Today, the beta for Unreal Tournament 3 went active and spawned a barrage of downloads across the internet, bringing many gaming sites to a crawl. Within hours, tens of thousands of gamers dredged through the vicious wait times and slow transfer rates to enjoy the first peek at the long-awaited first person shooter. I too suffered through these long wait times to give you guys the first look at this anticipated title. Let's take a look through some of the factors that make this game look extremely promising for those waiting to feed their hunger for a new competitive shooter.

Opening The Game
After double-clicking on the icon, I noticed that I was at the opening menu in no time at all. We're off to a good start. You're given your standard amount of options and settings to tune your game; nothing really out of the ordinary. At the moment, the campaign option was disabled, but I was able to get into multiplayer, and that will be the subject of this article. After setting up the options, I decided to first test the game on a LAN server and play with a bot, before I ventured into Internet games.

General Gameplay
Even with creating my own server, the game loaded fairly quickly, only taking about 10-15 seconds to load my test map, Shangri La. Honestly, this is a welcomed change from the tedious load times of Quake 4 and the annoying window minimizing and maximizing that came with it.

Once in the game, I was stunned at how gorgeous the scenery was and how much attention was given to the architecture of the buildings and structures. Everything from small patches of grass and vegetation growing throughout the map to the stunning unreachable backgrounds of the map, really show the care the developers put in this exquisite Japanese-themed map. Each room of the level was beautifully designed with a purpose, and the flow throughout them seemed very nice. Being made for 4-8 players, the map naturally feels huge, but for the mean time, it makes for an interesting 2vs2 battle with bots.

As for the sound in the game, I'm really torn between two sides of myself. For the side that really enjoys listening to the ambient noises of a game such as water running down a stream, trickling over rocks into a small pond below, UT3 has really stepped it up to another level. The ambient sounds, like wind rushing through the halls and the distant chirp of cicadas, really make me feel like I'm taking a stroll through an ancient Asian temple, trying to track down my opponent and get ready to unleash a fury of rockets on them. As for the side that fine tunes my configs to fully take advantage of the game's competitive side and squeeze out every ounce of advantage possible, this aspect of UT3 could use some work. After I turned off the music and ambient sounds, I could still not hear my opponent walking or jumping in some parts of the map, even when they were in the next room, a few meters away. While the directional sound seemed spot on the majority of the time, it's no good unless you can actually hear them.

With the default settings on 800x600 resolution, the game runs well and is generally free of the small hangups and pauses that accompany other betas. In addition, frames per second (the other FPS) seemed to stay relatively high throughout play, only going down slightly when I was in heavy fights in the main courtyard, the most open part of the level.

Visually, this game sports one of the most technically advanced engines out there and it shows. Being used with a dozen other games, such as Gears Of War, the Unreal Tournament 3 engine supports some great options like High Dynamic Range (HDR), Volumetric environmental effects and 64-bit color rendering. While playing the game, it was interesting to see how well it handled all the effects and the amount of detail on screen while still maintaining a high amount of FPS.

After playing Shangri La for a bit, I took a glance at the second map that comes with the beta, Heat Ray. Heat Ray is a level set inside a ruined innercity, wrought with partial buildings to wonder through and an extremely large rail station in the middle for massive gun battles. Though this map was made for a dozen or so players, I've talked to many people that tried it as a duel map already. The surprising thing about the map is how versatile it is; competitors of every style will enjoy this map. Fans of long-distance sniping will be able to set up shop and take out their opponents from almost all corners of the map. For the player inclined to more close-range battles, the hallways and stairwells throughout the tattered buildings offer opportunities for intense rocket and Link Gun battles. In addition, there are a ton of hiding places hidden throughout the map for those that can't manage to kill anyone the honorable way. Overall, the map has a great flow and, just like Shangri La, has an incredible amount of detail in it. Everything from broken tiled floors with dirt starting to show through to the distant spotlight waving in the city skyline really show the care the map makers put into it.