Unreal Tournament 3 for the PS3 is beautiful. It's almost as pretty as they claimed it was going to be. Really. The models are highly detailed, the weapons' special effects are nicely done and the environments can be, quite frankly, breath-taking. The UI in Unreal Tournament 3 is pleasing to look at and easy-to-use, so there's no confusion - just select your options and jump in.

A great bit of attention to sound was taken in the creation of Unreal Tournament 3, making this a game that puts your home theater's surround sound system to good use. Listening carefully can let you know where an enemy is before you see them - something that came in handy on more than a couple of occasions for me.

The musical score is very cinematic - think action movie - for the most part. There are some tracks that are very Asian-inspired pieces that are really cool; I wish Unreal Tournament 3 allowed me to select the tracks to listen to so I could choose these more often, but you get what they give you, evidently.

For online play, you can customize your character quite a bit. This is nice, allowing for some personalization and individualism, which, in turn, allows your opponents to more quickly identify you. This can be good or bad, depending on how well you play and whether you seek notoriety or not.

The PS3 version of Unreal Tournament 3 has a variety of modes to choose from. There is a single player Campaign mode, which strings together a series of different types of games, wrapped in a story. This is an interesting concept, but it is more like a tutorial mode than anything else. In addition to playing Campaign mode alone, you can join in a Campaign with a friend and play this mode online. Pretty neat.

If you're not interested in the storyline of the Campaign mode and you just want to unload a few clips as soon as possible, you're looking for Instant Action mode. This mode offers six different game options: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Vehicle CTF, Warfare and Duel. You can set a wide variety of settings on the games, from the skill level of the bots to the number of opponents, time limit, goal score and whether or not to force respawn. To make things more interesting (and in some cases, even the playing field a bit), there are also several "Mutators" which can be applied to the game. These, for the most part, seem like the effects of cheat codes, but the effects are applied to all of the players. There's a Low Gravity mutator, one called Handicap that provides armor and weapon bonuses to losing players, a Big Head mutator that changes players' head size based on their ration of kills to deaths, that sort of thing. There are eleven different mutators, so you'll want to play around and see how they change the gameplay.

The main thrust of Unreal Tournament 3, of course, is the online gameplay. This, unfortunately, quite often suffers from lag. If you get into a game and don't have lag, you'll likely be okay for a while, but it seems that once you're experiencing lag, it doesn't really get any better. When you're experiencing a Translocator effect and it's because your lag is so bad that the server is basically guessing where you are, it's time to find a different match to join.

For further customization and additional replay value, Epic Games managed to give the PS3 version of Unreal Tournament 3 one of the features that helped to generate a lot of interest in the previous PC versions... the ability to make mods for the game. If you have the time and skill (and download the appropriate tools onto a PC), you can create new maps, weapons, characters and otherwise modify different aspects of the game and then share these mods with your friends. This relies on the tools used for PC mod creation, but there is a tool that "cooks" the PC mod, changing automatically into a PS3 version of the mod. You then have to manually move it onto your PS3 and then go through an in-game menu to import the mods. Once imported into your game, you can play any matches that use the mods. It's a bit complex for a console game, but the end result is that the game technically can continue to evolve, at the hands of the community. If online games continue to be plagued with lag and connectivity issues, however, this might not become too much of a factor.

Unreal Tournament 3 is not a game you buy so you can play by yourself in your living room. This is one of those games that is intended for online gameplay. Yes, you can practice against bots or in Campaign mode, but the very fact that you can join a friend over the Internet, even in Campaign mode, indicates that the single-player aspects are not the focal point. The main point of this is that the difficulty is hard to define and is based on several factors, including your skill, your opponents' skills and the quality of each players' connection.

Single player games are fun and can be pretty challenging. They're not going to make you into the Unreal Tournament 3 world champion, perhaps, but they can at least give you the opportunity to hone your skills enough so that you don't make yourself look too bad the first time you play online.

The new vehicle aspect of Unreal Tournament 3 is one of those things you might want to practice a bit. There are a couple of control schemes to choose from, but Unreal Tournament 3 is, first and foremost, a First-Person Shooter; it feels very much like the developers tried to force the FPS control scheme onto vehicles. This comes off as awkward, since people have a much tighter turning radius than vehicles.

The most noticeable new game mechanic in Unreal Tournament 3 has to be the addition of vehicles. A combination of vehicles and the Translocator "weapon" allow for quick movement around the maps. Usually. Sometimes vehicles can be difficult to navigate in tight corridors, slowing your progress down a bit, but the vehicles also pack heavier firepower, so even when they prove a bit stubborn, they still are nice to have with you. In addition to simply getting you around the map and shooting things, the vehicles can play important parts in the strategies required to win certain battles, so despite the wonky control scheme, this makes them a necessary evil.

The overall presentation of Unreal Tournament 3 makes it a definite "showcase game" for the PS3. Unfortunately, I found the online gameplay to be very lag-ridden, something I don't typically have a problem with. I've tried it at different times and found that occasionally I could get into a game without noticeable lag and, once in, I could play for a few games without issues. In addition to the lag issues, the menu screen for finding a Quick Match has some quirks to it. After selecting your options and clicking (X) to find a game, the screen changes to a screen that indicates the PS3 is attempting to find a game, and then returns to the Options screen. This makes it look like you've been kicked back to the menu, but it is still looking for a game and will move you on to that game when it finds it.

Another problem that occurs when trying to jump into a Quick Match or choose Join Game is that the PS3 doesn't consider what maps and mods you have until after finding a possible match. There were several times that I tried to find a match only to get an error message telling me that I couldn't download the map. Luckily, this can be resolved by choosing the "Pure" only selection, restricting the games to those on the original game.

Sadly, Unreal Tournament 3 is not strong enough on the merits of its offline gameplay to provide hours of entertainment; after playing through a few missions in the Campaign mode or playing against bots, you start wanting to play against others. Unfortunately, my personal experience and other reports from around the web indicate that lag and connectivity issues will put more than a slight damper on the online gameplay, the single-most important aspect of Unreal Tournament 3.