It's been several months since we last saw Epic Games's sci-fi first person shooter Unreal Tournament 3 in action at Midway's January press event but at E3 last week we got to see an updated version of the game in action (although we were not allowed to go hands-on this time). As you may know, Midway announced that the game will be coming out this November for the PC and PS3 and that mods that are created for the PC version will work for the PS3 as well (although Epic has not yet worked out a definite way to accomplish this yet).

Despite the fact that we didn't get any hands-on time with UT 3 this time, we managed to learn quite a bit of new info on the game itself. One of the cooler things is that players will be able to customize the look of your player character a lot more than in previous games in the series. You will be able to change things like shoulder pads, helmets, boots and more and the more things you accomplish in the the more options you will have to change the visual look of the character.

We also got to see some of the new weapons and vehicles that we had not known about previously. On the Necris side we got to see the Scavenger, which is basically a energy orb with three tentacles coming out of it. The Scavenger can retract those tentacles with the player then rolling down enemies or extending the tentacles to chop off enemies. Another vehicles is the Stealthbender which is practically invisible when standing still and releases special items like spider-mines (small creature like devices that can blow up stuff) and our personal favorite the slow shield; anything that goes inside it is slowed down considerably, including players and weapons fire. The game will also have turrets that this time are on rails which means they can move around a bit.

One of the favorite weapons from Unreal Tournament 2003/2004 is the powerful Redeemer weapon and its back for Unreal Tournament 3 and this time when you fire it you can guide it to its location (you can even use the PS3's SIXAXIS motion sensors to guide it with your hand and arm movements. You will be able to know when someone has a Redeemer and when someone has fired it. In one level, beams of light on top of structures indicate that a Redeemer is ready to be picked up.

As one might expect, Unreal Tournament 3 is looking great and we saw the game being run both on a high end Dell XPS PC and a PS3 and there was little to no difference in visual quality. Epic has put in some interesting little visual tricks in some of the levels; in one of them we saw a space ship that moved around. All of the levels had some kind of different art style, from techo-gothic to Asian to Greek-Roman and more. The game is going to have some kind of single player campaign with some kind of non-linear branching features but we don't know any more about the single player play at this point.

The game is due out in the next four months or so and you can bet that before then Epic and Midway will provide more info and hands-on time with Unreal Tournament 3 before its release. We still have a lot of questions about the game (what the single player will really be like? how will PC mods work on the PS3 console?) but Epic's track record for making good games is hard to beat. We anxiously await some lenghty hands-on time with the game before its November release.

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