” gets thrown around a lot in gaming, but for Unreal Tournament III, every one of those words rings true.